Church of the Churchless

Alan Watts on how we create an illusory problem, then want it solved

You Tube works in mysterious ways. After I started listening on my iPhone to a video of Robert Sapolsky talking with an interviewer about how the brain constructs emotions, I noticed that an Alan Watts talk had popped up in a list of supposedly related videos.

Okay, I thought, I like Alan Watts, and the title sounds intriguing, "Alan Watts: Live Without Worry or Fear." Wow, all I have to do is spend 53 minutes listening to an Alan Watts talk, and I'll be worry and fear free. 

Of course, that didn't happen, unless there's a delayed reaction after hearing what Watts said. But I really didn't expect anything different. I just hoped to enjoy the talk and get some fresh insights into the philosophy Watts espoused with such clarity and wisdom.

That did happen. 

Watts gives away the secret to living without worry and fear early on in the talk. Basically it is to not fight life but to flow with life. Hard to argue with that, for we make life more difficult when we strain and struggle to control the uncontrollable. 

Problems always will be with us. However, we make matters worse when we view life itself as a problem to be solved, as opposed to dealing with problems that arise within a nonproblematic life. 

Religion, mysticism, and many forms of spirituality are all about viewing life itself as a problem. When we go along with this, Watts says that we fall prey to a trap. We create an illusory problem, then we want that problem solved.

There are lots of religious leaders, gurus, masters, and such who are happy to help with this. Salvation, enlightenment, God realization -- these and other wares are offered in the religious/spiritual marketplace as solutions to the illusory problem of life not being what life actually is.

Actually, we die. Actually, our knowledge of the cosmos is limited. Actually, happiness doesn't exist without sadness. But not being content with the actual nature of life, many people seek out a "guru" who will fix them by making their life into something that isn't an actual life.

Zen, says Watts, attracts some of these people. Traditionally, it was difficult to be accepted as a student by a Zen master. They'd tell the would-be student, "I have nothing to offer you. Go away." 

Viewing that brushoff as an invitation to try harder, the person who wants to be fixed by Zen makes an even stronger effort to be accepted as a Zen student. Sure, the Zen master knows that there is nothing wrong with the person that needs to be fixed. However, the only way to lead the person to that realization is by playing along with their illusion.

Watts likens this to someone who believes the Earth is flat. They can't be reasoned out of this false belief. So a wiser person says to them, "Lets go together to the edge of the world and peer over it." 

Moving in a single direction along a certain latitude, eventually they will return to the place from which they started, demonstrating that the Earth is circular in two dimensions. If they repeated this exercise by traveling along a certain longitude, they'd experience Earth as the globe that it is.

Watts shares a William Blake quote: "The fool who persists in his folly will become wise."

Likewise, a teacher of Zen indulges a student by pressing them to find the nature of themselves that is having the problem they want fixed by Zen. Typically this is done rather indirectly through statements such as "Show me the face that you possessed before you were born." 

Of course, being steeped in the Zen form of Buddhism, the Zen teacher knows that the student doesn't have a self that is separate from the life they are living now. But just as a flat-earth believer needs to experience the roundness of our planet to break free of their illusion, so does a Zen student need to expend much time and energy searching for the illusory self, or ego, or soul, that doesn't exist.

Eventually they will recognize that the search is useless, because there is nothing to be found but the life they're already living. A Donovan song comes to mind: "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is." Wikipedia explains:

The lyrics refer to a Buddhist saying originally formulated by Qingyuan Weixin, later translated by D. T. Suzuki in his Essays in Zen Buddhism, one of the first books to popularize Buddhism in Europe and the US:

Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.

Now, this paraphrase of the talk by Watts doesn't do justice to what he said. It's simply my way of expressing some key points that I recall from the talk.

Near the end of the talk Watts says that a Zen student is brought to the realization that the ego is phoney, not genuine, so it is impossible for the student to either act or to not act, since who they think they are isn't the reality of who they are.

For another way of expressing what I've said here, check out my 2014 post, "Watts: Wanting to clean up the messiness of life IS the mess." It includes a quotation from one of Watts' books on the same theme as the talk I've trued to describe. The quotation ends with:

Sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself. Life is giving you the message that the "you" that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist.

In other words, as an ego, I am separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. So the one who is supposed to be in control of them cannot control them because it isn't there. 

And as soon as you understand that, things will be greatly improved.

