Church of the Churchless

The best spiritual practice could be...nothing

Here's some thoughts about the value of basing your spiritual practice on... drumroll please... absolutely nothing. But I'll introduce this topic by sharing an anecdote.

Yesterday I took our dog for a walk around the community lake near our rural property. A house is for sale that overlooks the lake. A woman and two children were walking down from the house toward the lake, seemingly because the family was looking into buying the house.

A young boy came up to the fence that our dog and me were on the other side of. He pointed and said, "nice lake." Then he crawled through the fence with no problem.

His mother, I assume it was, came over to him. "Look," she said, "there's some barbed wire on this fence. You could have gotten caught on it. There's a gate over there. I'll show you the proper way to get through the fence." 

The gate, with a kayak peeking from the side

I said, looking at the boy, "Proper? That's no fun." As dog and I continued on our walk, I thought about my own boyhood days growing up in a rural area in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. 

Barbed wire was used in all the fences on the land where my friends and I played and cattle roamed. Rarely were there gates. Early on I learned various tricks to get through a barbed wire fence.

If the wire was tight, stand on the strands next to a post and hop over the fence. If the wire was loose, put your foot on the bottom strand and crawl through the fence. Or have a friend pull up on a strand while you step on the bottom strand while you crawl through.

Telling the boy that only a gate is the proper way to cross a barbed wire fence not only isn't true, it prevents the boy from learning other ways. The mother could have said, "Let's think of some ways to get through the fence safely without using a gate."

I was right when I said Proper is no fun. Often we have to act properly to fulfill a societal expectation. But I've found that improper behavior tends to be more enjoyable, because it flows from our natural inclination, not someone else's view of how life should be lived.

Anyway, back to the best spiritual practice being nothing. I can relate this to what I wrote above with just a little cramming of the fence/gate metaphor into the subject at hand. 

Religions are fond of gates. They like to control who passes through their gate that supposedly leads to God, heaven, enlightenment, or some other elevated state. So there are requirements to approach the gate.

For example, the Eastern religion I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, required initiates to be vegetarian, meditate 2 1/2 hours a day, not use alcohol or recreational drugs, abstain from having sex outside of marriage, and follow a vaguely stated pure and moral life.

Members of other religions follow other sorts of rules. The underlying rationale is that the spiritual seeker is different from what is sought. So the gap between seeker and sought has to be bridged by a gate that leads between what a person is now and what they hope to be.

Thus almost all religions have a dualistic philosophy. Humans are on one side of a cosmic fence -- the worldly, physical, limited, time-bound side where suffering is commonplace. Religions promise a way to get through that fence into a very different supernatural, spiritual, expansive, eternal side of the cosmos.

But what if that side doesn't exist? After all, there's no proof that it does. Then we're left with two basic approaches to spirituality, one that isn't based in reality, and one that is.

(1) There's much to do and become (non-reality based)
(2) There's nothing to do and become (reality based)

Yet here's why (2) still exists in the form of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita, and similar non-dual approaches to spirituality. Religions who preach (1) are so ubiquitous, and have been so for thousands of years, currently billions of people are lined up in front of gates that don't lead anywhere.

So they need to be told, "Hey, guys, wanted to point out that there's no need for those gates that you wrongly believe lead to divinity. Actually, you can just walk right around them, since there's no fence either."

Meaning, reality isn't divided into a natural world and supernatural world. There's just one world, and it isn't supernatural. It's right here, right now.

Thus nothing needs to be done to be "spiritual," viewed as being in touch with how you and the world really is, other than giving up the erroneous belief that you're separate from reality.

This is akin to someone being afflicted by a psychosis of sorts where they imagine being judged by an outside power, told by that power that they lack something without which they can't live a meaningful life, and instructed how to search for it under the guidance of people in tune with that power. 

What that person needs is the ability to recognize that what they imagine to be true, actually is false. They don't need to do anything. They need to stop believing in a fantasy.

Sam Harris likes to say in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, "Rest in the condition in which everything is appearing." That condition is awareness, or if you like, consciousness. Without awareness/consciousness, there is no reality capable of being known.

So in that non-dual sense, the observer isn't separate from what's observed; the thinker isn't separate from what is thought; the hearer isn't separate from what is being heard. Alan Watts speaks of this when  he says, "We don't come into the world; we come out of the world."

In other words, we aren't separate from the world.

I'm reading Stephen Bodian's book, "Wake Up Now: A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening." There's many places in the parts of the book I've read so far that echo the notion that the best spiritual practice is nothing.

Here's an example:

From a direct intuition of the imminent availability of the truth of your being, you've been lured into the spiritual marketplace, where well-intentioned vendors hawk their wares, promising enlightenment somewhere in the distant future as the result of years of effort if you're willing to buy their product, take their course, join their community, and invest thousands of hours of your time.

The innocent initial impulse to orient, listen, and move toward truth the way a child naturally returns to its mother or a bird to its nesting ground has been co-opted by an established tradition and turned into a circuitous path to spiritual realization. Welcome to the progressive approach!

Progressive paths are extraordinarily appealing because they've been so carefully elaborated, often over many centuries. Bearing the imprimatur of an established tradition, they suggest that if you just follow the instructions wholeheartedly, the results will take care of themselves. 

If you listen to enough teachings, spend enough hours in meditation, attend enough retreats, cultivate enough of the right attitudes and qualities, you'll one day discover the truth of who you really are. As inspiration, the progressive scriptures are filled with exhortatory tales of masters who began as seekers just like you and me and eventually achieved enlightenment through prolonged and concerted effort.

...Eventually, after giving up the effort and the formal practice of meditation, I met a teacher who told me, "The seeker is the sought, the looker is what he or she is looking for." My mind couldn't wrap itself around these words, but one day soon after, in a moment out of time, the seeker and the sought collapsed into one another, and I knew who I was once and for all.

The one who had been looking so hard for true nature was the very true nature I had been looking for. Truth had been playing hide and seek with itself. As long as I continued focusing so much on searching, I couldn't possibly stumble backward into the silent presence that was the source of all searching.

...In fact, the prolonged practice of a particular technique may have the opposite effect, deadening and habituating the mind, rather than making it more open and accessible to truth. If you want to know how a progressive path might affect you, spend some time at one of the tradition's residential meditation centers or ashrams.

Do the longtime practitioners appear happier, freer, more peaceful, more enlightened? Or do they seem rigid in their adherence to structures and rules, lacking in spontaneity, proud of their spiritual progress or stature, addicted to control?

Every center, tradition, and practitioner is different, of course, but many of the ashrams and monasteries I've visited lack the joy and aliveness one would expect to find there; instead, they exude a quality of emotional repression and subservience to form.

Which is why I started off this post by saying, Proper is no fun.

 

I give away eight boxes of books. And a lot of fond memories.

I woke up yesterday morning with a fresh insight: time for the books to go. Not just the small box of giveaway books that had been sitting on a table in my bedroom for quite while. 

Also, the boxes of books that had been languishing in the storage space above our carport for much longer, about fifteen or twenty years, I can't remember exactly.

Those books had a lot more sentimental value, which might explain why I hadn't thought of donating them before, even though I'd glance at the boxes every time I climbed up the dropdown ladder to get something out of the crawl space.

(Aptly named, since you have to crawl around on the sheets of plywood placed over the rafters, there not being nearly enough room to stand up.)

The eight boxes that I took this afternoon to the Friends of the Salem Public Library for their annual book sale mostly contained books that I'd used as research for three books I've written: God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder; Life is Fair; Return to the One.

Each was written in the spirit of seva, volunteer service, during the time I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious organization with headquarters in India.

So the boxes of books were sort of like a mental archaeological excavation. They contained mostly fond memories of a period in my life when I held considerably different spiritual beliefs than I have now. I took photos of the boxes before I put them in my car.

The bottom box in the photo above contained some of the books I'd used in research for my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. I started to write it not long after Gurinder Singh Dhillon became the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas following the death of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated me in 1971.

I'd never even had a high school physics class, even though the book was about the relation between mysticism and the New Physics (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, etc.). It took years of reading, note taking, pondering, writing, and re-writing before the book was published by Threshold Books.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas had agreed to buy several thousand copies to resell at a low cost, which sweetened the deal enough for Threshold Books to agree to publish the book -- which they found appealing because I'd included so many Rumi quotes, and Threshold was a Sufi-oriented publisher.

Having developed a writing relationship with the folks in charge of books published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, my next book project was Life is Fair. This effort was even more meaningful to me, since I was told that Charan Singh had wanted to have a little book describing the karmic rationale for vegetarianism that he could hand out to people. 

When I was asked if I wanted to take on the project after it had stalled with other people attempting to write such a book, it took me about one millisecond to say "Yes! Absolutely." Being able to fulfill a wish of my guru before he died was a dream come true. Hey, maybe my meditation sucked, but I felt like I could write a book about karma and vegetarianism.

At times that feeling seemed like a fantasy. There were so many changes of direction and rewrites, I almost lost hope. Almost. Eventually I went to India to finish the book at the RSSB headquarters and it ended up being published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. One of the pleasant parts of writing Life is Fair was finding cartoons to illustrate some key points in a humorous manner.

