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Now, don’t try to do anything about this. Don’t make any effort. Because, naturally, by force of habit, certain tensions remain inside you, and certain ideas and words drift all the time through your mind.
Just like the wind blows, or clouds move across the sky. Don’t bother with them at all, don’t try to get rid of them. Just be aware of what’s going on in your head, like it was clouds in the sky, or the crackling of the fire.
There’s no problem to this. All you have to do, really, is look and listen without naming. And if you are naming, nevermind; just listen to that.
Now, you can’t force anything here; that you can’t willfully stop thinking and stop naming. It’s only telling you that the separate “you” doesn’t exist. It isn’t a mark of defeat, it isn’t a sign of your lack of practice in meditation.
That it runs on all by itself simply means that the individual, separate you is a figment of your imagination. So you are aware, at this point of, a happening. Remember, you don’t know anything about the difference between you and it; you haven’t been told that.
You’ve no words for the difference between inside and outside, between here and there, and nobody has taught you that what you see out in front of you is either near or far from your eyes. Watch a baby put out a finger to touch the Moon. You don’t know about that.
Just—therefore—here it is. We’ll just call it “this.” And if you will feel it—the going on, which includes absolutely everything you feel—well, whatever that is, it’s what the Chinese call Tao, or what the Buddhists call ‘suchness,’ or tathātā. And it’s a happening.
It doesn’t happen to you, because where is that? You—what you call you—is part of the happening, or an aspect of it. It has no parts; it’s not like machine.
And it’s a little scary because you feel, “Who’s in control around here?” Why should there be anyone? It’s a very weird notion we have that processes require something outside them to control them. It never occurred to us that processes could be self-controlling.
Even though we say to someone, “Control yourself!” We always, in order to think about self-control, we split a person in two. So that there is a you separate from the self that’s supposed to be controlled. Well, how can that achieve anything?
How can a noun start a verb? Yet, it’s a fundamental superstition that that can be done. So you have this process—which is quite spontaneous—going on.
We call it life. It’s controlling itself! It’s aware of itself.
It’s aware of itself through you. You are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself. And because it’s the universe looking at itself through you, there’s always an aspect of itself that it can’t see.
So it’s just like that snake, you see, that is pursuing its tail. Because the snake can’t see its head, like you can’t. We always find—as we investigate the universe, make the microscope bigger and bigger—and we will find ever more minute things.
Make the telescope bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and the universe expands because it’s running away from itself. It won’t do that if you don’t chase it. So it’s a game of hide-and-seek.
Really, when you ask the question, “Who is doing the chasing?” you are still working under the assumption that every verb has to have a subject. That when there is an action there has to be a doer. That’s what I would call a grammatical convention, leading to what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Like the famous it in “It is raining.” So when you say, “There cannot be knowing without a knower,” this is merely saying no more than, “There can’t be a verb without a subject,” and that’s a grammatical rule, and not a law of nature. Anything you can think of as a thing, as a noun, can be described by a verb. And there are languages which do that.
It sounds awkward in English, but face it: when you look for doers as distinct from deeds, you can’t find them. Just as when you look for stuff underlying the patterns of nature: you can’t find any stuff. You just find more and more patterns.
There never was any stuff; it’s a ghost. What we call stuff is simply pattern seen out of focus. It’s fuzzy, so we call it stuff.
Like kapok! So we have these words—energy, matter, being, reality, even Tao—and we can never find them. They always elude us entirely.
Although we do have the very strong intuition that all this that we see is connected or related. So we speak of a universe, although that word really means one turn. It’s your turn now.
Or, like, you make one turn to look at yourself, but you can’t make two turns and see what’s looking. So it’s very simple, therefore. You only have to understand that you can’t do anything about it.
And as they say in Zen: So all these trials that gurus put their students through have, as their ultimate object, convincing you that you can’t do anything. Only, it’s convincing you very thoroughly. It’s convincing you in more than a theoretical way.
Now, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that—but you see, I’m not a guru in that I don’t give individual spiritual direction to people. And I give away the guru’s tricks. That may not be very good, but on the other hand, those tricks are only necessary in the sense that I would say to someone, “It’s necessary for you to go see a psychiatrist if you think you must.” And if you’re not going to be satisfied without going to Japan and studying Zen Buddhism from a Rōshi—okay, you better go.
