from brainpickings
“All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe,” the great theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote in his influential It for Bit model of the nature of reality, adding: “Observer-participancy gives rise to information.”
Wheeler arrived at this notion that the universe doesn’t exist out there, independent of us, through the gateway of physics just as his British contemporary Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) was arriving at it through philosophy. In introducing Eastern thought into the West, Watts spoke and wrote with unparalleled lucidity about the way in which our self-referential awareness of an experience (or observer-participancy, in Wheeler’s words) shapes the experience itself, nowhere more elegantly than in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library) — his timeless and increasingly timely treatise on how to live with presence.
Watts argues that as long as we divide life into interior self-awareness and exterior experience, into life in here and life out there, we split our psyches asunder and doom ourselves to never attaining the wholeness at the heart of human happiness. With an eye to the inherent interconnectedness of the universe, he writes:
"There is a world of difference between an inference and a feeling. You can reason that the universe is a unity without feeling it to be so. You can establish the theory that your body is a movement in an unbroken process which includes all suns and stars, and yet continue to feel separate and lonely. For the feeling will not correspond to the theory until you have also discovered the unity of inner experience. Despite all theories, you will feel that you are isolated from life so long as you are divided within.
But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel, and know."
Like the physicist who builds models of how the universe works but remains completely blind to her own interior world, we risk being only half-human when we worship at the altar of the outrospective intellect to the exclusion of our introspective intuition, the seedbed of belonging to the integrated wholeness of the universe — that is, when we approach the world as separate experiencers of it rather than as participatory parts of it. Watts admonishes:
"The sense of unity with the “All” is not, however, a nebulous state of mind, a sort of trance, in which all form and distinction is abolished, as if man and the universe merged into a luminous mist of pale mauve. Just as process and form, energy and matter, myself and experience, are names for, and ways of looking at, the same thing — so one and many, unity and multiplicity, identity and difference, are not mutually exclusive opposites: they are each other, much as the body is its various organs. To discover that the many are the one, and that the one is the many, is to realize that both are words and noises representing what is at once obvious to sense and feeling, and an enigma to logic and description."
[…]
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, “I am all this.” There is simply “all this.”
More than half a century before physicist Sean Carroll held up the beautiful notion of “poetic naturalism” as a counterpoint to the scientific contention that the universe is inherently meaningless, Watts inverts that common charge and writes:
"If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it."
Watts argues that this impulse for description over experience, for attempting to make sense of reality by standing outside it rather than surrendering to it, is symptomatic of the divided mind — the mind that robs us of inner wholeness. He writes:
"So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom… But the undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness.
[…]
When … you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance."
Showing posts with label alan watts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alan watts. Show all posts
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Alan Watts Explains the Meaning of the Tao, with the Help of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn
A Nancy panel is an irreducible concept, an atom, and the comic strip is a molecule. - comics theorist Scott McCloudA little over ten years ago, cartoonist Jim Woodring isolated a single image from Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running and deeply polarizing Nancy comic strip, celebrating it on his blog, the Woodring Monitor, as "the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn.”
What makes this panel the greatest? Woodring declined to elaborate, though his readers eagerly shared theories—and some befuddlement—in the comments section:
Sluggo has reached the perfect state of no-effort, the satori-like denial of the "small mind" and all of the suffering that comes with it.
… it's the comic equivalent of a koan—something designed to tie our rational mind in knots so that we can glimpse enlightenment.
Sluggo smiles because he knows a
secret. He says no because he rejects consensus reality. He floats along
because he doesn’t fight life—he sees the maintenance of the harmony
and is one with that harmony. He knows all paths lead away from home.
Instead he goes within and knows freedom.
"I am content. I need nothing, I will do nothing, I am fine as I am.”
In the state of being in accordance
with the Tao, there is a certain feeling of weightlessness, parallel to
the weightlessness that people feel when they get into outer space or
when they go deep into the ocean.
Could other Nancy panels serve as vehicles for Taoist enlightenment? Mayhaps:
Bushmiller’s strong point was never
the content of his comic strip's jokey plots—a friend once described him
as 'a moron on an acid trip.' In fact, the gags were even simpler than
was necessary for a 'children's' strip. That's because they were just a
vehicle for the controlled and brilliant manipulation of repetition and
variety that gave the strip its unique visual rhythm and composition.
Bushmiller choreographed his familiar formal elements inside the
tightest frame of any major strip, and that helped make it the most
beautiful, as a whole, of any in the papers.” - Tom Smucker, The Village Voice, 1982
This month sees the publication of Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read Nancy, a book length analysis of one single strip, which also functions as a how-to and history of the comic medium. This hotly anticipated volume has in turn given rise to a lively online How To Read Nancy Reading Group, a hotbed of fan art, altered panels, and Nancy strips from around the world.