I spent a lot of time at the marvelous Powell's Books in Portland, an hour's drive north of where I lived in Salem, sitting on the floor of the Humor section, thumbing through cartoon books featuring Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, and other comic strips.

Today I couldn't bear to let the cartoon books I'd bought go when it came time to unload the box they were in onto a library cart. Those were the only books I took home with me. I looked at a few pages and started laughing, then figured that while my spiritual/philosophical views have changed considerably, my love of humor hasn't.

The bottom box above mostly held books I'd gotten for my research into Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher. After Life is Fair was completed, I wrote Gurinder Singh and asked him if there were any other books I could write for Radha Soami Satsang Beas. He replied that they'd like to have a Mystics of the West series and listed some possibilities. Plotinus was one of them.

I'd heard about Plotinus but knew next to nothing about his philosophy. So even though Plotinus is notorious for being one of the most difficult Greek philosophers to understand -- his Enneads are full of confusing passages -- I dove into the deep waters of Plotinus and read every book about him in English, along with every translation of the Enneads in English. 

Return to the One was quite a writing journey. After several years of work, just as with the other two books I despaired that I'd ever reach a satisfactory endpoint. But I refused to give up, telling myself that if I had to write out the book on paper bags and leave them strewn on park benches, that's what I'd do. (Yeah, unrealistic and kind of dramatic, but writers have strange ways of getting through dark periods.)

In the end, Return to the One wasn't published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas for reasons I've talked about in other blog posts. A sticking point was that the RSSB publishing department wanted me to include a quotation from Charan Singh at the beginning of each chapter. I wasn't willing to do that, since this was a book about the philosophy of Plotinus, not a book about how that philosophy could be seen as relating to the RSSB teachings. So I published the book on my own. 

Anyway, I feel good about sending those eight boxes of books off to the Friends of the Salem Public Library. It was time to let the books go. I like to think that they'll end up with people who enjoy reading them as much as I did. They're filled with notes and highlighting. So whoever buys them will see what I found important, which may be quite different from what they think is important. 

Lastly, a (very) minor miracle. The eight boxes fit into the not-very-large back of my Subaru Crosstrek.

Morality, like Alan Watts, is in the eye of the beholder

It's been interesting to see the various reactions of regular readers of this blog to my series of posts about Alan Watts, especially my recent post about how "Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy." 

Those like me who agree with how Watts viewed reality -- as a self-organizing whole without any top-down commander like God -- tended to view his personal life as irrelevant to his philosophizing, which leaned in his later years toward Chinese/Taoist perspectives.

Not surprisingly, those who disagreed with how Watts saw things seized upon his three marriages, affairs with other women, drug use, and excessive drinking as evidence that Watts was a fake who didn't live up to the ideals that he spoke about in his books and talks.

This is a reflection of the fact that in large part, morality is subjective. Different people look upon right and wrong in different ways. So here's some observations along that line, using the reaction to Alan Watts as an example.

First, I wanted to learn more about the life of Watts, so yesterday I ordered a biography from Amazon, "Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts," by Monica Furlong. I got it today and obviously haven't been able to read it yet, but noted that Furlong had a new foreword in the 2012 edition. Here's how Furlong's foreword ends.

Watt's philosophy, carefully developed over the years with study, had a freshness and honesty about it. He had read deeply in Christian theology and felt that many of its symbols had lost their power as a result of being taken too literally, and needed to be rediscovered. He worked at meditation, read Jungian psychology, studied Oriental religious ideas of all kinds, visited Japan.

Out of much thinking, reading, and talking, he developed a language that spoke to Westerners who wanted a religion, or at any rate a way of life, that was not totally trapped in rationality. He felt that religion tended to suffer from mystification and the use of a mandarin language that excluded most people, except as timid followers of leaders who then abused their power.

His own teaching moved between ways of talking about huge imponderables -- suffering, death -- to the everyday -- the kind of food, clothes, relationships, ways of living that might be appropriate for human beings.

Few, if any, human beings can cope well with becoming a guru or icon. Alan Watts handled it better than some, mainly because he had good friends, and he had a sense of humor that put his fame into perspective, but he was stressed by the exposure and at times his head was turned by it. 

Watts is not a man on whom it is possible to deliver an easy verdict -- he escapes labels. He had an extraordinary wisdom, a lot of knowledge, and a rare ability to put both into language that ordinary people can understand.

He still has much to teach anyone searching to find belief -- his short and deceptively simple little books are remarkable guides. He was sometimes vain, a know-it-all who could be thoughtless of others, but he was invariably kind in what he said about other people. "He was fond of lifting the elbow," Dom Aelred Graham wrote to me, "but I never heard him say a harsh word about anybody."

There are not many of us of whom the Recording Angel will be able to say as much, and it was perhaps Watts's capacity to live out the life he wanted, with all its ups and downs, its failures and successes, that left him so attractively free of envy.

His children, I noticed when I interviewed them, were both clear-sighted and truthful about him, but also had loving memories, as had his friends.

He was both an inspired leader and, like all of us, flawed -- in Gary Snyder's words, "he sowed problems wherever he went." Watts knew himself well, and used to describe himself as a "genuine fake," an expression that catches not only his ambiguities, but also the ambiguities of the human condition, not least when we are trying to be religious.

This book tries to explore both the genuineness and the fakery.

Furlong does a nice job here, balancing Watts' strengths and weaknesses, pointing out that Watts echoed his philosophy in his life: there aren't sharp edges in nature, or in human nature. No clear demarcation of black and white, good and bad, moral and immoral. 

There are shades of meaning, ambiguities, tendencies that can reverse themselves and move in a fresh direction. 

As noted before, Alan Watts didn't set himself up as someone to emulate. He urged people to trust themselves, not authorities, religious or otherwise. So those who criticize Watts for not being moral are laying their own ethical framework over Watts' life and then finding it lacking.

I'm reminded of the current controversy in Great Britain over Boris Johnson, the prime minister, having  parties during a time the rest of the country was on a strict Covid lockdown. Now, that's the sort of hypocrisy that, if proven to be true, deserves condemnation. 

But to my knowledge, Watts never said "Don't drink; don't use psychedelic drugs; don't have affairs; don't drink alcohol excessively." Sure, he did those things. Yet he can't be condemned for living a life that was at odds with his philosophy.

Since Watts was a big admirer of Taoism, below is a story from Eva Wong's book, "Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living." The back cover says, "The Lieh-Tzu is a collection of stories and philosophical musings of a sage of the same name who lived around the fourth century B.C.E."

That's a long time ago, but one story reminded me of the debate over Alan Watts' morality today. In 2007 I shared an abbreviated version of that story in "Wine, women, and enlightenment." Here's that blog post.

Got to get fired up, or cooled down, for the Taoism talk I'm going to give to a Comparative Religion class tonight. I won't prepare a whole lot. Want to let it flow.

I'm planning to carry along the Lieh-tzu, though. That's the third leg of the traditional Taoist canon, along with the Tao-te Ching and the Chuang-tzu.

Translator Eva Wong says:

The Lao-tzu describes a state of reality that a sage experiences; the Chuang-tzu describes a state of mind that the sage is in; but the Lieh-tzu describes how the enlightened person lives.

…If the Lao-tzu is poetry and the Chuang-tzu is prose, then the Lieh-tzu is a series of comic strips. By exaggerating the ridiculous aspects of human actions, it portrays the human condition as humorous and pokes fun at social taboos.

I love how Taoist sages so often take a contrarian view of morality. You won't find a story like "What damages health more—unrestricted pleasure or obsessive hard work?" in a traditional religious scripture. Here's an abbreviated version of Lieh-tzu's tale.

-----------------------------

Tzu-ch'an, the chief minister of the kingdom of Cheng, had two brothers. While he spent his energy on strengthening the country and putting down crime and disorder, his two brothers indulged in everything that satisfied their senses.

One of the brothers had a brewery and a large warehouse in the back of his mansion where he stored thousands of jars of wine. He drank heavily, and, when drunk, he was oblivious to everything around him. He couldn't recognize friends or relatives, and he lost all concern for life or death.

The other brother had a dozen rooms in the house where he kept a group of beautiful young women. When he was aroused sexually, he would spend months with the women, never even bothering to come out to meet friends and relatives or take care of the family business.

Tzu-ch'an was very concerned about his brothers' lifestyles. So he went to talk to Teng-hsi, a fellow statesman who, although sarcastic and snide at times, was known for his keen observations and problem-solving ability.

Tzu-ch'an said, "Can you suggest anything that would get my two irresponsible brothers to behave more properly?"

Teng-hsi replied, "Tell them what they're doing is damaging their health. Maybe this will convince them to change their lifestyles."

One day Tzu-ch'an found his brothers together. He took this opportunity to talk to them about their lives.

"Heaven made us a cut above animals in dignity and intelligence. Therefore, it is your duty to live up to these expectations and behave in a manner befitting our position in society. If you only live to satisfy your senses, you are no more than animals. Stop harming yourselves, become responsible citizens, and I shall give you a position in the government."