It isn’t necessary unless you say it is. If that’s the only thing that’ll satisfy you, and you feel that deep down inside you. If you got that yearn, then you’ve got that yearn.
But if, on the other hand, you haven’t, you haven’t. And I’m not going to put you down on that account, you see? The point is, what do you want to do?
What is it in you to do? But there it is: that you can struggle, and struggle, and struggle, and indeed will do so as long as you have the feeling inside you that you are missing something. And people—your friends, all sorts of people—will do their utmost to persuade you that you’re missing something.
Because they are missing something, and they think they are getting it through a certain way—and therefore, to assure themselves, they’d like you to do it, too. So there is this thing. And, you see, a clever guru beguiles his students by letting them have the feeling of success and accomplishment in certain directions.
A guru gives people exercises; A: that are difficult but can be accomplished, and B: that are impossible. You’ll always be hung-up on the impossible ones, but the possible ones, you will get the feeling of making progress, so that you will double your efforts to solve the impossible exercises. And then they range things in many, many ranks and levels through which you can advance.
This state of consciousness, that stage of consciousness, or think of the degrees of masonry, or so on. Ranks, and learning things, the different belts in jūdō, and all that kind of jazz. You can do that, and it gives people this sense of competing with themselves, or even with others.
Because of the feeling, inside, that there is just something I’m missing. And, of course, if you are learning any sort of skill and you haven’t perfected the skill, there is indeed something you are missing. But in this thing that we are talking about that isn’t true.
Because you, as the Buddhists say, “are Buddhas from the very beginning.” And all that searching is like looking for your own head, which you can’t see and therefore might conceivably imagine that you are lost. So that, indeed, is the point: that we don’t see what looks, and therefore we think we’ve lost it. And so we are in search of the Self, the ātman.
Well, that’s the one thing we can’t find because we have it; we are it! But we confuse it with all these images. So therefore, if you understand perfectly clearly that you can’t do anything to find that very, very important thing—God, Enlightenment, Nirvāṇa, whatever—then what?
Well, I find—you know—it’s so stupid, because even if I tell myself, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.” Why did I say that? You see? why did I say that?
Why did I go out of my way to tell myself there’s nothing I can do about it? Because in the back of my mind there’s a funny little feeling that if I did tell myself that, something different would happen. See?
Alright, so even that doesn’t work. Nothing works. Now, when absolutely nothing works, where are you?
Well, here we are—I mean, there’s a feeling of something going on. The world doesn’t stop dead when there’s nothing you can do. There’s something happening.
Now, just there: that’s what I’m talking about. There’s the happening. When you are not doing anything about it, you’re not not doing anything about it; you just can’t help it, it goes on despite anything you think or worry about, or whatever.
Now there is the point. Right there. And remember, although you will think at first that this is a kind of determinism, there are two reasons why it isn’t.
One, there is nobody being determined. Now, other people think of determinism as the direction of what happens by the past; the causation of what happens by the past. Now, if you will use your senses you will see that that is a hallucination.
The present does not come from the past. If you listen—and only listen; close your eyes—where do the sounds come from, according to your ears? You hear them coming out of silence.
The sounds come, and then they fade off. They go like echoes. Or echoes in the labyrinths of your brain, which we call memories.
The sounds don’t come from the past, they come out of now and trail off. You can do that later with your eyes. You can see—like when you are watching television—there’s a vibration coming out from the screen to your eyes.
And it starts from there, somehow. Because we see the hands and then they move, we think that the movement is caused by the hands—and that the hands were there before, and so can move later. We don’t see that our memory of the hands is an echo of there always being now.
They never were, they never will be. They’re always now. So is the motion.
And that that is recollected is the trailing off echo like the wake of a ship. And so, just as the wake doesn’t move the ship, the past does not move the present. Unless you insist that it does.
And if you say, “Well, naturally, I’m always moved by the past,” that’s an alibi, and it completely fails to explain how you ever learn anything new. That’s why all the psychologists who are mostly behaviorists are completely bogged down in trying to find a theory of learning. Because, according to the theory of learning that we have, everything new that you assimilate is really only learned when translated into terms of what you already know.
So in that sense, learning becomes like a library which increases only by the addition of books about books already in it. A lot of libraries are indeed like that. So that’s what we call scholasticism.