Invite your pals over to play comic theorist Scott McCloud’s Dadaist game Five Card Nancy or take the online version for a solo spin.
And for those who require context, here is the original strip from which the floating Sluggo panel is drawn.
Apparently the key to the Tao is a plastic hammock…
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Alan Watts: Carl Jung and Variations of the Self
"The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha." - Carl Jung
Thumbnail: Via Carl Jung's "The Red Book"
Saturday, October 15, 2016
The Taoist View of the Universe - Alan Watts
via Creative by Nature
“Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.” ~Alan Watts
“At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world.
To the traditional way of Chinese thinking this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that plus and minus, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.
People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is “to make the world a better place” – to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness.
But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially “good and healthy” are creating more problems than they solve.
We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away – from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself.
Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves- that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.”
This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.
In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of “going with the grain.” The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.
In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland.
Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other.
When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. The male individual must not neglect his female component, nor the female her male. Thus Lao-tzu says:
Knowing the male but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.
The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female. The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it:
When everyone knows beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness,
there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are in mutual sequence.
They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting.
It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being as sound from silence and light from space.
Thirty spokes unite at the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
This space is not “just nothing” as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:
The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.
Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary.
Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra says, “That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form.”
The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”
~Alan Watts~
“Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.” ~Alan Watts
“At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world.
To the traditional way of Chinese thinking this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that plus and minus, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.
People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is “to make the world a better place” – to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness.
But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially “good and healthy” are creating more problems than they solve.
We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away – from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself.
Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves- that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.”
This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.
In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of “going with the grain.” The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.
In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland.
Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other.
When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. The male individual must not neglect his female component, nor the female her male. Thus Lao-tzu says:
Knowing the male but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.
The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female. The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it:
When everyone knows beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness,
there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are in mutual sequence.
They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting.
It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being as sound from silence and light from space.
Thirty spokes unite at the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
This space is not “just nothing” as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:
The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.
Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary.
Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra says, “That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form.”
The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”
~Alan Watts~
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Monday, September 19, 2016
Identity, self, and the secret of life
Introduced by NASA Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell and narrated by philosopher Alan Watts. A media compilation featuring Apollo mission footage and music from The Cinematic Orchestra and Tomáš Dvořák (Machinarium OST).
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Reality Smashing Quotes
via Fractal Enlightenment
“Quotations are like wayside robbers who leap out, brandishing weapons, and relieve the idler of his certainty.” ~ Walter Benjamin
Ah quotations, those little packets of redemption, those tiny bundles of emancipation. They take our tiny bowls of fixed thinking and stir them up into giant bowls of flexible thinking. They eclipse both certitude and uncertainty, intermittently. They intellectually crush out. In this article we’ll delve into ten quotations that tear the veil between the believer and his/her belief. Ten quotes that rattle the cage of our certainty, tease out the hypocrisy of our convictions, and force our heads over the edge of the abyss of the human condition. As Bradford Keeney pinpointed, “Words are only useful in teasing one another. In teasing we are less likely to get stuck in any particular belief, attitude, or form of knowing.”
Number one: “We understand nothing! If you understand this, you understand everything.” ~ Paul Mic
It’s okay that we’re fallible. It’s okay that we’re imperfect and prone to make mistakes. It’s even okay that we’re inherently hypocritical and torn between spirit and flesh. After all, we are a ridiculously young species in a preposterously ancient universe. Does this get us off the hook? Nope. But it does get us out of our own way, so that we’re able to focus on what really matters: life, love, and laughter. As, Jorge Luis Borges said, polishing up the predicament, “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
Number two: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ~ Richard Feynman
Indeed. Questions are infinite and free. Answers are finite and fixed. I would even go so far as to say that the only answer is to question. How could it not be? When you can question anything, ad infinitum. One could even question my declaration that the only answer is to question. As Elie Weisel said, “Every question possesses a power that does not lie within the answer.” Of course! In the end all one has are questions with which to challenge the lot; to usurp the throne it’s intellections, and make assumptions naught. And then there’s Franz Kafka’s thought on the subject that knocks it out of the park, “He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”
Number three: “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” ~ James Russell Lowell
Such a thought keeps us open to new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences, so that we may perhaps evolve, or co-evolve, into having a healthier perspective of reality. We’re able to move from thesis to anti-thesis and into synthesis, and then back into thesis, to which a new anti-thesis becomes inevitable. Lest we doom ourselves to making the same mistakes as our ancestors did, it behooves us to intuit when an antiquated ideal has grown unhealthy and stale. As Aldous Huxley warned, rounding out the thought, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
Number four: “You must change in order to find your truest self. And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring… Tease God. Do not fear God. A fool’s love is what God loves best. It represents the ready and available heart of a child at play.” ~ Bradford Keeney
Barring the idea that everything is an illusion, ‘change’ is perhaps the only certainty we have to hang our hats on. It seems to be the only permanent. Which is ironic, because change is the epitome of impermanence. Oh well. Might as well have a good sense of humor about it. Better to laugh with all the gods (and with the absence of god, if you’re an atheist) than to stare all self-serious and dead-mackerel-eyed into the infinite nothingness vainly tempting to force-feed “Truth” into a reality that doesn’t give a rat’s as*. Alan Watts smooths out the thought, “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
Number five: “God emptied to the limit is man, and man emptied to the limit is God.” ~ Alan Watts
Imagine it: God emptied to the limit. What’s left? Man, in his imperfect, naked vulnerability: a finite, trembling creature at the seeming center of an Infinite Flourishing. Imagine further: Man emptied to the limit. What’s left? God, writhing in perfect union with all things, interdependently spread out into infinite ubiquity. Such is the existential predicament of mankind: a breath-gasping, sphincter-tightening, mortal beast daring his soul into transcending it all with the self-actualized symbolism of God. Either way, man is God and God is man. Especially considering Meister Eckhart’s thought on the subject, “The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me.” Or? As Rumi said, “Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.”