Tzu-ch'an's brothers said:

"We know that wine and sex damage health. But we also know that life is short, and we want to enjoy whatever we can now. You, on the other hand, suppress what you want to do in order to maintain your rank and power.

"You are proud of your achievements and you want us to conform to your beliefs. You want to entice us with titles and political power, but we know that such things only bring burden and trouble.

"You may be the chief minister, and the country may look like it's in order. But look at yourself closely. You are tired and haggard. You have damaged your body and mind because you are anxious about keeping the country in order. In order to maintain your reputation, you have damaged your heart by suppressing your natural inclinations.

"We, on the other hand, may be wild and unruly, but we are true to ourselves. We have never put up a front to gain respect. We have never been involved in dirty politics or harmed other people with treachery and intrigue.

"Can you say this about yourself? If you can't, then it's not we who should take your advice, but you who should take ours."

Tzu-ch'an did not know what to say. Later he saw Teng-hsi and related the whole incident to him. Teng-hsi said, "You have been living with enlightened men and didn't even know it."

Lastly, here's an excerpt from another Lieh-Tzu story, "A madman or an enlightened man?"

Is Tuan-mu Shu a madman or an enlightened man? If you judge him by social norms, then it would appear that Tuan-mu Shu was indeed crazy. He abandoned his family, did not care for the welfare of his descendants, and squandered his wealth.

But then again, Tuan-mu Shu was sincere in everything he did. There was no pretense, no scheming, no ulterior motive in his actions. He followed his heart and was not constrained by social conventions. He enjoyed himself freely, he gave freely, and he never did anything that went against his nature.

Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy

There's nothing that irks me more on this blog than commenters who are annoyingly sanctimonious, taking an I'm-holier-than-thou attitude to people they feel morally superior to. So when I saw this comment about Alan Watts by Spence Tepper yesterday, it irritated me.

Allan Watts may appeal to drug addicts, alcoholics, sex addicts and fame addicts, but he would have done them greater good acknowldging his own struggles with these things. A man who fails, but struggles, openly acknowldging his struggle, and fights directly as best he can, that is a source of real inspiration. But a man who escapes his duty in a world of clever sounding concepts is no role model. Except to provide what appeals to some functioning alcoholics looking for an enabler : A clever but paper thin identify with which to paper over the windows of harsh sunlight, a means of enabling the denial. We can only look at Watts deconstruction of identity as wishful thinking and in fact the creation of an identity of freedom that in fact enabled addiction.

There's so much wrong with this comment, at first I didn't know how to respond to it. But this morning, I did, addressing myself both to Tepper and to another commenter critical of Watts, "Appreciative Reader."

Appreciative Reader and Spence, I'm planning to write a blog post tonight about what Alan Watts said about morality, since you two have what appears to be an erroneous conception that Watts' personal life contradicted his philosophy of life.

That isn't true. At least, I see no evidence that it is. So please explain in a comment why you think that Watts being married three times, having affairs, using drugs, and becoming an alcoholic is at odds with the philosophy he espoused.

I've read most or all of Watts' books, some several times. I've just finished listening to all of the audio recordings in the Tao of Philosophy section of the talks on the Waking Up app. I'm not aware of the slightest mention that Watts believed in rigid moral commandments such as the Bible and other religious texts contain.

In fact, the opposite is true. He urged people to trust themselves, and to not be taken in by the illusion that there's a Commander, a Boss, a God, who decrees what is right and good to do, or who controls people's actions. I've also seen no evidence that Watts put himself forth as a guru to be emulated. Again, the opposite is true. He jokes and plays around, not taking himself seriously, saying that he just gives talks for the money and because he enjoys it.

You two have piled onto Watts for reasons I can't understand. It's irritating when people try to kill the messenger because they don't like the message. It's fine to disagree with a philosopher's point of view, but I see no value in saying that Watts' philosophy is garbage because he had some human problems.

Are you aware of anyone who doesn't have problems? Could your own personal lives withstand a close look to see if you've overcome human weaknesses, or what appear to be human weaknesses? In part this is a sensitive issue for me because my mother was an alcoholic, along with being a strong independent woman who was an amazing thinker and persuasive talker, even though I came to disagree with her conservative political views.

The notion that someone who becomes an alcoholic or heavy drinker is amoral, a bad person, offends me. It's the worst kind of holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness to view a person as a failed human being because they drank too much, had affairs, or otherwise didn't live up to traditional standards. My family was full of flawed successful people who were interesting in part because of their flaws, not in spite of them.

It's one thing to criticize a religious leader like the RSSB guru who says one thing and does another thing. But unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, my view is that Alan Watts lived the life he espoused in his talks.

Note that my central concern isn't whether Watts lived up to some objective standard of morality, because such doesn't exist.

Sure, virtually everybody agrees that killing, stealing, and such  almost always are immoral, though exceptions are common. Killing is OK in war; stealing because your children are starving is understandable.

Since Watts never did anything criminal to my knowledge, and morality in large part is a personal decision, seemingly the charge against Watts here is that the philosophical message he conveyed in his books and talks was at odds with some aspects of his life: notably the affairs he had while married and excessive drinking, which some call alcoholism.

So I did some Googling of "Alan Watts morality." The best articles I found were on the AllanWatts.org web site, a two-part series called Mysticism and Morality (see here and here). This appears to be a transcript of a talk by Watts.

Here's an excerpt that shows the foundation of how Watts viewed morality: real honesty.

You see, now, how real honesty is a genuine basis of morals. Real honesty is always not pretending that you’re [your] feelings are other than they are. We know, as we deal with situations practically, that we may have to do things that go against our feelings, and it’s the same with helping people—when you have to—whom you don’t like and you don’t want to help, but on the whole it’s rather necessary to do so. But don’t ever be dishonest in playing that you’re [your] feelings are not what they are.

Now, from this standpoint we can perhaps understand something about the deep relationship between morals and mysticism. If we go back, you see, to the experience that I described as mystical we see that it is the vision—I tried to put it, fumblingly, in the sense of the rightness, the harmoniousness of everything that you are from one moment to another.

That, in other words, human behavior—its ups and its downs—is no different in principle from the behavior of the clouds, or of the wind, or of dancing flames in the fireplace. As you watch the pattern of the dancing flames they never do anything vulgar. Their artistry is always perfect. Ultimately, it is the same with human beings. We are just as much a part of the natural order as flames in the fire or stars in the sky. But this is only apparent to the person who is honest in the sense in which I have spoken.

In other words, the person who is tied up with trying to pretend that his feelings are other than what they actually are—he can never see this, and he’s always a troublemaker. He is the original hypocrite. The person who is unbelievably destructive is the person who pretends that he is a model of love and rectitude and justice, and, in fact, isn’t. Because nobody really can be. But then, superior altogether is the kind of person I would call the ‘loving cynic’ who knows, of course, that everybody has his weakness and his price and so on, but isn’t contemptuous for that reason.

I also picked up my favorite book by Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity. Here's some passages that offer another perspective on how Watts viewed morality.

If morality is the art of living together, it is clear that rules, or rather techniques, have a place in it. For many of the problems of a community are technical problems -- the distribution of wealth and population, the proper management of natural resources, the organization of family life, the care of the sick and disabled, and the harmonious adaptation of individual differences. 

The moralist is therefore a technician who is consulted on these problems as one consults an architect on building a house or an engineer on erecting a bridge. Like medicine, shoe-making, cookery, tailoring, farming, and carpentry, living together requires a certain "know-how." It demands the acquisition and use of certain skills.

But the moralist has, in practice, become much more than a technical consultant. He has become a scold. From his pulpit or his study he harangues the human race, issuing praise and blame -- mostly blame -- like fire from the mouth of a dragon. For people do not take his advice. They ask how it is best to act under such and such circumstances. 

He tells them, and they seem to agree that he is right. But then they go away and do something different, for they find his advice too difficult or have a strong desire to do the opposite. This happens so regularly that the moralist loses his temper and begins to call them bad names. When this has no effect, he resorts to physical violence, implementing his advice with policemen, punishments, and prisons.

...The conventional moralist has nothing to contribute to these problems. He can point out the frightful effects of alcoholism and gambling, but that is simply more fuel for depression and worry. He can promise rewards in heaven for suffering patiently endured, but that, too, is a gamble of a kind. 

...The urge is ever to make "I" amount to something. I must be right, good, a real person, heroic, loving, self-effacing. I efface myself in order to assert myself, and give myself away in order to keep myself. The whole thing is a contradiction.

The Christian mind has always been haunted by the feeling that the sins of the saints are worse than the sins of the sinners, that in some mysterious way the one who is struggling for salvation is nearer to hell and to the heart of evil than the unashamed harlot or thief.

It has recognized that the Devil is an angel, and as pure spirit is not really interested in the sins of the flesh. The sins after the Devil's heart are the intricacies of spiritual pride, the mazes of self-deception, and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy where mask hides behind mask behind mask and reality is lost altogether.

The would-be saint walks straight into the meshes of this web because he would become a saint. His "I" finds the deepest security in a satisfaction which is the more intense for being so cleverly hidden -- the satisfaction of being contrite for his sins, and contrite for taking pride in his contrition. In such an involved vicious circle the masks behind masks are infinite.