Alan Watts on Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism

Though Alan Watts was an Anglican minister and served as chaplain at Northwestern University, in the book he wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, three Eastern religions/philosophies garner the most attention and praise.

That's because Watts correctly sees Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism as being transformational, rather than metaphysical, as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are. Just picture Christianity without Jesus, or Judaism without the history of the Jewish people, or Islam without the revelation of the Koran via Mohammed.

Hard to do, if not impossible. But Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism do just fine without any history or personalities. Even Buddhism teaches "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Meaning, Buddha the person isn't at all necessary to understand Buddhism. Watts says:

For the wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief.

This experience is psychological, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.

In an interesting chapter called "The One in the Many," Watts describes how the three Eastern practices aim to lead to a realization that the reality of this world partakes of the reality of all existence.

That, in a nutshell, is the open secret of happiness, according to Watts: accepting what is, here and now, for the smallest piece of the world where we live and breathe possesses the same reality as the vastest reaches of the cosmos.

The Upanishads are the foundation of what was subsequently known as Vedanta, which is to say the "end" of fulfillment of the Vedas, the Vedas being the earliest of all Hindu scriptures. With matchless economy and beauty of language the Upanishads speak in a number of different ways of Brahman, the One Reality which is expressed in all the manifold forms, objects, activities, and living beings of the universe.

...Therefore the phrase "That art thou" (tat tvam asi) is the first, fundamental principle of Vedanta arising from the second, that all things without exception are Brahman, not by participation, for Brahman is one and indivisible. Hence Vedanta is also known as the system of Advaita (literally, "not two") or nonduality, and nonduality in philosophy is the natural expression of total acceptance in psychology.

...In other words, if man has the experience of separateness, this experience also is Brahman since there is nothing other than Brahman. Maya is not illusion as against reality, for in the Vedantist conception there is nothing apart from Reality which may be set over against it. Thus we may say that while there is no actual separateness from Brahman, there is certainly an experience of separateness, and this experience is real even though it is incomplete and relative.

Buddhism sprang into being in India as a reaction to Vedanta losing its way. 

But invariably there came a time when the experience was obscured by the doctrine, when the psychology of religion became the philosophy of religion and the Brahmanic tradition degenerated into scholasticism, ceremonialism, and fantastic extremes of asceticism whose object was not to accept the opposites but to destroy them, so negatively was the doctrine interpreted.

I love how Watts describes the Buddhist scriptures, which fell into much the same trap as Vedanta did. 

Although we have in writing a prodigious number of words attributed to the Buddha, little is known of him.

...The earliest records of his teaching are found in the Pali Canon, three large groups of scriptures which read, for a great part, like a statistical report compiled on wet afternoons by monks who had nothing better to do. 

...As for the sections on psychology, never were there such ponderous lists of minutiae, the apparent aim of which is to analyze the human being down to the last detail and so prove that he does not really exist. 

On the plus side, as revealed in the Dhammapada: 

The Buddha's teaching is unique in its utter lack of theology; it concentrates wholly on the necessity of arriving at a personal immediate experience and dispenses with the doctrinal symbol of that experience. In this respect it is the only truly psychological religion. 

...In its most concrete form ordinary, everyday experience is just how you feel at this moment. In a certain sense Buddhism is very much a philosophy and a psychology of the moment, for if we are asked what life is, and if our answer is to be a practical demonstration and not a theory, we can do no better than point to the moment -- now!

It is in the moment that we find reality and freedom, for acceptance of life is acceptance of the present moment now and at all times.

...For this reason Mahayana Buddhism teaches that Nirvana or enlightenment cannot really be attained, because the moment we try to attain it by our own power we are using it as an escape from what is now, and we are also forgetting that Nirvana is unattainable in the sense that it already is. 

Lastly, there's Taoism.

All our reasoning is based on the law of cause and effect operating as a sequence. Something is happening now because something else happened then. But the Chinese do not reason so much along this horizontal line from past, through present, to future; they reason perpendicularly, from what is in one place now to what is in another place now.

In other words, they do not ask why, or from what past causes, a certain set of things is happening now; they ask, "What is the meaning of those things happening together at this moment?" The word "Tao" is the answer to this question. The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life.

...This is another way of saying that there is a harmony called Tao which blends all events in each moment of the universe into a perfect chord. The whole situation in and around you at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are to be in accord with Tao.