Number six: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” ~ Niels Bohr
Truth shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s ability to hold multiple conflicting dispositions at the same time regarding the same topic. In short: Truth is a slippery red herring. In order to handle it, the mind must be both flexible and sharp, all while not taking itself too seriously. This requires being circumspect with ideas while also attempting to sharpen them on the whetstone of probability. And then having the audacity to be circumspect with probability. Perhaps nobody said it better than Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Number seven: “’I don’t know’ is an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject. It’s fun to say. Try it: ‘I don’t know.’ Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: ‘I don’t know.’ Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: ‘I don’t know.’ Empty your mind and lift your heart: ‘I don’t know.’ Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: ‘I don’t know.’” ~ Rob Brezsny
Indeed. “I don’t know” frees us into a state of “prepared to learn.” We are liberated from the burden of having the answers. We shed the weight, so that maybe we can pack it back up in a healthier way that makes us more robust. We unlearn what we have learned. Then we shed the weight again, back into a state of “I don’t know.” We empty the cup, so that we can fill it back up with the fresh water of awe and wonder. Then we empty it again. Over and over. Education by perpetual astonishment is the thing. ‘I don’t know’ in order that I may be overwhelmed by my not knowing.
Number eight: “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ~ Mark Twain
If, as Voltaire said, “Religion began when the first conman met the first fool,” then perhaps the fool gets un-fooled by realizing that the conman is just a man – fallible, flawed, imperfect, prone to mistakes, and more than likely just as wrong about his assertions as the fool is about his uncertainty. The absolute folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, if only he could intuit it. But alas, as Mark Twain surmised, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Number nine: “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” ~ Rene Descartes
Just as the folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, so too is doubt the only salvation for the blindly faithful. And the predicament is much the same. How to get the blindly faithful passed their blind spot. It comes down to a problem of cognitive dissonance that’s exacerbated by people’s tendency to take themselves and their beliefs too seriously. But breakthroughs can be made. We just need to trip our ignorant religious tendencies into an enlightened spiritual dance. As Eckhart Tolle suggested, “Here is a new spiritual practice: Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”
Number ten: “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
There you are: a tiny human in a gargantuan cosmos, a small speck in a vast universe, a flash in the pan of Time heretofore. What to do with the existential angst? What to do with the delicious tearing between spirit and flesh? What to do with the preciously finite amount of time you have within an infinite reality? It’s all yours to take in. It’s all yours to open up to. It’s all yours to plant seeds so as to flourish into the healthiest, most open-minded version of yourself. It’s all yours to breathe in an out with a flexible and un-shatterable sense of humor. It’s all so serious that it’s not serious at all. Laughable, really. And yet, as Terence McKenna profoundly stated, “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”
“Quotations are like wayside robbers who leap out, brandishing weapons, and relieve the idler of his certainty.” ~ Walter Benjamin
Ah quotations, those little packets of redemption, those tiny bundles of emancipation. They take our tiny bowls of fixed thinking and stir them up into giant bowls of flexible thinking. They eclipse both certitude and uncertainty, intermittently. They intellectually crush out. In this article we’ll delve into ten quotations that tear the veil between the believer and his/her belief. Ten quotes that rattle the cage of our certainty, tease out the hypocrisy of our convictions, and force our heads over the edge of the abyss of the human condition. As Bradford Keeney pinpointed, “Words are only useful in teasing one another. In teasing we are less likely to get stuck in any particular belief, attitude, or form of knowing.”