...Where there is to be creative action it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence.

Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are "itself." It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the "well" it wishes to others is not security but liberty.

Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting.

But there is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

If you still want to call Alan Watts immoral because he had affairs and drank alcohol to excess, go ahead. I just hope you'll agree with me that Watts had a view of morality that was much different from the top-down God-centered approach to right and wrong that religions espouse.

Don't apply that sort of morality to Watts, because he denied it, and it doesn't apply to him. But if you feel good about seeing yourself as morally superior to Watts, I'm sure he'd hear this with good humor, telling you to go ahead if that's what gives you pleasure.

Alan Watts speaks about the Limits of Language

Here's another of the blog posts where I share notes I take while listening to audio recordings of talks by Alan Watts, thanks to Sam Harris making these available on his Waking Up app. I've now shared summaries of all of the talks in the Tao of Philosophy section.

I'll be taking a break from my Alan Watts listening, then probably I'll jump around and sample the many other Watts talks on the Waking Up app. I enjoyed this one about the Limits of Language, just as I have the other talks.

Watts is correct that the language we grow up with shapes how we view the world. The current issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article about how classical Chinese with its thousands of difficult to draw ideograms made it very difficult for the Chinese people to read and write their own language.

So in the 1900s ways were found to simplify Chinese, which made possible China's transformation into a global power. But the special character of Chinese remained, a subject Watts often alludes to his talks, such as how verbs often or usually lack a subject/noun, which is rare in English. 

Limits of Language

Ideas are very powerful, not just emotions. Underneath the surface of every language are hidden beliefs. Like, the assumption that everything material is made of some basic stuff, as a carpenter makes things out of wood.

But is a tree made of wood? No, it is wood. Our language contains many ghosts. There isn't a flash of lightning. The flash is lightning. What are some hidden assumptions that underlie language and mathematics?

Organisms are made of something. Stuff had to be assembled by an outside intelligence, a boss. The boss is different from what he puts into shape, because common sense does not allow that things shape themselves. But in Chinese, nature means that which is so by itself. 

To be made is to be commanded, by God or the laws of nature. Like a military command. God the Father is a beneficent parent.

At first an atom was viewed as not cuttable into smaller pieces. But a deeper look revealed that the atomic realm consists of particles and waves, which then looked more like a wavicle. Even smaller particles were found.

Through us, the universe is looking at itself. But you can't directly see the back of your head. The knower never becomes the object of knowledge. So there's always a profound mystery. You will never know what is really going on, because if you were, it would be like making love to a plastic woman.

Why I became a philosopher is because I always believed existence was weird. It's odd that we're here. You get a philosophical itch. Why is this so? Then you realize the real question is, how is it?

What is this it? If you got an answer, you wouldn't be able to put it into words. We always classify when you ask "What is it?" Man or woman. Republican or Democrat. Cat or dog. But with existence we need a group of all groups. We can't envision what the outside would be. So we can't answer the question, "What is it?"

Physicists give us the answer in terms of form, not substance. Seemingly wavicles must be of some thing, but they're not. It is the form that matters. 

Matter comes from the Sanskrit root "to measure." So we get maya, illusion. In Chinese "li" is organic pattern. A grammatical illusion is that all verbs need subjects. What is the difference between a thing and an event? I close my fingers and I'm fisting. Handing is when my fingers are open. 

Chinese is close to this, having only verbs, not nouns. When we divide the world into doers and doings, we lose sight of the possibility that the whole universe is a process. It's a ridiculous idea that a commander is always needed.

The world is a musical phenomenon. Good music is always only about itself. Listening to music is the meaning of it. Suchness. You are your form. You are what you're doing. 

"You must go on living" is a double bind. We're not living in the now where reality lives. Only suckers put hope in the future. Aristocrats live in the past. Proletariat live in the present because they have nothing else. Bourgeousie live in the future.  

They transform the future into a spiritual future. They will never die, being with God. This hope for the future is a hoax. Maybe I'll make spiritual progress if I work at yoga for 20-30 years. Because you're not fully alive now, you think that one day you will be.

If you were actually aware of how the world is, you couldn't describe it. We eat abstractions all the time. When you understand, you don't put your hope in time. Meditation is unlike any other human activity. You do it for its own sake, not to improve yourself.

Be completely in the here and now. Come to your senses. Yoga is the cessation of symbolizing. Until there is silence of the mind, eternal now eludes us.

Understand non-verbal reality. Very easy. Be fully aware without thinking. Can you hear the past or future? Can you hear anyone listening to something else? Contemplate what is. Then all these ghosts go away. 

Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." In India, Jesus wouldn't have been put to death. "I and the Father are one" -- they'd say, yes, so right. 

But we have a delayed notion. Only at a certain age, if you've been with a certain guru. Here, you have to wait until you're dead to understand reality. 

"I'm neurotic." "I'm frightened." "I'm dependent on material things."  I need to get all that under control first. So you've got spiritual pride. You want to be rewarded for all the work you'll put in. Wouldn't it be great to be as free as the air? But you see that you're a mess.

You want to run away from making a mess, but you can't. There's nothing you can do to transform yourself into someone liberated, because you want this. You can't bite your own teeth. Or lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

What does it mean if you can't do anything about it? The reason is that you don't really exist. That is, as an ego, a soul, a separate will. When you realize this, you're liberated. Zen: neither can you take hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. Not being able to get it, you get it. 

This isn't fatalism. Ego is an abstraction, like "3" is a concept. So is one's self. There's a happening, but that's not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don't exist, you're reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

Trust yourself and others, but not completely

Recently I've been writing blog posts where I share notes I take while listening to audio recordings of talks by Alan Watts, thanks to Sam Harris making these available on his Waking Up app.

Those posts are similar to books I read in this fashion. Not long after I've been exposed to them, I can only remember a few things about them.

Which brings to mind Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, which was part of his appearances on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s.

His brilliant notion was to offer university courses that only take a few minutes, because he'd only teach the couple of things that college students can remember five years after they've graduated. This You Tube video shows Sarducci explaining the concept.

Of course, right now I can remember quite a bit about what Alan Watts says in his talks, since I've been listening to them in just the past two weeks or so. But I'm pretty sure that I'll forget most of his message before too long, aside from some pearls of wisdom that have embedded themselves in my mind.

Like, trust yourself and others, but not completely. 

Couldn't agree more. This is one of the simple truths that Watts is adept is pointing out. When he says those things, they seem obvious. However, he expresses the truths in such a fresh, engaging fashion, they seem delightfully new.

Think about it. Let's say you've a devotee of a guru, or some other spiritual teacher, who claims to know how to come closer to God or divinity. You've surrendered yourself to this person, considering that they possess a higher wisdom that you lack.

What gives you confidence that you've done the right thing? It can only be that you trust yourself. You trust that your devotion to this person is well-founded. You trust your commitment to them. 

So even if you have turned over to this spiritual teacher some decisions you otherwise would have handled on your own -- like ethical/moral decisions about how to live -- this surrendering of your own volition is possible only because you trust your sense that this is the right thing to do.

Likewise, if you later decide that the spiritual teacher isn't worth following any more, what gives you the ability to walk away from the person is your trust in yourself that now this is the right thing to do.

In other words, as Watts says in one of his talks, if you don't trust yourself, you've got no leg to stand on. Even choosing to not trust yourself or someone else requires that you trust your decision to stop trusting.

That last point is important. 

Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody is perfect. You, me, the Pope, gurus, doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, the Dalai Lama -- every human being is prone to not being trustworthy for one reason or another, some more than others, of course.

"I could be wrong" has to be our ever-present mantra, along with the related "You could be wrong." 

Often wrongness is factual. When Donald Trump says the 2020 election was stolen from him, that's factually wrong. Trump can't be trusted in that regard. Also, many other regards. If someone says global warming isn't happening, that's also factually wrong, and the person can't be trusted in that regard.

In other regards, they can be trusted. Thus we have to trust in our ability to discern when trust is merited, and when it isn't, whether or not the object of our trust is ourself or someone else. 

When I listen to Alan Watts speak, I don't agree with everything he says. When I read a nonfiction book, I don't agree with everything the author has written. But if my overall feeling is that someone can be trusted, I have no problem overlooking my occasional feelings of "you're wrong." 

My wife and I have been married for almost 32 years. Sometimes she thinks I'm wrong. Sometimes I think she's wrong. This doesn't affect our love for each other in the slightest. It's a natural part of every relationship to consider that the other person is wrong at times.

And it's also a natural part of the relationship we have with ourselves to admit "I was wrong," and so I shouldn't have trusted myself when I thought I was right, even though there was no way I could have known at that moment that I was wrong -- because life doesn't allow do-over's, moving only in one immutable direction in a series of now's.

To repeat: trust yourself and others, but not completely. Such is the spice of life, never being sure what will happen in our relationship both with others and ourself. The Netflix series "Succession" is a great example of this. 

No central character can be trusted. Indeed, they glory in their untrustworthiness. I always enjoy it when a Succession actor asks "Can I trust you?" and they hear "No, absolutely not." This is a big part of what makes the show so captivating, the continual intrigue of not being certain who can be trusted at any moment.