When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virtue" or "grace" or "power," but best understood as Tao realized in man. 

So it all comes down to accepting the reality of what is in the present moment. Pretty damn simple, when Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism are stripped down to their essence.

True acceptance is the way out of the vicious circle of duality

I like to read books by Alan Watts. Other people don't like Watts. Some of them visit this blog. So when I write about how I enjoy what Watts has to say, probably they find those blog posts irritating.

Such is the play of duality. It's how the world works, generally.

Love is inconceivable without hate. Up is inconceivable without down. Absent dualities, we're simply left with what is, reality without a second. But the moment we ascribe human qualities, such as likes and dislikes, to aspects of reality, duality appears.

(I'm not saying that reality is completely absent of duality. Light and dark, or positive and negative charge, seemingly would be present without people. This is a point in The Tao of Physics. However, there's no doubt that in large part we humans manufacture duality out of the way we conceive of things.)

In the book Watts wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, he speaks of the vicious circle of duality. 

The problems of duality are clearly stated in the Christian faith, but they often pass unrecognized under the symbols in which they are contained. The story of the Fall, of the eating of the fruit of Good and Evil, describes man's involvement in the vicious circle -- a condition in which, of his own power, he is able to do nothing good that is not vitiated by evil.

In this condition it may be said that "all good deeds are done for the love of gain," that is, with a purely self-interested motive, because "honesty is the best policy." 

Every advance in morality is counterbalanced by the growth of repressed evil in the unconscious, for morality has to be imposed by law and whenever there is compulsion there is repression of instinctual urges. Indeed, the very formulation of the ideal of righteousness suggests and aggravates its opposite.

Thus St. Paul says, "I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet." So, too, Lao Tzu remarks in the Tao Te Ching, 

When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness.
When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites. 
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized.
Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come the differences of things.

I love the solution that Watts proposes. I also love the way Watts says it. He has a wonderful ability to describe subtle ideas in an easy to understand way. When I read his books, often I'm struck by a feeling of "Wow, so nicely said. I've thought along this line myself, but never in such a clear way." 

Here's what Watts says about how to avoid making acceptance of reality into a dualistic vicious circle.

The motivating power of the vicious circle is pride. In Christian terms we should say that man is not willing to be saved as he is; he feels that it is necessary for him to do something about it, to earn salvation by his own self-made spirituality and righteousness.

The Grace of God is offered freely to all, but through pride man will not accept it.

He cannot bear the thought that he is absolutely powerless to lift himself up and that the only chance of salvation is simply to accept something which is offered as freely to the saint as to the sinner. If nothing can be done to earn this Grace it seems to set all man's self-imposed ideals at naught; he has to confess himself impotent, and this is more than he can bear.

So the gift of Grace is tacitly ignored, and man goes on trying to manufacture it for himself.

When it is said that man will not let himself be saved as he is, this is another way of saying that he will not accept himself as he is; subtly he gets around this simple act by making a technique out of acceptance, setting it up as something which he should do in order to be a "good boy."

And as soon as acceptance is made a question of doing and technique we have the vicious circle.

True acceptance is not something to be attained; it is not an ideal to be sought after -- a state of soul which can be possessed and acquired, which we can add to ourselves in order to increase our spiritual stature.

If another paradox may be forgiven, true acceptance is accepting yourself as you are NOW, at this moment, before you have even begun to make yourself different by accepting yourself. 

In other words, as soon as we try to make the ideal state of mind called "acceptance" something different from the state of mind which we have at this moment, this is the pride which makes it so difficult to accept what we are now, the barrier that stands between man and that which we call God or Tao.

But when it is suggested that we should find union with God here and now at this very moment, everyone is outraged and begins to make excuses. "After all, how can we attain such sublime understanding at the moment? We are unprepared. We are not good enough. We shall have to do all kinds of things first. We must meditate and train ourselves in religious discipline, and then perhaps after many years we shall be fit and worthy to attain the greatest of all attainments."

But this is surely a peculiar form of blindness and false pride, masquerading as humility. We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of a finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.

This is an old story to those who have studied the wisdom of the East, but still the search goes on, a search for something we have never lost, something which is staring us right in the face, a search which the Buddhists sometimes describe as "hiding loot in one's pocket and declaring oneself innocent."