Number one: “We understand nothing! If you understand this, you understand everything.” ~ Paul Mic
It’s okay that we’re fallible. It’s okay that we’re imperfect and prone to make mistakes. It’s even okay that we’re inherently hypocritical and torn between spirit and flesh. After all, we are a ridiculously young species in a preposterously ancient universe. Does this get us off the hook? Nope. But it does get us out of our own way, so that we’re able to focus on what really matters: life, love, and laughter. As, Jorge Luis Borges said, polishing up the predicament, “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
Number two: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ~ Richard Feynman
Indeed. Questions are infinite and free. Answers are finite and fixed. I would even go so far as to say that the only answer is to question. How could it not be? When you can question anything, ad infinitum. One could even question my declaration that the only answer is to question. As Elie Weisel said, “Every question possesses a power that does not lie within the answer.” Of course! In the end all one has are questions with which to challenge the lot; to usurp the throne it’s intellections, and make assumptions naught. And then there’s Franz Kafka’s thought on the subject that knocks it out of the park, “He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”
Number three: “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” ~ James Russell Lowell
Such a thought keeps us open to new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences, so that we may perhaps evolve, or co-evolve, into having a healthier perspective of reality. We’re able to move from thesis to anti-thesis and into synthesis, and then back into thesis, to which a new anti-thesis becomes inevitable. Lest we doom ourselves to making the same mistakes as our ancestors did, it behooves us to intuit when an antiquated ideal has grown unhealthy and stale. As Aldous Huxley warned, rounding out the thought, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
Number four: “You must change in order to find your truest self. And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring… Tease God. Do not fear God. A fool’s love is what God loves best. It represents the ready and available heart of a child at play.” ~ Bradford Keeney
Barring the idea that everything is an illusion, ‘change’ is perhaps the only certainty we have to hang our hats on. It seems to be the only permanent. Which is ironic, because change is the epitome of impermanence. Oh well. Might as well have a good sense of humor about it. Better to laugh with all the gods (and with the absence of god, if you’re an atheist) than to stare all self-serious and dead-mackerel-eyed into the infinite nothingness vainly tempting to force-feed “Truth” into a reality that doesn’t give a rat’s as*. Alan Watts smooths out the thought, “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
Number five: “God emptied to the limit is man, and man emptied to the limit is God.” ~ Alan Watts
Imagine it: God emptied to the limit. What’s left? Man, in his imperfect, naked vulnerability: a finite, trembling creature at the seeming center of an Infinite Flourishing. Imagine further: Man emptied to the limit. What’s left? God, writhing in perfect union with all things, interdependently spread out into infinite ubiquity. Such is the existential predicament of mankind: a breath-gasping, sphincter-tightening, mortal beast daring his soul into transcending it all with the self-actualized symbolism of God. Either way, man is God and God is man. Especially considering Meister Eckhart’s thought on the subject, “The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me.” Or? As Rumi said, “Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.”
Number six: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” ~ Niels Bohr
Truth shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s ability to hold multiple conflicting dispositions at the same time regarding the same topic. In short: Truth is a slippery red herring. In order to handle it, the mind must be both flexible and sharp, all while not taking itself too seriously. This requires being circumspect with ideas while also attempting to sharpen them on the whetstone of probability. And then having the audacity to be circumspect with probability. Perhaps nobody said it better than Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Number seven: “’I don’t know’ is an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject. It’s fun to say. Try it: ‘I don’t know.’ Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: ‘I don’t know.’ Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: ‘I don’t know.’ Empty your mind and lift your heart: ‘I don’t know.’ Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: ‘I don’t know.’” ~ Rob Brezsny
Indeed. “I don’t know” frees us into a state of “prepared to learn.” We are liberated from the burden of having the answers. We shed the weight, so that maybe we can pack it back up in a healthier way that makes us more robust. We unlearn what we have learned. Then we shed the weight again, back into a state of “I don’t know.” We empty the cup, so that we can fill it back up with the fresh water of awe and wonder. Then we empty it again. Over and over. Education by perpetual astonishment is the thing. ‘I don’t know’ in order that I may be overwhelmed by my not knowing.