So then, you become aware that this happening isn’t happening to you, because you are the happening. The only you there is is what’s going on. Feel it.
And disregard the stupid distinctions that you’ve been taught—I mean stupid relatively speaking—and feel it genuinely. When you feel it genuinely—you get down to rock bottom—all that isn’t there. That’s a game that’s been erected on it.
And it isn’t determined. In other words, you get this odd feeling of a synthesis between doing and happening, in which doing is as much happening as happening, and happening is as much doing as doing. And if you’re not very careful at that point, you’ll proclaim yourself God Almighty in the Hebrew Christian sense.
Like Freud alleges babies feel that they’re omnipotent. And in a way they are. I am omnipotent in so far as I am the universe, but I’m not omnipotent in the role of Alan Watts.
Only cunning. So now, then, this sensation of the happening is basic to all we want to explore. With that in mind, we can go on, now, to the question of pain and our so-called reactions to it.
And once again, you will see that the problem, as posed, immediately sets up the duality of the pain and the one who suffers it; the one who offers resistance. And therefore, reasoning from that, you can quite easily see that a great deal of the energy of pain is derived from the resistance offered to it. And that resistance takes very many forms, not only of attempts to get away from a pain which is present.
Let’s suppose you try to run away from a migraine headache. As you carry it with you you can’t get away from it, and it seems to be absolutely in the middle of everything that you are. So that, however much you thresh and resist, the pain goes with the threshing.
Other forms of pain are problematic, to a large extent, because of our prior anxiety about them, and because of the valuations that we put on them. And we may as well start from that point. And what we very largely dislike about people in pain is the noise they make.
When I challenged R. H. Blyth and said, “You’re a vegetarian, but don’t you realize that plants have feelings?” He said, “Yes, I do, but they don’t scream so loudly.” And so, say, in a hospital or any place like that, it is taboo to scream. Because you must understand that hospitals—and any institution of that kind—is run for the convenience of the staff. All institutions are.
And so everything is done in such a way as to interiorize—localize—pain. Of course, in a way, that makes it worse. So we have a big, big social problem.
Fundamental, right from the beginning, about our reaction to anything painful. And these are very odd things. Let’s take, for example, when a child has eaten something that doesn’t agree with it and it vomits.
Now, you well know that, when you’ve got a bad stomach, that vomiting is a very pleasant release from that. But because when mama sees the vomit—or somebody else does—they say, “Ugh!” You are taught that doing it is socially unacceptable, and therefore people suppress vomiting, and learn from their parents that it’s nasty—just as they learn that excrement is nasty, and just as they learn to worry about disease and death. Now, there really isn’t anything radically wrong with being sick or with dying.
Who said you’re supposed to survive? Who gave you the idea that it’s a gas to go on and on and on? And we can’t say that it’s a good thing for everything to go on living from the very simple demonstration that, if we enable everyone to go on living, we overcrowd ourselves.
That we are like an unpruned tree. And so, therefore, one person who dies—in a way—is honorable, because he is making room for others. And the panic that all life, everywhere, must be saved—although each one of us, individually, will naturally appreciate it when anybody saves our life—if we apply that case, you see, all around, we can see that it is not workable.
We can also look further into it, and see that if our death could be indefinitely postponed we would not actually go on postponing it indefinitely. Because after a certain point we would realize that that isn’t the way in which we wanted to survive. Why else would we have children?
Because children arrange for us to survive in another way. By, as it were, passing on a torch so that you don’t have to carry it all the time. There comes a point where you can give it up and say, “Now you work.” It’s a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals, than it is always with the same individual.
Because as each new individual approaches life, life is renewed. And one remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child. Because they see them all as marvelous, because they see them all in a way that is not related to survival and profit.
When we get to thinking of everything in terms of survival and profit value—as we do—then the shapes of scratches on the floor cease to have magic. And most things, in fact, cease to have magic. So therefore, in the course of nature, once we have ceased to see magic in the world anymore, we’re no longer fulfilling nature’s game of being aware of itself.
There’s no point in it anymore, and so we die. And so something else comes to birth, which gets an entirely new view. And so, nature’s self-awareness is a game worth the candle.
It is not, therefore, natural for us to wish to prolong life indefinitely. But we live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us, in every conceivable way, that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture, in particular, suffers.