It is difficult just because it is too easy, for man finds it so hard to climb down from his high horse and accept that which is, freely and unreservedly. 

Small wonder, then, that we are advised to become again as little children, who have an inconvenient way of drawing attention to obvious things which the adult mind cannot or will not see. For spiritual understanding is not a reward given to you for being a great person; you cannot acquire it any more than you can acquire the wind and the stars.

But you can open your eyes and see it.

That seeing, Watts says, doesn't require the embrace of any philosophy, religion, spiritual path, or mystical pursuit. However, it lies at the core of three nondualistic practices: Vedanta Advaita, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Watts describes these practices well in chapters that follow his vicious circle discussion, and how to escape it. That probably will be the subject of my next churchless blog post. Which will irritate some and please others. 

Why I embrace the dark side of me and the world

Looking back, I don't think I ever was a full-on dualist, just a half-hearted one.

This was during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India whose core teaching was that this world in which we live and breathe isn't our true home but a temporary resting place -- since the purpose of life is to return to higher regions of reality and God through extensive meditation, devotion to a guru believed to be God in Human Form, a vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and drugs, and morality, including no sex outside of marriage.

Thus the RSSB teaching was thoroughly dualistic. The guru would say things like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." Which I recall is a quote from Teilhard deChardin.

I never fully embraced this notion of the world as a place to be escaped from. I didn't like the judgmentalism of so many RSSB initiates. They considered themselves to be God's chosen people, even though that honor is claimed by many, if not most, dualistic religions. They were even proud of their humility.

When I gave talks about the RSSB teachings, which was frequent, I'd pay lip service to the oft-repeated adage that it was crucial to shun lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism. However, I never came across a single person during my 35 years of RSSB membership, including the guru, who didn't manifest these and other so-called "negative" emotions and qualities.

Which are better termed simply emotions and qualities. 

In my experience, the people who talked the most about having overcome negative emotions and qualities were seriously lacking in positive emotions and qualities. It was as if all the attention they paid to stifling their dark side left them with insufficient energy to manifest their bright side -- especially in a natural fashion rather than a stilted artificial fashion.

One reason I detested holier-than-thou attitudes back then, and still do, is that I grew up in a family with a lot of dysfunction. Not just my immediate family, which was very small. My mother was divorced and I had a half-sister ten years older than me who got married at 18, so wasn't around much. My father wasn't in the picture, a man who I only spent an hour with in my entire life, aside from my baby years.

And that hour was very weird, not satisfying at all. My mother didn't speak much about my father. She told me that they got a divorce after he refused to move to Texas, a drier climate than Massachusetts, on the advice of doctors following the birth of my sister Evie, who was born with a congenital heart condition. Supposedly my father's job as a General Electric efficiency expert was more important to him.

Just as alcohol was more important to my mother than sobriety for much of my childhood. That was her biggest dark side, I suppose, as my father's cold detached ambition was to him. In addition, I grew up listening to tales of my mother's relatives facing their own divorces, drinking problems, affairs, and such. 

There was a lot of financial and artistic success in my family. Also, a lot of dark side dysfunction. They were all good people. They were family. They were lovable. So early on in my life I learned an important truth: we all are driven by forces outside of our control. Genetic, psychological, cultural. Scratch the surface of a so-called saint and you'll find a sinner.

That's why I get irritated when some commenters on my recent blog posts take self-righteous shots at two authors I like a lot: Alan Watts and Paul Breer.

Both men make no claim to being saints. Breer was in prison for two years; Watts had a drinking problem and relationship problems. Their personal lives were completely in accord with the messages in their books. Breer was a passionate believer in the illusion of free will and an immaterial self. Watts was a fervent advocate for a spirituality founded on being and acting natural, which included embracing the dark side of life.

Here's how Watts described the dark side in a book he wrote in 1940 when he was only 24, The Meaning of Happiness. These are wise observations about life that narrow-minded religious moralists should seriously consider, rather than reject out of hand.

If you sit still for a while, completely relaxed, and let your thoughts run on, let your mind think of whatever it likes, without interfering, without making suggestions, and without raising any kind of obstacle to the free flow of thought, you will soon discover that mental processes have a life of their own.

They will call one another to the surface of consciousness by association, and if you raise no barriers, you will soon find yourself thinking all manner of things both fantastic and terrible which you ordinarily keep out of consciousness.