Number eight: “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ~ Mark Twain
If, as Voltaire said, “Religion began when the first conman met the first fool,” then perhaps the fool gets un-fooled by realizing that the conman is just a man – fallible, flawed, imperfect, prone to mistakes, and more than likely just as wrong about his assertions as the fool is about his uncertainty. The absolute folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, if only he could intuit it. But alas, as Mark Twain surmised, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Number nine: “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” ~ Rene Descartes
Just as the folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, so too is doubt the only salvation for the blindly faithful. And the predicament is much the same. How to get the blindly faithful passed their blind spot. It comes down to a problem of cognitive dissonance that’s exacerbated by people’s tendency to take themselves and their beliefs too seriously. But breakthroughs can be made. We just need to trip our ignorant religious tendencies into an enlightened spiritual dance. As Eckhart Tolle suggested, “Here is a new spiritual practice: Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”
Number ten: “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
There you are: a tiny human in a gargantuan cosmos, a small speck in a vast universe, a flash in the pan of Time heretofore. What to do with the existential angst? What to do with the delicious tearing between spirit and flesh? What to do with the preciously finite amount of time you have within an infinite reality? It’s all yours to take in. It’s all yours to open up to. It’s all yours to plant seeds so as to flourish into the healthiest, most open-minded version of yourself. It’s all yours to breathe in an out with a flexible and un-shatterable sense of humor. It’s all so serious that it’s not serious at all. Laughable, really. And yet, as Terence McKenna profoundly stated, “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”
Monday, July 11, 2016
Monday, July 4, 2016
The Taoist Way - Alan Watts
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao Tzu
Monday, June 27, 2016
Jack Kerouac and The Golden Eternity
via brainpickings
In the mid-1950s, literary iconoclast and beat icon Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922–October 21, 1969) became intensely interested in Buddhism, which began permeating his writing. It was the golden age of Eastern ideas drawing Western minds, from legendary composer John Cage to pioneering philosopher Alan Watts, credited with popularizing Zen thinking in mainstream Western society. Watts, in fact, at one point criticized Kerouac’s writing as being “always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.” But when stripped of his literary self-consciousness, as he was in his private letters, Kerouac had a special way of articulating the most beautiful and eternal concepts of Zen Buddhism with equal parts expansive awareness and crystalline precision.
Kerouac sent one such letter to his first wife, Edie Kerouac Parker, in late January of 1957, a decade after their marriage had been annulled. Found in The Portable Jack Kerouac (public library) — an altogether terrific treasure trove of his stories, poems, letters, and essays on Buddhism — the missive is nothing short of exquisite.
Kerouac writes:
In the mid-1950s, literary iconoclast and beat icon Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922–October 21, 1969) became intensely interested in Buddhism, which began permeating his writing. It was the golden age of Eastern ideas drawing Western minds, from legendary composer John Cage to pioneering philosopher Alan Watts, credited with popularizing Zen thinking in mainstream Western society. Watts, in fact, at one point criticized Kerouac’s writing as being “always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.” But when stripped of his literary self-consciousness, as he was in his private letters, Kerouac had a special way of articulating the most beautiful and eternal concepts of Zen Buddhism with equal parts expansive awareness and crystalline precision.
Kerouac sent one such letter to his first wife, Edie Kerouac Parker, in late January of 1957, a decade after their marriage had been annulled. Found in The Portable Jack Kerouac (public library) — an altogether terrific treasure trove of his stories, poems, letters, and essays on Buddhism — the missive is nothing short of exquisite.
Kerouac writes:
I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.Echoing Watts’s philosophy on death, Kerouac considers the illusion of the solid “self” as he contemplates the life and death of mountains:
We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.He ends the letter with one of his free-flowing, uninhibited poems:
The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Alan Watts: The Difference Between Belief and Faith
via BrainPickings
A century and a half before Carl Sagan explored the relationship between science and religion, Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, contemplated the subject in a beautiful letter. Two centuries later, Alan Lightman crafted an enchanting definition of secular spirituality. This question has also been addressed by Albert Einstein in answering a little girl’s question about whether scientists pray, Flannery O’Connor in considering dogma, belief, and the difference between religion and faith, and Jane Goodall in her exquisite conversation with Bill Moyers on science and spirituality — and yet the question is, and perhaps is bound to remain, an open one.
One of the most articulate and lucid attempts to answer it comes from Alan Watts, who popularized Eastern philosophy in the West, in his fantastic 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library) — the same treasure trove of insight that gave us Watts on happiness and how to live a full life and his prescient admonition about our modern media gluttony.
Watts writes:
A century and a half before Carl Sagan explored the relationship between science and religion, Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, contemplated the subject in a beautiful letter. Two centuries later, Alan Lightman crafted an enchanting definition of secular spirituality. This question has also been addressed by Albert Einstein in answering a little girl’s question about whether scientists pray, Flannery O’Connor in considering dogma, belief, and the difference between religion and faith, and Jane Goodall in her exquisite conversation with Bill Moyers on science and spirituality — and yet the question is, and perhaps is bound to remain, an open one.
One of the most articulate and lucid attempts to answer it comes from Alan Watts, who popularized Eastern philosophy in the West, in his fantastic 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library) — the same treasure trove of insight that gave us Watts on happiness and how to live a full life and his prescient admonition about our modern media gluttony.
Watts writes:
"We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
[…]
The present phase of human thought and history … almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint.