Alan Watts talks about Man and Nature

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app. 

This talk is titled "Man and Nature." It presents the traditional Chinese view as being most in line with modern science, a view I agree with. There's a reason the classic book was called The Tao of Physics, rather than, say the Jesus of Physics or the Brahman of Physics. 

Chinese philosophy is thoroughly naturalistic, leaving aside offshoots that are religious/supernatural. This helps explain why I'm enjoying the talks by Watts so much, since I find Taoism (or Daoism) to be my favorite spiritual approach, along with non-religious Buddhism, especially Zen.

Enjoy.

Man and Nature

Experience leads us to feel that we're isolated centers of will and action placed in a world that is not us. Science tells us something different. An ecologist would say that what you do is what the whole universe is doing here and now, like a wave being the result of the ocean.

The real you isn't a puppet that gets pushed around. We've been hoodwinked into believing that you only exist in your own skin. Our real body is that, plus the whole external environment.

Don't view things that way, and we despoil the environment. We try to vanquish the world. We need a new consciousness that the real self is more than the conscious ego.

This unknown self is more Us than I, connected to everything that is. Knowing that, you see that you never die, instead appearing in various forms. 

What is nature? Not something artificial. There's an idea that nature is outside us. There is human nature, but you can't trust it.

(1) The Western theory is that nature is a machine, an artifact. It is made by God, like a table made out of wood. A construct, and someone knows how it was put together -- the architect, God. Later, the view changed to no God, but nature was still seen as a mechanism. Most of us look at our bodies as a chauffeur looks at a car.

(2) The East Indian theory is that nature is a drama. Maya/illusion, art, play. In Hinduism ultimate reality is an eternal boundless self. The universe doesn't tell you that self is vibrations of the universe. Brahman plays hide and seek eternally. Self pretends it is lost. Kali Yuga is an age of darkness we're supposedly living in now.

(3) The Chinese theory is that nature is of itself, so, marked by spontaneity. Automatic, but not machinery -- rather, biology. The heart beats by itself. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, grass grows by itself. Tao is the course of nature. Words can't describe it. 

There's a great difference between Tao as nature with no boss, and the Judeo-Christian view of God as Lord of Nature. With original sin, you can't trust human nature. The Chinese would say, if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anything. Can you mistrust yourself if you don't trust yourself?

If you can't trust yourself, you're totally mixed up. You have no leg to stand on. In this respect Taoist and Confucian philosophy are in agreement.

Confucius taught that the highest virtue is human-heartedness. Virtue doesn't mean morality. Above all, trust human nature in full realization that it is both good and bad. A "good" war is based on human greed for treasure, women, whatever. A "bad" war is based on ideologies. 

If you're going to do something evil, do it for a plain simple selfish motive. Don't do it in the name of God. Because if you do, it turns you into a monster who is no longer human, but self-righteous. 

Humans are complex. We don't know ourselves at all, really. You're much more than your conscious thoughts. 

Western mechanical theory. Indian drama theory. Chinese organic theory. Nature, including human nature, is a system of organic anarchy. So the Chinese come closest to getting it right. 

When you look at clouds, you know at once they aren't a mess. Patterns of foam on water never make an artistic mistake. We humans are all wiggly. Is there something wrong with how the stars are arranged? Should they be organized in a regular pattern? Do you praise peaks in a mountain range for being high, or the valleys for being low?

When people visit a place called Inspiration Point, they say, ah, just like a picture. Someone goes to see Picasso and says, your paintings don't look like anything. Picasso asks, do you have a photo of your girlfriend? He takes one out of his wallet. Picasso says, is she really so small as that?

Natural order is like order in trees and mountains. They are orderly, but we can't put our finger on the order. Order of nature is thus in a way indefinable. Nature is a self-ordering principle that doesn't know how it does it.

Government always is a mess. Government always is opposed to people. Taoists say the state should be as unobtrusive as possible. Simply help the people and don't claim any merit for yourself.

So here is a conception of nature as something we must trust. But nature isn't completely trustworthy. Sometimes it lets you down with a wallop. 

It's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call purposelessness. Like waves washing against the shore with no meaning. Haven't you gone on a walk with no purpose in mind? All music is purposeless. Same with dancing. Do you dance to arrive at a particular spot on the floor?

Same with us. There's no "God's purpose." 

Here's the choice. Are you going to trust it, or not? That "it" is you and nature and everything around you. Now, there will be mistakes. But if you don't trust it at all, you're going to strangle yourself. You'll surround yourself with laws and rules and police and guards. 

Who will look after the guards? No go. To live, I must entrust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust nature that doesn't have a boss.

Alan Watts speaks about the Myth of Myself

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app. 

This talk focuses on the fascinating subject of who the "I" is. Most of us believe that this refers to someone inside our head that we consider to be Me. But Watts disagrees, viewing us as basically being the same as the cosmos. 

In a bit of synchronicity, a few minutes ago I checked my email and found a message from a local spiritual teacher, Jessica Amos. Echoing Watts, she wrote in part:

In his book Going Home, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the concept of "This is, because that is," using the visualization of ocean waves...

Imagine you are a wave on the ocean, and surrounding you are many, many other waves. If you (the wave) look deeply within yourself, you will realize being there depends on the presence of all the other waves. Your coming up and going down, being big or small, depend entirely on how the other waves are. 
 

"Looking into yourself, you touch the whole, you touch everything -- you are conditioned by what is there around you."

Here's my notes of Watts' talk. Enjoy.

Myth of Myself

"I" is a profound mystery. You can't touch your finger with your finger. Or "I" with "I." Most believe we are a skin-encapsulated ego. We regard our self/ego as being inside our head.

Not so in other cultures. Japanese/Chinese would point to their heart or solar plexus as the seat of self. But we locate our self between the ears and behind the eyes. We have an idea of ourselves as a little man in the head getting signals from outside and controlling the body voluntarily.

A child asks: "Mommy, who would I have been if I had a different father?" The child gets an idea from their culture that mommy and daddy pop the child into a body. The idea is that we're a soul or spiritual essence imprisoned in a body.

So we speak of confronting reality, of coming into the world, of being an island of consciousness. What is outside of me is not me. This results in estrangement between me and the outside world.

Actually, we don't come into the world. We come out of it. Each of us is a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole. 

There are two great myths, ideas we try to use to make sense of the world.

(1) The world as artifact, like clay made into a pot. Everything has been made. But the Chinese disagree. They see things growing naturally, like a seed turning into a plant. Others, though, believe there's a celestial architect. 

God is a mastermind who knows everything. Unfortunately, this becomes too much for modern man, being watched by a cosmic judge. Everywhere is this eye judging and watching you.

(2) Instead, we get another myth, that of the purely mechanical universe. The idea of the universe being run by a kindly gentleman doesn't make sense. Outside the human mind, there's just a chaotic interaction of blind forces.

Energy is totally stupid. Our intelligence is an accident. The universe doesn't share our feelings. It must be beaten into submission. These ideas also don't make any sense.

You can't get an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. An apple tree apples. Our Earth peoples. We grow out of this world just as apples grow out of an apple tree. A tiny seed has the potentiality of an giant oak within it. 

The usual notion of us being isolated egos in a bag of skin is a hallucination. When you try to describe the behavior of an organism, you must also describe the environment. Walking requires a description of the floor.

You couldn't see me without the background. In order to see me you must see not just what's within the boundary of my skin but what's outside too.

The only thing to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this: For every inside there's an outside, and for every outside there's an inside. Different, but they go together. What is hidden is implicit. What is obvious is explicit. 

Your behavior can't be separated from the world around you. Each of us is a waving of the entire cosmos. But we feel that we're a stranger in this world. This depends on a false notion of ourself. 

We have two kinds of consciousness. Spotlight is conscious attention, or concentration. Floodlight is what lets you drive a car while you're talking to a friend. But our culture says that conscious attention is me.

We ignore floodlight consciousness, which is always operating. So we have a sensation of ourselves as just the spotlight, leaving us unaware of most of our being. Our real deep self is the whole of being. 

Being is infinite variety. You are what the whole thing is doing. Each one of us is the world playing this way for a while. Yet we fear death. We tell our children, you've got to be educated and whipped until you're really human.

We get the ghastly Christian ego who feels he's homeless, an orphan. We have a sensation of being a stranger on the earth. 

We speak of confronting reality, of facing facts, such as we're an island of consciousness in an alien world. We feel estranged from the external world.

We need to realize that the real self is not just the conscious ego. We don't know how we know. We're unaware how we grow our hair or digest our food. Our unknown self is inseparably connected with all there is.

You never die. What you are just appears in different forms. If you want to know how the inside of your head feels, open your eyes and look. That's how the inside of your head feels.

Courageous criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Today "Natasha" left three comments on a recent blog post, "RSSB guru standards have sunk a lot since Charan Singh's time." RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an organization currently led by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, often abbreviated as GSD.