Over a period of time this exercise will show you that you have in yourself the potentiality of countless different beings -- the animal, the demon, the sartyr, the thief, the murderer -- so that in time you will be able to feel that no aspect of human life is strange to you -- humani nihilism a me alienum puto. ["I consider nothing human is alien to me."]

In the ordinary way consciousness is forever interfering with the waters of the mind, which are dark and turbulent, concealing the depths. But when, for a while, you let them take care of themselves, the mud settles and with growing clarity you see the foundations of life and all the denizens of the deep.

...For the unconscious is not, as some imagine, a mental refuse-pit; it is simply unfettered nature, demonic and divine, painful and pleasant, hideous and lovely, cruel and compassionate, destructive and creative. It is the source of heroism, love, and inspiration as well as of fear, hatred, and crime.

Indeed, it is as if we carried inside of us an exact duplicate of the world we see around us, for the world is a mirror of the soul, and the soul a mirror of the world. Therefore when you learn to feel the unconscious you begin to understand not only yourself but others as well, and when you look upon human crime and stupidity, you can say with real feeling, "There but for the Grace of God go I." 

 

The whole universe is at work in every thought and action

I'd thought that I'd read, or at least heard about, every book by Alan Watts -- one of my favorite authors. But then I saw a comment on this blog where someone recommended The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East.

So I ordered it, as the commenter said that Watts had interesting observations about free will, one of my favorite subjects. Sweet! Favorite author plus favorite subject equals enjoyable reading.

Watts wrote The Meaning of Happiness in 1940, when he was just 24 years old. Though I'm just a few chapters into the book, it's clearly the product of an intellect wise beyond his years. In a preface written in 1952, Watts says that his ideas have gone far beyond the philosophy of the book.

I'm sure that's true. However, The Meaning of Happiness contains themes that continued on through the rest of Watts' life, such as the folly of viewing reality as being divided into material and supernatural spheres.

I haven't come across specific mentions of free will yet, but a section where Watts talks about the nature of spirituality implies rather strongly that what we call "our" will actually is the will of the entire universe, a view that I find both scientifically correct and emotionally inspiring.

Here's some excerpts that resonated with me.

In itself, spirituality is purely an inner experience; it has no necessary effect whatsoever on one's outward behavior judged from the standards of efficiency and worldly wisdom. This is not to say, however, that it is something absolutely private and personal, finding no expression that others can see.

For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one's self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it.

It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one's every thought and action, however trivial and small.

...In one sense you feel that your life is not lived by you at all; the power of the universe, fate and destiny, God Himself, are directing all your motions and all your responsibilities are blown to the winds. In another sense you feel free to move as you wish; you seem to be moving life with the same vast power with which life moves you, and your littlest acts become filled with gigantic possibilities. 

Indeed, physicists tell us that the stars are affected when we lift a single finger.

The result of these two feelings is that you no longer distinguish between what you do to life and what life does to you; it is as if two dancers moved in such perfect accord that the distinction between lead and response vanished, as if the two became one and the same motion.

By the whirling, ever-changing movement of this dance you are carried along without pause, but not like a drunken man in a torrent, for you as much as life are the source of the movement. And this is real freedom; it includes both freedom to move and to be moved; action and passivity are merged, and in spirituality as well as in marriage this is the fulfillment of love.

All this, however, does not take place in the ecstasy of trance, in some abstract state of consciousness where all shapes and substances have become merged into a single infinite essence.

The spiritual man does not perform his ordinary activities as one in a dream, letting his surface thoughts and deeds run on mechanically. He can become just as absorbed in the usual affairs of the world as anyone else, but in a certain way he sanctifies them for under his hands sharpening a pencil becomes as much a religious act as prayer or meditation.

Indeed, he can afford to become absorbed in everyday affairs almost more than others, and he can do so with a certain zest and abandon for to him ordinary human thoughts and activities are as much included in the dance of the spirit as is anything else.

This, indeed, is much of his secret, for he knows that spirituality does not consist in thinking always about the spiritual as such. His world is not divided into "watertight compartments" and his religion is not a special form of thought and activity, for the spiritual and the material are not separated. 

...Those who cannot feel that man's principal concern should lie outside this world, who feel that salvation has nothing to do with removal to another realm of experience or with mere obedience to a moral law -- such people can find little assistance from religion as usually taught, and today they constitute a very large proportion of intelligent men and women.