But “religious” people who resist the scraping of the paint from the glass, who regard the scientific attitude with fear and mistrust, and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are curiously ignorant of laws of the spiritual life which they might find in their own traditional records. A careful study of comparative religion and spiritual philosophy reveals that abandonment of belief, of any clinging to a future life for one’s own, and of any attempt to escape from finitude and mortality, is a regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. Indeed, this is actually such a “first principle” of the spiritual life that it should have been obvious from the beginning, and it seems, after all, surprising that learned theologians should adopt anything but a cooperative attitude towards the critical philosophy of science."The Wisdom of Insecurity is the kind of book that stays with you for life. Complement it with Watts on money vs. wealth and your ego, the universe, and becoming who you really are.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Alan Watts Introduces America to Meditation & Eastern Philosophy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life
Alan Watts moved from his native London to New York in 1938, then eventually headed west, to San Francisco in the early 1950s. On the left coast, he started teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies, wrote his bestseller Way of Zen, and began delivering a long-running series of talks about eastern philosophy on KPFA radio in Berkeley. During these years, Watts became one of the foremost popularizers of Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoisim, which made him something of a celebrity, especially when the 60s counterculture movement kicked into gear.
Now, 40 years and change after his death, you can find no shortage of vintage Watts’ media online (including this archive of streaming lectures). And today we’re featuring an episode from a TV series called Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, which aired in San Francisco circa 1960. “The Silent Mind” runs 28 minutes, and it offered American viewers an introduction to the philosophy and practice of meditation, something still considered exotic at the time. History in the making. You’re watching it happen right here. Find more meditation and Alan Watts resources below.
Related Content:
The Wisdom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Provoking Animations
The Zen Teachings of Alan Watts: A Free Audio Archive of His Enlightening Lectures
Free Guided Meditations From UCLA: Boost Your Awareness & Ease Your Stress
Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide
via OpenCulture
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Alan Watts: Two Lectures
Alan Watts - control freaks and unmasking religion
Alan Watts - the Illusion of Expectations
Friday, November 6, 2015
The Yin-Yang of Fortune and Misfortune: Alan Watts on the Art of Learning Not to Think in Terms of Gain and Loss
via brainpickings
“The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad.”
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his now-legendary lecture on the shapes of stories. But this idea was first articulated by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973), who began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West during the 1950s and 1960s. Fusing ancient wisdom with the evolving insights of modern psychology, Watts’s enduring teachings addressed such concerns as how to live with presence, what makes us who we are, the difference between money and wealth, the art of timing, and how to find meaning in meaninglessness.
Although he wrote beautifully and authored a number of books, Watts was a remarkably charismatic speaker and delivered some of his most compelling ideas in lectures, the best which were eventually published as Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks 1960–1969 (public library).
In a talk titled “Swimming Headless,” Watts explores the psychological dimensions of Taoist philosophy and its emphasis on cultivating the mental discipline of not categorizing everything into gain and loss. Learning to live in such a way that nothing is experienced as either an advantage or a disadvantage, Watts argues, is the source of enormous empowerment and liberation.
He illustrates this notion with an ancient Chinese parable:
"The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune."
In the book adaptation, the parable makes the same point in slightly more refined language:
"Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The farmer steadfastly refrained from thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage, because one never knows… In fact we never really know whether an event is fortune or misfortune, we only know our ever-changing reactions to ever-changing events."
Complement Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life with Watts on death, the difference between belief and faith, and what reality really is, then revisit philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and physicist David Bohm’s immensely stimulating East/West dialogue on love, intelligence, and how to transcend the wall of being.
“The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad.”
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his now-legendary lecture on the shapes of stories. But this idea was first articulated by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973), who began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West during the 1950s and 1960s. Fusing ancient wisdom with the evolving insights of modern psychology, Watts’s enduring teachings addressed such concerns as how to live with presence, what makes us who we are, the difference between money and wealth, the art of timing, and how to find meaning in meaninglessness.
Although he wrote beautifully and authored a number of books, Watts was a remarkably charismatic speaker and delivered some of his most compelling ideas in lectures, the best which were eventually published as Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks 1960–1969 (public library).
In a talk titled “Swimming Headless,” Watts explores the psychological dimensions of Taoist philosophy and its emphasis on cultivating the mental discipline of not categorizing everything into gain and loss. Learning to live in such a way that nothing is experienced as either an advantage or a disadvantage, Watts argues, is the source of enormous empowerment and liberation.
He illustrates this notion with an ancient Chinese parable:
"The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune."
In the book adaptation, the parable makes the same point in slightly more refined language:
"Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The farmer steadfastly refrained from thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage, because one never knows… In fact we never really know whether an event is fortune or misfortune, we only know our ever-changing reactions to ever-changing events."
Complement Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life with Watts on death, the difference between belief and faith, and what reality really is, then revisit philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and physicist David Bohm’s immensely stimulating East/West dialogue on love, intelligence, and how to transcend the wall of being.
Monday, August 10, 2015
"Kensho" - Short film narrated by Alan Watts
Dreamt by Aaron Paradox
“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
— Rumi
Saturday, August 1, 2015
The Taoist View of the Universe – Alan Watts
via Creative by Nature:
“Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.” ~Alan Watts
“At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world.