I admire people like Natasha who speak truth to power. Here's what was said in the three comments. It takes courage to stand up against people like Dhillon, especially in a country like India where religious zealots often treat critics harshly. RS is a shorter way of referring to Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

I have RS friends in India that say the lower caste members of RS say that GSD only meets with rich people. He only appoints rich people from higher castes to positions of authority. This is common knowledge of the lower caste members of RS who do seva at the Dera. Their kids get denied admission to the Dera school but no one will admit to that. And they don’t get the same level of care that higher caste RS sevadars or westerners get. They say the only reason the officials protect GSD from legal troubles is in order to get the votes from his followers. This is common knowledge in the Punjab. Westerners are so naive with what they believe about the guru. The caste system is alive and well at the Dera.

And many of them believe his wife was murdered to keep him and his sons from going to prison. In the Punjab this is very common behavior from powerful people. They have also little respect for women.

Westerners can’t speak to the kind of person GSD is because they don’t know the Punjabi culture. They don’t know how he behaves in Punjab and with officials. They don’t spend anytime with him and don’t know him on a personal basis. They only know what they are told by high caste members of RS. If Americans lived among the poor people in Punjab they would understand what he is really like and they would know what people think of him here. He just another powerful guru who says what people want to hear but does only what is in benefit for him. This is very common with gurus. I don’t understand how westerners can serve someone they don’t know. And they don’t know him at all.

Alan Watts on finding the balance between gooey and prickly worldviews

Here's another compilation of notes I'm taking from audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has shared on his Waking Up app. This talk is called Seeing Through the Net. It's 47 minutes long, but you can get the gist of what Watts said by reading my summary in a much shorter time.

"Who guards the gods?"

In modern times many have the goal of rational control of everything inside and outside us. But things have gotten so complex, nobody knows what to do. If you try to run a hospital, or a business, there's so much red tape.

You don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if that's the only culture you know. What do you mean by the good life, rationality, and so on? So find complex cultures different from your own, such as Chinese or Indian.

Triangulation often is better than a single line of sight. What are you going to do if you're a god with technological powers? Most people don't know what they want. 

What if you could control your dream and experience 75 years in one night? Are you wise enough to play at being God?

The Western model of the universe is political, engineering. No Chinese child would ask, "How was I made?" However, Western thought has a creator. The world is a construct. We look at things as bits of information.

But the physical universe is wiggles. Clouds, mountains -- no sharp edges. Some fishermen held up a net and looked at things through it. Likewise, we break up the world into measurable units. We come to think that this is the way the world really is. Discrete, made up of points.

Prickly people want precision. Gooey people say, you don't understand. Actually, the universe is both. Look close, prickly. Broader view, gooey. 

The capacity to look via scanning is like a spotlight. A floodlight has less intensity, but you see more all at once. A spotlight notices those things for which we have notation. A thing is a unit of thought. To talk about the universe you have to reduce it to things

As one understands a machine, we have reduced the cosmos to bits. This is very fruitful in being able to control the world via technology. 

We reduce the infinite wiggleness of the world to grasp it in thought. In medicine, you get a specialist who looks at a patient as a gall bladder. But there are fundamental differences between a mechanism and an organism. 

Trying to control the world only through scanning, bit by bit, things will look overly complex. We face an information explosion. Even computers won't help much.

What if we went from from spotlight to floodlight? What if we could grasp a situation instantly, intuitively? With pattern recognition, humans can recognize an object instantly. Humans have no problem with this, while computers do.

Brain: you yourself are this thing you can't figure out. You are the most complex thing that has been encountered in the cosmos. What you want is surprise. When you've figured everything out, you'll be bored.

Ideally, a person trusts his own brain. He makes his best discoveries without thinking.

But others only will believe you if you explain in a bit by bit fashion. This takes time. Most decisions in life can't wait. I'm not against technology. But new respect for organic organization is needed. We've got to let back some goo in the system, not just prickle.

The brain can solve problems without us knowing how. 

Practical issue: if technology relies exclusively on linear thinking, it will destroy its environment, because everything becomes too complex.

Are we going to foul things up by insisting on using linear input/analysis, without trust in multiple inputs that we can't pin down because it is you? In Chinese culture, man's essential nature is good, unlike the Christian notion of sin.

Native Americans have a saying, "Paleface doesn't know he is hungry until he looks at his watch." We've confused the menu with the dinner, and we're starving. Symbols are not reality.

How to sound like Alan Watts in two easy steps

As noted in a couple of recent posts (here and here), I've been enjoying listening to audio recordings of Alan Watts' talks that Sam Harris has shared on his Waking Up app.

I'm pretty sure I've read all of Watts' books, some of them several times, notably The Wisdom of Insecurity, which I absolutely love.

But the audio recordings have given me a fresh appreciation for how Watts viewed the world, or more broadly, reality. His spontaneous speech -- he spoke without notes -- offers a window into his mind that is clearer in some respects than his books provide.

So here's how you, or me, or anybody, can sound like Alan Watts in two easy steps.

(1) Look for complementary opposites, not just a favored perspective. Watts continually points out that up doesn't exist without down; black without white; life without death; truth without falsehood; figure without background; love without hate; and so on.

In this regard, as in many other regards, Watts is a thorough-going Daoist.

The yin-yang symbol encapsulates how opposites relate to each other. Within yin there's a bit of yang; within yang there's a bit of yin. Each can transform into the other, showing that there's no such thing as a stand-alone concept, even if we'd prefer that this were the case -- as in life somehow existing without death.

Everything is related to another thing that may appear to be distinct from the first thing, but which upon closer inspection is inseparable from it. There's no way we could see a white cloud if there wasn't blue sky providing a background. So clouds and sky really are one thing, not two.

(2) Look for organic naturalness, not controlled transcendence. Watts' speaking style illustrated this. He doesn't have an outline that he follows, a scripted speech. Instead, you can sense his mind darting this way, then that way, and back again, sort of like a jazz band riffing on a musical theme rather than a symphony playing a composer's sheet music.

Here too his viewpoint is Chinese/Daoist rather than Western/Abrahamic or Indian/Hindu. He doesn't consider that we humans are spiritual beings inhabiting a material world. Instead, we are natural beings inhabiting the natural world. There's no difference us between us and nature. Our job isn't to control nature, but to live in harmony with our fellow natural beings and entities.

A creator God has no place in his worldview. Nor does the notion that we are sinners, fallen souls, strangers in a strange land. What keeps us dissatisfied is the false idea that satisfaction lies somewhere other than the here-and-now we find ourselves in.

RSSB guru standards have sunk a lot since Charan Singh's time

Writing recently about how the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, threatened people whose village is involved in a property dispute with RSSB, got me to thinking about how different things are guru-wise compared to the time Dhillon's predecessor, Charan Singh, headed up the organization.

I was initiated by Charan Singh in 1971. He died in 1990. So for nineteen years I was exposed to how Charan Singh handled being guru.

This included two weeks in 1977 I spent at the Dera, RSSB headquarters in India, when I got to hear him speak and answer questions in English at evening meetings along with having two brief personal interviews with Charan Singh.

Plus, I read all of his books numerous times, listened to cassette tape recordings of him speaking and answering questions, and repeatedly watched several RSSB videos made during the time Charan Singh was guru. 

There was never any doubt in my mind that Charan Singh was a deeply warm, friendly, honest, humble, sincere, compassionate person. Let's leave aside the question of whether he was God in Human Form, as the RSSB teachings say.

Charan Singh was an exemplary person. He fulfilled his duties as RSSB guru with grace. The only "scandalous" talk I ever heard about him was that he had disciples bypass India customs through some scheme involving watches, if I recall correctly.

The fact that I can't remember this very well shows that it wasn't a big deal. 

Compared to what Gurinder Singh Dhillon has been accused of, it's absolutely nothing. I have no problem recalling most of the scandals the current RSSB guru has been enmeshed in, though I may have omitted some in this 2020 post, "RSSB guru's life should be closely examined."

Here's an excerpt from that post, which nicely sums up why I think it makes sense to pay close attention to how Dhillon has been behaving. In short, not very well, especially compared to previous RSSB gurus.

Dhillon is a public figure. He is the leader of a religious organization with millions of followers. He is shown in You Tube videos that are viewed by many.

And Dhillon also has been the subject of many stories in the Indian financial press regarding the involvement of the guru, his family, and close associates in a financial scandal where allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars were illegally siphoned off from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers, who are relatives of the guru, into shell companies and unsecured loans to the Dhillon family.

Here's a sampling of blog posts I've written about the questionable activities of the RSSB guru.

Malvinder's criminal complaint casts light on RSSB guru's role in financial fraud
Devastating criticism of Gurinder Singh Dhillon by a RSSB insider
Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement
Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, accused of making death threats
Sheetal Talwar talks about death threat made from RSSB satsang office
Sheena's "Memoirs of a Seeker" throws light on Gurinder Singh Dhillon
Bloomberg story shows Gurinder Singh Dhillon's shady business dealings
RSSB guru appears to have lied about his financial problems

It is easy for a guru to appear all spiritual, loving, and trustworthy when he or she is sitting on a stage, surrounded by fawning followers, with nobody asking tough questions about the guru's personal life outside of his religious duties. 

But none of us is only who we are at our best public moments. There's much more to us that only comes to light in private moments. Knowing the full picture isn't important when it comes to most people we know.