For the nineteenth-century conflict between religion and science was, for those whose eyes were open, a stripping off of nonessentials from religion, but unfortunately official religion seldom saw it in this way. It clung to supernaturalism, which, rightly or wrongly, rationalist science has discredited, and continued to make it the keystone of spirituality.

But that kind of religion does not encourage the type of love upon which spirituality is founded. We have seen that its technique is imitative and thus unlikely to produce genuine, firsthand religious experience; we have also seen that its contempt of this world and its concentration on the world hereafter has little to do with the essentials of religion.

...In this sense, religion is union with life; whether that life is this present life of physical form, of thought and feeling with brain and soul, or whether it is a life of purely psychic substance is beside the point.

These are only different grades of existence; they are not different grades of spirituality, for the same spiritual laws apply in every grade of existence, and when one has learned union with one of them, one has discovered the secret of union with any of them.

We have suggested that the secret of this union lies in a positive attitude toward the world in which we live. 

To repeat the question which religion has to answer, we want to discover how we can learn to be united with life in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstance, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it we may find freedom and happiness. 

To be united with life in all its expressions may seem a large demand to make on oneself, for those expressions include disease, pain, death, madness, and all the horrors which man can devise, wittingly or unwittingly, for his fellow creatures. 

In fact the "nub" of the whole problem is the acceptance of the dark side of life, for this is the very occasion of our unhappiness. "Acceptance" may seem a weak word for a positive attitude of love, but it is used because the type of love in question is relaxed.

It is positive but not aggressive; it grows in its own way and is not forced. Therefore we may say that it is not enough to tolerate the dark side of life; acceptance in this sense is much more than a "let it be" with a resigned shrug of the shoulders.

Let us call it "creative acceptance," though because this phrase smacks overmuch of philosophical jargon we will write the noun and only remember its qualifying adjective. This is perhaps wise in another way, for a truth oddly comes out of a play on words: to be genuine, acceptance must be unqualified.

The profundity of "There are no black people in Africa"

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite. 

Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't. 

If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people.

Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world didn't have the conceptual divisions that are so much a part of human existence. 

A hurricane or earthquake wasn't destructive until we humans evolved the ability to conceive of "destructive." 

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we'd be better off with a more limited brain. Conceptualization is entertaining, valuable, and a great survival tool. If concepts weren't favored by natural selection, we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for them.

But it's wise to keep in mind how arbitrary many of our customary ways of dividing up the world are. Here's another excerpt from the book by Isabel Wilkerson that I'm reading: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents."

(My first blog post about Caste is here.)

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture: the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of.

She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten that startled me in its simplicity. 

"You know that there are no black people in Africa," she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everybody else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production.

None of us are ourselves.

I think that's true. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it weren't true, if each of us actually were ourselves, and there was no societal pressure to put people into boxes that don't reflect who they truly are? Wilkerson speaks of containers.

Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you what shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.

Alan Watts: live life like a cat falling out of a tree

Recently on Facebook I saw this quote from a book by Alan Watts, What is Tao? Makes a lot of sense to live life like a falling cat. Not too tense. Not too rigid. Just the right amount of relaxation.

The same attitude of relaxed gentleness [practiced in judo] is most beautifully seen when you watch cats climbing trees.

When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground.

But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind that it didn't want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing.

In the same way, it is the philosophy of the Tao that we are all falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. As a matter of fact, the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it.

So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. Don't resist it.

This fits with a Taoist story from Chuang Tzu that I shared in a 2004 blog post, "I become a Taoist." 

Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage: though he may suffer injury he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire.

He knew nothing about getting into the carriage and nothing about falling from it. The thought of death or life, or of any alarm or affright, does not enter his breast. Therefore he encounters danger without shrinking from it. Completely under the influence of the liquor he had drunk, it is thus with him.

How much more would it be so if he were under the influence of his Heavenly constitution! The sagely man is kept hid in his Heavenly constitution and therefore nothing can injure him.

Well, I'm pretty damn sure that a sagely man can indeed be injured, but I'll give Chuang Tzu his poetic license. 

His main point seems to be the same as what Alan Watts said above. Going through life in a relaxed fashion is better than being unduly tense. 

As regards cats, I found a You Tube video that explains how they can fall from high places and come away in pretty good shape. 

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.

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.

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.