And we notice it, firstly, in the way in which death is swept under the carpet. This is one of the major problems in hospital work. When a family conspires with a doctor to keep from grandmother the knowledge that she is dying.
Grandmother suspects that she is dying, but probably doesn’t really want to know for sure, and her family talk with her in such a way as to say, “Well, you’ll probably be getting alright in a few weeks. Wouldn’t it be nice to do this, that, and the other?” Because they have this funny feeling that it’s important to build up courage and hope. And so they become liars.
And a mutual mistrust develops, because once you are playing the game on that level, you tend to play the mistrust on other levels. And so the person is left to die alone, suddenly, unprepared, and doped up to the point where death hardly happens. And there is no derivation from it—of the peculiar spiritual experience that can come with death.
Back in 1958 I was in Zürich, and there met a most extraordinary man by the name of Karlfried von Dürckheim. He was a former German diplomat who had studied Zen in Japan, and when he came back after the war, he opened a meditation school and retreat in the Black Forest. And he said, “Well, I tell you what, a lot of my work has to do with people who went through spiritual crises during the war.” And he said, “You know, we all know when a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation, and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori.” And that’s what I mean when I was explaining that, when one gets to an extreme—that is to say, to the point where you realize there is nothing you can do about life, nothing you can not do about life—then you’re the mosquito biting the iron bull.
Well, so in the same way, he said, “Look, you heard a bomb coming at you—you could hear it whistle, and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you, and that you were finished—and you accepted it. And suddenly, there was a strange feeling that everything is absolutely clear. You suddenly see that there isn’t a grain of dust in the whole universe that’s in the wrong place.
That you understand completely—absolutely, totally—what it’s all about!” You can’t say what it is. But he said, “In so many cases, the bomb was a dud and they lived to tell the tale.” Or, he said you were in a concentration camp; you’ve been there so long that you gave up all hope whatsoever of ever getting out—you were just going through this miserable, boring, degrading grind, week after week, after week. Nobody paid the slightest attention to you, as an individual.
You knew you would never get out and you accepted it. And suddenly, something changed. This extraordinary feeling.
Freedom. Or he said you were a displaced refugee. You had lost your family, you didn’t know whether they even existed; you were miles from your home, you didn’t know whether it existed.
You had lost your job, your very identity. You were absolutely nowhere. And you accepted it.
And suddenly you were as light as a feather and free as the air. Now, he said, “So many people have had those experiences, and they talk about them to their families and friends, and they say, ‘Oh well, you were under terrific pressure, you probably had some hallucination,’ you know?” Well, he said, “I am showing those people that, so far from having a hallucination, those were the few, few occasions in which they woke up.” So, you see, this is always the opportunity presented by death: that if one can go into death with eyes opened and have somebody help you, if necessary, to give up before you die, this extraordinary thing can happen to you. So that, from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say, “I wouldn’t miss that opportunity for the world!
Now I understand why we die! The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life is all about; by letting go.” Because then we come to a situation that the ego can’t deal with. When we are no longer hypnotized by that, then our natural consciousness can see clearly what all this universe is for.
So, therefore, we have missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way instead of having a socially understood acceptance of death, and rejoicing in death. Now, I can imagine that one person would want to rejoice in death in an entirely different way from another. Like, say, a wedding.
It’s a rite of passage. There are certainly some forms of celebrating a wedding which I would find a total bore and quite offensive. Other ways would be very good; I would enjoy it.
So everybody—in other words, I’m not saying that you’ve got to get mixed up with a lot of people coming, laughing around you, and bringing you presents, and cards, and everything because you’re going to die. But I’m only indicating a general thing. That the doctor, the ministers, the psychiatrists—and, above all, us—really owe it to our friends to work out an entirely new approach to death.
Because what has happened, you see—from earliest childhood, the child learned that great uncle was dying, and saw the family put on long faces and say, “Aaaawh, that’s too bad.” Even Christians, who think they’re going to go to heaven, you know? They get absolutely morbid—more so than anybody else—about death, because heaven, as they all know, is a very boring place. And so this frightful thing: “Oh!
He’s dead.” You know? No one understands that, for the living to lose someone you love—or even for a dying person—to worry about what on earth my wife, my children, my whatever are going to do without me? One can understand a certain worry in that.