To the traditional way of Chinese thinking this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that plus and minus, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.
People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is “to make the world a better place” – to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness.
But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially “good and healthy” are creating more problems than they solve.
We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away – from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself.
Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves- that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.”
This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.
In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of “going with the grain.” The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.
In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland.
Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other.
When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. The male individual must not neglect his female component, nor the female her male. Thus Lao-tzu says:
Knowing the male but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.
The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female. The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it:
When everyone knows beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness,
there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are in mutual sequence.
They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting.
It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being as sound from silence and light from space.
Thirty spokes unite at the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
This space is not “just nothing” as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:
The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.
Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary.
Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra says, “That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form.”
The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”
-Alan Watts
“Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.” ~Alan Watts
To the traditional way of Chinese thinking this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that plus and minus, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.
People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is “to make the world a better place” – to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness.
But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially “good and healthy” are creating more problems than they solve.
We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away – from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself.
Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves- that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.”
This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them.
In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of “going with the grain.” The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.
In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland.
Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other.
When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. The male individual must not neglect his female component, nor the female her male. Thus Lao-tzu says:
Knowing the male but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.
The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female. The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it:
When everyone knows beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness,
there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are in mutual sequence.
They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting.
It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from non-being as sound from silence and light from space.
Thirty spokes unite at the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
This space is not “just nothing” as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:
The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.
Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary.
Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra says, “That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form.”
The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”
-Alan Watts
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”
By Gary McGee
“Like they say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left for you in that moment than to have a good laugh.” –Alan Watts
The title of this article is a koan attributed to a 1st century Zen Master named Linji Yixuan. It’s obviously not meant to be taken literally, since killing is wrong. It’s a koan with shock-value, meant to jar us awake, a tool meant for self-exploration and self-interrogation. In this article we will attempt to dissect this curious koan and try to bring some clarity to it so that we can use it as a tool toward our own self-development.
The “road” is generally meant to symbolize the path to enlightenment. But it could also be interpreted as our own personal path, or even something as simple as the direction our life is going. The “Buddha” we meet on the path is our idealized image of perfection, whatever that might be. It’s our conception of what absolute enlightenment would look like. One could argue that the Buddha on the path is us, or at least our projection onto the world about what it means to be Buddha. But, and here’s the rub, whatever our conception of the Buddha is, it’s wrong!
Like it says in the opening of the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” What we’re “killing” is the idea that enlightenment is achievable. If we believe we have achieved enlightenment then we need to “kill” that belief and keep meditating. This is because there is no permanence. Permanence is an illusion. Everything is constantly changing.
Even if we think we have all the answers, those “answers” must still be questioned. This is the urgency inherent within the koan. A true master “achieves” enlightenment, “kills” it, and then keeps meditating. He or she does so in order to keep learning, to keep enlightening. Indeed, to reinforce the journey truly being the thing.
Every master knows that we are all Buddha disguised as the Self. We are all God in hiding. It’s just that some of us are playing the victim and some of us are free. Like Alan Watts asked, “Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?” Most of us are walking tragedies, suffering in a cruel world. We all experience pain. We all have scars. But true masters flip the tables on tragedy and choose comedy instead, thus completely altering the power dynamic.
They choose happiness without reason. They choose laughter and joy over anger and spite. They honor their scars rather than resent them. They choose dancing rather than depression.
And this is precisely where the Fool and the Sage merge, where humor and wisdom coalesce. Up until the point we meet “Buddha on the road” we are victims of the world, but once we “kill” the Buddha we become the world. We become sacred clowns.
We become holy fools, with the power to keep the journey going despite wounds or set-backs or even enlightenment itself! This is the wisdom of the Fool/Sage –to fail (or succeed), to let go, to have a good laugh, and then to start all over again with our wisdom in tow.
“You must change in order to find your truest self,” writes Bradford Keeney in The Bushman’s Way of Tracking God. “And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring.” Yes! God is us. Buddha is us. This sacred energy is hiding inside us because we have been too boring. We need to shake ourselves awake. The world is not a frozen thought, but a dynamic feeling, a heroic expression, a comic guffaw. Our bones are too serious inside us. Even our funny bone is serious. We need to loosen up. Let’s not be serious, let’s just be sincere. Shake up your bones. Unloosen the straightjacket that society has strapped around your soul. Let’s hone ourselves into instruments that are sharp enough to cut God. And then let’s have a healthy enough sense of humor to laugh about it afterwards…
…Imagine you are a clown walking down the path toward sacred clownhood. You encounter me standing on one leg. You approach me to get a better look. I am trickster-fabulous with my coyote-throat and crow-tongue, with my Thunderbird wings and smoking-mirror skin. I am whispering unspoken truths to power when you draw near. You ask me my name and I open my moon-eye, keeping my sun-eye closed.