For example, I don't need to know the private life of my doctor, hair cutter, plumber, or electrician, because this isn't relevant to my relationship with them. However, in the case of a guru who is considered to be God in Human Form by his devotees, a trusted spiritual guide with upstanding morals, it definitely is highly relevant how the guru behaves in his private life.

I just spent an enjoyable four days, Monday through Thursday, watching every prime time minute of the Democratic National Convention. It didn't feature just the public side of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It also showed lots of details about their personal and private life.

That's the only way to understand who a politician really is. And it's also the only way to understand who a guru really is. You can't claim to be a "perfect" guru if in your personal life you're doing some decidedly imperfect things.

So if you're a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, ignore the admonition to not be interested in the guru's personal life. Sure, usually a person's private life should be off-limits to public scrutiny. But not when a person occupies an important public role, like wanting to be President or Vice-President of the United States.

In that case, as in the case of a guru who supposedly is a highly elevated spiritual being capable of guiding people back to God. it makes sense to get to know the entire person, not just their public persona.

Description of Gurinder Singh Dhillon "secret" video

I've gotten a description of the video shared in a recent blog post where Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) in India, is talking in Punjabi. 

Apparently Dhillon is threatening those who live in Waraich, a village that is next to the boundary wall of the RSSB headquarters in the Punjab known as the Dera. Reportedly Dhillon was instrumental in acquiring the land of Waraich and the villagers filed a petition in the Punjab high court that made Dhillon angry.

The guru visited the village gurdwara (Sikh temple) where a local person made this video. Even though Dhillon and previous RSSB gurus used to be against India's caste system, in the video Dhillon says "mei ve jatt da put haa mera pind bhindranwale de naal hai," which means "I am son of jatt [upper caste and very aggressive in nature] and my village is next to Bhindranwale's village."

A Britannica article says that Bhindranwale was a "Sikh religious leader and political revolutionary whose violent campaign for autonomy for the Sikh state of Punjab and armed occupation of the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar led to a violent and deadly confrontation with the Indian military in 1984." The article about him concludes with:

In July 1982 he moved to the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar. He gathered a considerable following of like-minded Sikhs and stockpiled weapons. In early June 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Indian troops to attack the complex, and, in the fighting that followed, several of its buildings were heavily damaged. According to the government authorities, hundreds of people were killed in the action, including Bhindranwale. Other reports (notably from Sikhs) put the death toll considerably higher, possibly as many as 3,000. For many Sikhs, he died the death of a martyr.

Assuming this summary is correct, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, it sure seems like Dhillon is acting very unlike an enlightened guru in the video. His mention of Bhindranwale appears to be a threat directed at the villagers, implying that Dhillon can be as tough as Bhindranwale was.

How us old folks view time

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "Time has a different flavor for old folks like me." Give it a read, especially if you're younger than me (likely you are), so you can see what the future holds.

This is how the post starts out.

Remember when you were three? Probably not. I recall what that age was like via my memory of what my young daughter and her friends would say when asked how old they are.

"Three going on four." They were so eager to be older, they'd fudge their age to get the next birthday into the answer.

Believe me, those days are long gone for us old folks. I'm fine with saying "73" when asked my age. What's more annoying is having to scroll down through history when a web site wants me to select the year I was born.

2000's, gone. 1990's, keep going. 1980's, around halfway there. 1970's, graduated from college. 1960's, high school. 1950's, childhood. 1940's, ah, finally reached the promised age-land. Which reminds me that World War II had only been over for a few years when I was born in 1948.

Dude, you're ancient! I'll say to myself.

For sure you'll never hear someone my age say "Seventy-three going on seventy-four." We've already got plenty of reminders that while time marches on for everybody, it feels like it's sprinting after you qualify for Medicare.

"Secret" video of Gurinder Singh Dhillon speaking in Punjabi

Someone sent me this video of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, speaking to some people. I haven't gotten a translation yet. Below is what the person told me. I used a photo of the guru as a thumbnail, since the video's images are so indistinct.

If someone could translate the video into English, that'd be great. I'll then share the translation in an update to this post, if what Dhillon says is interesting. I'm curious what "the thing" is referred to below. A translation can be emailed to me, using the address in the right sidebar.

----------------------------

Hello Brian , I'm sending you one video of so called baba gurinder singh g which was u can say hidden video made by one of lady who were present there when the thing happened , the video is in punjabi language . You need translators who could translate it in very true nature.. Plz translate it and will make it possible to become come in ur blog.

Moving essay about a neuroscientist preparing for death

Here's an essay from The Atlantic, "A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death." I'm a subscriber, so I don't know if non-subscribers can read this amazing essay. Click on the link and see if it works for you. If not, I've copied in what David J. Linden wrote below. He makes some cogent observations about why almost all religions believe in an afterlife.

A Neuroscientist Prepares for Death

About the author: David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.

When a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia—a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart.

“Chug this can of Diet Dr. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.”

So I did. However, the resulting images showed that the mass did not contain the telltale signature of bursting bubbles in my stomach that would support a hernia diagnosis. A few weeks later, an MRI scan, which has much better resolution, revealed that the mass was actually contained within the pericardial sac and was quite large—about the volume of that soda can. Even with this large invader pressing on my heart, I had no symptoms and could exercise at full capacity. I felt great.

The doctors told me that the mass was most likely to be a teratoma, a clump of cells that is not typically malignant. Their outlook was sunny. Riffing on the musical South Pacific, my cardiologist said, “We’re gonna pop that orange right out of your chest and send you on your way.”

While I was recovering from surgery, the pathology report came back and the news was bad—it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma. Because of its location, embedded in my heart wall, the surgeon could not remove all of the cancer cells. Doing so would have rendered my heart unable to pump blood. The oncologist told me to expect to live an additional six to 18 months.

I was absolutely white-hot angry at the universe. Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor? This is what’s going to take me away from my beloved family, my cherished friends and colleagues? I simply couldn’t accept it. I was so mad, I could barely see.

[And now comes the part where I’m weeping while I type.]

Five years ago, I met Dena and we fell for each other hard. This wasn’t mere “chemistry”; it was more akin to particle physics—a revelation of the subatomic properties of love. Dena has uplifted me with her pure and unconditional affection, her kindness, beauty, optimism, and keen intelligence. She is the best wife anyone could want, and she is way better than I deserve. Leaving her behind will be the very hardest part of this whole awful situation.

Until the moment of that diagnosis six months ago, I had been the luckiest man in town. My twins, Jacob and Natalie, have been nothing but a delight for 25 years. I’ve been fortunate to have a long career in academic science with the freedom to pursue my own ideas, which is a gift like no other. My good friends are a constant source of joy and amusement. By any reasonable measure, I’ve had a great life, full of love, creativity, and adventure.

I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd, and so I think about what preparing for death has taught me about the human mind. The first thing, which is obvious to most people but had to be brought home forcefully for me, is that it is possible, even easy, to occupy two seemingly contradictory mental states at the same time. I’m simultaneously furious at my terminal cancer and deeply grateful for all that life has given me. This runs counter to an old idea in neuroscience that we occupy one mental state at a time: We are either curious or fearful—we either “fight or flee” or “rest and digest” based on some overall modulation of the nervous system. But our human brains are more nuanced than that, and so we can easily inhabit multiple complex, even contradictory, cognitive and emotional states.

This leads me to a second insight: The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation. Thirty minutes fly by in a conversation with a good friend, but seem interminable when waiting in line at the DMV. That fat raise you got at work seems nice until you learn that your co-worker got one twice as large as yours. A caress from your sweetheart during a loving, connected time feels warm and delightful, but the very same touch delivered during the middle of a heated argument feels annoying and presumptuous, bordering on violation.

If someone had told me one year ago, when I was 59, that I had five years left to live, I would have been devastated and felt cheated by fate. Now the prospect of five more years strikes me as an impossible gift. With five more years, I could spend good times with all of my people, get some important work done, and still be able to travel and savor life’s sweetness. The point is that, in our minds, there is no such thing as objective value, even for something as fundamental as five years of life.

The final insight of my situation is more subtle, but it’s also the most important. Although I can prepare for death in all sorts of practical ways—getting my financial affairs in order, updating my will, writing reference letters to support the trainees in my lab after I’m gone—I cannot imagine the totality of my death, or the world without me in it, in any deep or meaningful way. My mind skitters across the surface of my impending death without truly engaging. I don’t think this is a personal failing. Rather, it’s a simple result of having a human brain.

The field of neuroscience has changed significantly in the 43 years since I joined it. I was taught that the brain is essentially reactive: Stimuli impinge on the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, etc.), these signals are conveyed to the brain, a bit of computation happens, some neural decisions are made, and then impulses are sent along nerves to muscles, which contract or relax to produce behavior in the form of movement or speech. Now we know that rather than merely reacting to the external world, the brain spends much of its time and energy actively making predictions about the future—mostly the next few moments. Will that baseball flying through the air hit my head? Am I likely to become hungry soon? Is that approaching stranger a friend or a foe? These predictions are deeply rooted, automatic, and subconscious. They can’t be turned off through mere force of will.