But nobody is indispensable, and there comes a point when you have to say, “I’m sorry, but I’m completely going to abandon responsibility for anything. Because there is no further way I can do it.” This is another way of that surrender. And then the curious thing that occurs is: the moment all that is dropped, suddenly, it dawns on you that—to be important—existence does not have to go on any longer than a moment.
Quantitative continuity is of no value. How long can you hold your breath? Who cares!
So it follows from that, you see, that if any one of us—without being shocked into it by being bombed, or put in a concentration camp—could, at this moment, be as one about to die, genuinely and honestly, we would understand the mystery of life. Because death is the—in a certain sense—the source of life. Just as we see in nature when the leaves fall from the trees, they mold and rot, and this supplies humus from which more plants can grow.
It’s a cycle like that. But in every way—symbolic and otherwise—human beings try to stop that cycle. Unamuno said, “Human beings are the only species that hoard their dead.” And therefore, with the ghastly art of the mortician, we try to make the body unpalatable to the worms, and so to stop life.
As if to be eaten, in due course, were an indignity to the human being. Whereas we eat everything else and we give nothing back. So that is a kind of a social symptom of our profound disorientation with respect to death.
We think death is unnatural—and furthermore, in our culture—we think birth is a disease, and send the mama to the hospital for the most unnatural and weird kind of parturition. In other words, more and more, one regards the healthy and inevitable and natural transformations of the body as pathological. I can imagine, you know, people having sexual intercourse on an operating table to be sure that the whole thing is hygienic.
You know, everything about us, like that, is becoming over-interfered with by specialists, and less and less the province of our own preferences. It’s very, very hard, indeed, to die in your own way without some blasted bunch of relatives come fussing around and insisting that you go to a hospital, that you get fixed with the tortures of being fed through tubes, and things to keep you alive indefinitely, and waste the family’s savings. It’s even a crime to commit suicide.
That’s simply nonsense. It’s this perfect panic to survive at all costs. Now, let’s get practical.
You say, “Okay, I understand what you are saying theoretically, but I know that I would be terrified if there’s somebody who is going to tell me that I was going to die. And that I would look frantically around for some doctor, some sort of something.” That this panic to live is in us in an uncontrollable way, and this is part of the reason why we say we have an instinct to survive. The instinct is this panic.
So let’s take another step, now, in the same way as I showed you steps about realizing that you don’t have an ego. You say to yourself, in the ordinary way, when you feel that panic, you feel a bit ashamed of it. Even though you’ve been taught that you should do everything possible to survive.
See what a bind you are in here? So one feels, “Oh goodness, I must face this thing calmly and bravely, and not be in this panic.” But the point of the fact is, you are in a panic, and you can’t stop it! Now, that’s very important because this is another way of showing you the same thing that death is showing you: that you can’t do anything about it.
Just as when you finally realize you can’t do anything about the death, you could’ve solved all that before, by understanding you couldn’t do anything about the panic. But if you think all the time “I’m supposed to stop this panic,” then all that happens is you’re at cross-purposes with yourself again. The panic is, of course, put off in the ordinary way.
We all know we are going to die. But it’s sufficiently far off so that we can put it out of our minds. And anybody who does put it in our minds in the ordinary way is taken to be a skeleton at the banquet—a Cassandra, and gloomy.
So that the old-fashioned preacher of bygone days who preached about death, and those monks who kept skulls on their desks—and all that sort of thing—is regarded today as very morbid. Why, in the Baroque times, it was a fashion, for a while, of making tombstones with marvelous sculptures of skeletons and bones all over them. And on the Via Veneto in Rome there is a Capuchin church where, down in the crypt, there are chapels where the altar furnishings and everything are made entirely from the bones of departed monks.
Then we have, among Tibetans and Buddhists, graveyard meditations. And they have trumpets in Tibetan Buddhism made of human thigh bones. And they have cups—ritual cups—made of the domes of human skulls, richly worked in silver and turquoise.
And we say all that is very morbid. So, from this point of view you can see—first of all, theoretically—how death can solve its own problem. Now if you say, “I can only see it theoretically, and I can’t go the whole way with you,” then I will ask you, “What is blocking you?” Well, you say, “It gives me the heebie-jeebies and the horrors.” I say, “Alright, so death is not the problem.