“I am Jester Guru,” I say, laughing and bouncing from foot to foot. “I am Slapstick Soothsayer. I am Wag & Sage. I am Blessed Buffoon. I am Charlatan Shaman. I am the Fool’s Philosopher. I am Prankster Pope. I am Mystic Muppet. I am Elder Funnyman. I AM THE HEYOKA WHO BEFUDDLES ALL HEYOKAS! I am the all singing all dancing Juggernaut Oracle, and I’m here to inform you that you have finally arrived.”
What do you do?!
“Like they say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left for you in that moment than to have a good laugh.” –Alan Watts
The title of this article is a koan attributed to a 1st century Zen Master named Linji Yixuan. It’s obviously not meant to be taken literally, since killing is wrong. It’s a koan with shock-value, meant to jar us awake, a tool meant for self-exploration and self-interrogation. In this article we will attempt to dissect this curious koan and try to bring some clarity to it so that we can use it as a tool toward our own self-development.
The “road” is generally meant to symbolize the path to enlightenment. But it could also be interpreted as our own personal path, or even something as simple as the direction our life is going. The “Buddha” we meet on the path is our idealized image of perfection, whatever that might be. It’s our conception of what absolute enlightenment would look like. One could argue that the Buddha on the path is us, or at least our projection onto the world about what it means to be Buddha. But, and here’s the rub, whatever our conception of the Buddha is, it’s wrong!
Like it says in the opening of the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” What we’re “killing” is the idea that enlightenment is achievable. If we believe we have achieved enlightenment then we need to “kill” that belief and keep meditating. This is because there is no permanence. Permanence is an illusion. Everything is constantly changing.
Even if we think we have all the answers, those “answers” must still be questioned. This is the urgency inherent within the koan. A true master “achieves” enlightenment, “kills” it, and then keeps meditating. He or she does so in order to keep learning, to keep enlightening. Indeed, to reinforce the journey truly being the thing.
Every master knows that we are all Buddha disguised as the Self. We are all God in hiding. It’s just that some of us are playing the victim and some of us are free. Like Alan Watts asked, “Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?” Most of us are walking tragedies, suffering in a cruel world. We all experience pain. We all have scars. But true masters flip the tables on tragedy and choose comedy instead, thus completely altering the power dynamic.
They choose happiness without reason. They choose laughter and joy over anger and spite. They honor their scars rather than resent them. They choose dancing rather than depression.
And this is precisely where the Fool and the Sage merge, where humor and wisdom coalesce. Up until the point we meet “Buddha on the road” we are victims of the world, but once we “kill” the Buddha we become the world. We become sacred clowns.
We become holy fools, with the power to keep the journey going despite wounds or set-backs or even enlightenment itself! This is the wisdom of the Fool/Sage –to fail (or succeed), to let go, to have a good laugh, and then to start all over again with our wisdom in tow.
“You must change in order to find your truest self,” writes Bradford Keeney in The Bushman’s Way of Tracking God. “And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring.” Yes! God is us. Buddha is us. This sacred energy is hiding inside us because we have been too boring. We need to shake ourselves awake. The world is not a frozen thought, but a dynamic feeling, a heroic expression, a comic guffaw. Our bones are too serious inside us. Even our funny bone is serious. We need to loosen up. Let’s not be serious, let’s just be sincere. Shake up your bones. Unloosen the straightjacket that society has strapped around your soul. Let’s hone ourselves into instruments that are sharp enough to cut God. And then let’s have a healthy enough sense of humor to laugh about it afterwards…
…Imagine you are a clown walking down the path toward sacred clownhood. You encounter me standing on one leg. You approach me to get a better look. I am trickster-fabulous with my coyote-throat and crow-tongue, with my Thunderbird wings and smoking-mirror skin. I am whispering unspoken truths to power when you draw near. You ask me my name and I open my moon-eye, keeping my sun-eye closed.
“I am Jester Guru,” I say, laughing and bouncing from foot to foot. “I am Slapstick Soothsayer. I am Wag & Sage. I am Blessed Buffoon. I am Charlatan Shaman. I am the Fool’s Philosopher. I am Prankster Pope. I am Mystic Muppet. I am Elder Funnyman. I AM THE HEYOKA WHO BEFUDDLES ALL HEYOKAS! I am the all singing all dancing Juggernaut Oracle, and I’m here to inform you that you have finally arrived.”
What do you do?!
Saturday, June 27, 2015
The purpose of living - Alan Watts
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
― Alan Watts
― Alan Watts
Friday, June 12, 2015
Alan Watts - Once You Know This
"The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down YOU is the Whole Universe. And It's doing... Your living organism and all its behavior, it's expressing it as a singer sings a song... You are something that the Whole Universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the Whole Ocean is doing..."
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