And because our brains are organized to predict the near future, it presupposes that there will, in fact, be a near future. In this way, our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the totality of death.

If I am allowed to speculate—and I hold that a dying person should be given such dispensation—I would contend that this basic cognitive limitation is not reserved for those of us who are preparing for imminent death, but rather is a widespread glitch that has profound implications for the cross-cultural practice of religious thought. Nearly every religion has the concept of an afterlife (or its cognitive cousin, reincarnation). Why are afterlife/reincarnation stories found all over the world? For the same reason we can’t truly imagine our own deaths: because our brains are built on the faulty premise that there will always be that next moment to predict. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures.

While not every faith has explicit afterlife/reincarnation stories (Judaism is a notable exception), most of the world’s major religions do, including Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, and arguably, even Buddhism. Indeed, much religious thought takes the form of a bargain: Follow these rules in life, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife or with a favorable form of reincarnation or by melding with the divine. What would the world’s religions be like if our brains were not organized to imagine that consciousness endures? And how would this have changed our human cultures, which have been so strongly molded by religions and the conflicts between them?

While I ponder these questions, I am also mulling my own situation. I am not a person of faith, but as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories and their ultimately neurobiological roots. I’m not sure whether, in the end, faith in afterlife/reincarnation stories is a feature or a bug of human cognition, but if it’s a bug, it’s one for which I have sympathy. After all, how wonderfully strange would it be to return as a manatee or a tapeworm? And what a special delight it would be to see Dena and my children again after I’m gone.

David J. Linden is a neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.

Alan Watts on meaning, play, letting go

As noted in my previous post, I'm enjoying the audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app.

Here's some notes I made of Watts' talk on Sense of Nonsense, which focused on the meaning of life. Or, the lack thereof.

Watts started off by talking about significance, which we feel our life should have.

"Significant" music is such not because it means something other than itself, but is satisfying as it is.

Likewise, when our inner turmoil is quietened, small ordinary things are significant of themselves. A skilled photographer can capture images of leaves, pebbles, ripples on a lake, and lead us to see the images as significant. 

The significance of the world is what is going on now.

This is characteristic of music and dance. Dance is not to be going anywhere. Dance doesn't point outside of itself. Neither does good food. The delight of eating is different from what the food does for us.

"Fun" isn't leading to something else.

Hinduism has the notion of creation as God's play. Christianity has angels singing Hallelujah, which Watts says is "Whoopee!" Delight in nonsense. In the Bible, Job surrenders to the unreasonableness of God. 

The very question is the answer. Everything in the world is as weird as a hippopotamus. Jazz is a love of nonsense. 

So the true meaning of life is no meaning. Non-sense.  But this is significant nonsense. The world is full of fascinating complexity.

I also listened to Alan Watts talk about the Coincidence of Opposites. 

A most elementary lesson is that any sensual experience is a vibration: off-on. Life is a system of now you see it, now you don't. 

The crest and trough of life are inseparable. Different things can be inseparable. The two sides of a coin. Black and white. Sadness and happiness. 

The price we pay for concentrated attention, which can be highly useful, is that we lose sight of the figure/background relationship.

Our physical world is a system of inseparable differences. The organism/environment is a unified field, a transactional relationship. 

A mystic is a person who is aware of their inseparability from their environment. 

Is existence serious? Must I survive? How serious is life? Western culture assumes seriousness. In church, laughter is discouraged. 

However, a basic metaphysical axiom is that existence is playful. There's no destination. Music is playful. You play the piano. 

An end of the composition isn't the purpose of music. If it was, a symphony would just consist of the last few bars of music.

With travel, you try to get somewhere. But life isn't a journey. It's supposed to be a musical thing, played all the way along. 

Prediction has survival value. But it creates anxiety. All falls apart in the end. Existence is spontaneous. It happens of itself. We've got to let go and let it happen. Don't try.

This talk by Alan Watts is marvelous

Thank you, Sam Harris. As of January 1, he's arranged to have about 100 hours of recorded talks by Alan Watts put on his Waking Up app. 

I've read just about of all of Watts' books. Some I've read numerous times, notably The Wisdom of Insecurity, one of my favorite books. 

The recordings are arranged in categories: Tao of Philosophy, Philosophies of Asia, Myth & Religion, Philosophy & Society, Comparative Philosophy, Ways of Liberation, Religion of No Religion, Eastern & Western Zen, Taoism, Zen & Meditation, Comparative Religion, Early Radio Talks, Human Consciousness, Buddhism, Spiritual Alchemy, The Arts, The Future, The Self, The Universe.

I suspect there's considerable overlap between the various recordings, but I'll learn if that's true as I make my way through them. I'm starting with Tao of Philosophy, described as "Explore the limits of language, man and nature, the illusion of control, the myth of the self, and more."

Today I finished listening to a 54 minute talk, Not What Should Be. Here's a summary based on notes I took. Watts is an excellent speaker, who spoke without notes, according to a short introduction by Harris. 

-----------------------

We have a false sense of personal identity, which creates a profound discord between man and nature. Actually, the environment is not something other than ourselves. Yet we make the mistake of viewing intelligence as being inside us, while outside is just a blind mechanism.

People say of a baby, it came into this world. In truth, we come out of this world. Our head is as much a part of the environment as our body.

Education leads us to view reality as made up of discrete lines/facts, linear scanning. Yet in the universe everything happens together all at once. We confuse the world as it is with how the world is described. 

"I" is a symbol of ourselves. The real you is the universe centered on your organism. Your behavior is part of the environment. There's a continual push-pull between organism and environment. 

A sense of cosmic consciousness causes us to say either "I do everything" or "I do nothing." There's just a single process going on, so both points of view are right. 

Our sense of ourself is very limited. If we're asked what our childhood was like, we'll relate a few stories. But that's just a vanishingly small proportion of what actually happened during those years. We know nothing of how our heart beats, what is being secreted by our glands, the operation of our stomach, liver, and other organs.

Thus we have an impoverished image of ourselves. The unconscious is a mystery. We're full of illusions. Our history leaves out most of what happened. All I have is a caricature of myself, a skeleton. It's no wonder we feel so inadequate.

We hope for a divine event that will change our viewpoint. Yet we fail to realize that our "I" is an illusion. Any attempt to change ourselves through effort is bound to fail.

When you will, you grit your teeth. Muscular tension accompanies our effort. Try! We strain with the thought of gaining a psychological benefit. "I" is marked by chronic tension. When an organ is fully functioning, we are unaware of it. It's only when something goes strong that we're aware of our stomach, say.

The big difficulty is that I want to find a method to improve myself. But the self to be improved is that which is doing the improving. Unloving me has to make me into loving me. So I hope God will improve me.

In Zen many feel that it takes hard work to get rid of ego. The biggest ego trip is getting rid of ego. Actually ego is an illusion. Mystical experience is a gift of God. You can't do anything about it because you don't exist.

There is no method. Good news! The main obstacle to mystical realization has collapsed: you. You can't control thoughts and feelings. They are you. 

Do you breathe? Do you see? There are just happenings. You can only preach to ego. I just talk about what it is. And I get paid for doing this.

The hallucination of ego disappears only in recognition of our own futility. You can't control your own mind. Quietness naturally comes over you when there is no controller. The experiencer of experience is just experience. 

In nature there's just knowing. Not "I am feeling." There is feeling there. Just a happening. That space is meditation. 

Don't try to get rid of mind chatter. This just keeps up the illusion of a controller. Eventually there is silence when thoughts and feelings are allowed to be like clouds appearing and disappearing in the sky.

Reality isn't material or spiritual. That's just an idea. You are this universe. Other people's doings are your doings. If you're going to say "I'm God," you must allow it for everybody else too. This was the mistake of Christianity. Only Jesus supposedly was godlike. 

There are endless games of spiritual competition. My guru is better than your guru. My yoga is better than your yoga. You are this universe. The universe is still beginning now.

-----------------------

Lastly, here's an actual transcript of part of Watts' talk dealing with the idea of us being a caricature of ourselves. He starts off talking about the richness of his present-moment experience talking to a large group of people, and how different it is when he's asked to describe what he did that evening. 

-----------------------

Instead of this rich physical experience, which is very rich indeed, I have to attenuate it in memory and description... So, therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did yesterday, what I did the day before, in terms of this stringy, mangy account. All I have is a caricature of myself.

...We are, as it were, conceiving of ourselves as a bunch of skeletons. And there's no flesh on them, just a bunch of bones. And no wonder we all feel inadequate. 

We're all looking to the future. To bring us a goodie. We know what we want to have is a golden goodie at the end of the line somewhere. There's a good time coming be it ever so far away, that one far-off divine event toward which creation moves. 

We hope. And therefore we say of something that's no good, it has no future. I would say, it has no present. But everyone says it has no future. No. 

Here we are, as it were, psychically starved. And always therefore looking, looking, seeking, seeking, seeking. And this confused seeking is going on everywhere. We don't know what we want.

Nobody knows what they want. We say what we want in vague terms. Pleasure, money, wealth, love, fulfillment, personal development. But we don't know what we mean by all that.