Alan Watts: How to Come Back from Alienation with the Universe and with Ourselves
The quotation below immediately follows what I transcribed in the post “Alan Watts: Each of Us Can Say `I am the Universe’.” Because it goes in a different direction, I’m treating it as a separate passage. The passage begins by weighing in on the conundrum `If a Tree Falls in a Forest and No One is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?' and ends with the subtle psychology of trying too hard. Waking up has a curious quality of seeming like doing nothing, although in another sense, one of the most important things of all has happened. Not trying to be better, in just the right way, is a more effective path to being a better person than trying is, in the usual wrong way of trying. In the terms of Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence, saboteurs can easily mess up our trying. And the way of the Sage is the way of ease and flow.
“See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So, if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if the sun shines in a world that has no eyes, it’s like a hand beating on a skinless drum: no light. You evoke light in the universe, in the same way that you, by having a soft skin evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It’s your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being a whole universe of light, and color, and hardness, and heaviness, and everything. You see? But in the mythology that we’ve sold ourselves on during the end of the 19th century, when people discovered how big the universe was—and that we live on a little planet, in a solar system on the edge of a galaxy, which is a minor galaxy—everybody thought, ‘arghhhh, we really aren’t important after all. God isn’t there and doesn’t love us. Nature doesn’t give a damn.’ And, we put ourselves down. See? But actually, it’s this simple funny microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet, that’s way out somewhere, who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe—out of what would otherwise be mere quanta. There’s jazz going on. But—Do you see?—this little ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism, on this little planet, is what the whole show is growing there. And so, realizing Its own presence. It does it through you. And you’re It.
Only, you, you, you—because you got the—you know, when you put a chicken’s beak on a chalk line, it gets stuck. It’s hypnotized. So, in the same way, when you learn to pay attention—and as children, you know all the teachers who were in class said: “PAY ATTENTION!”. All the kids stare at the teacher. And we gotta pay attention. That’s what’s putting your nose on the chalk line. And you got stuck with the idea of attention, and you thought “Attention is me”—the ego: attention. So, if you start attending to attention, you realize what the hoax is. That’s why in Aldous Huxley’s book Island, the rajah trains the minah birds on the island to say ‘Attention! Here and now boys!’
See? Realize who you are! Come to! Wake up! Now here’s the problem: If this is the state of affairs which is so—and if the consciousness state you are in this moment, is the same thing as what we might call ‘the divine state’—if you do anything to make it different, it shows you don’t understand that it’s so. So, the moment you start practicing yoga, or praying, or meditating, or indulging some sort of spiritual cultivation, you are getting in your own way. Now this is why—this is the Buddhist trick. The Buddha said: “We suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won’t suffer.” But he didn’t say that as the last word. He said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that to someone, they’re going to come back after a while and say, `Yes, but I’m now desiring not to desire.’ And so the Buddha will answer: `Well, at last you begin to understand the point.’ Because you can’t give up desire. Why would you try to do that? It’s already desire. So in the same way, you say `You ought to be unselfish’ or to give up your ego: `Let go. Relax.’ Why do you want to do that? Just because it’s another way of beating the game, isn’t it? The moment you see—you hypothesize that you are different from the Universe, you want to get one-up on it. But if you try to get one-up on the Universe—and you’re in competition with it—it means you don’t understand you are It. You think there’s a real difference between self and other. That self—what you call `yourself’, and what you call `other’— are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They’re really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself as north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other. But it’s all one. So, if you try to make the north pole defeat the south pole—or get the mastery of it, or the south pole get the mastery of the north pole—you show you don’t know what’s going on. So, there are two ways of playing the game: the first way—which is the usual way—is that a guru or teacher, who wants to get this across to somebody— because he knows it himself, and when you know it, you know, you’d like others to see it, too—so what he does is he gets you into being ridiculous, harder and more assiduously than usual. In other words, if you are in a contest with the universe, he’s going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous. And so he sets you such tasks as saying, `Now of course, in order to be true person, you must give up yourself—be unselfish.’
So the Lord, sets down out of heaven and says the first and great commandment is: `Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ `You must love Me.’ Well, that’s a double bind. You can’t love on purpose. You can’t be sincere, purposely. It’s like trying not to think of a green elephant while taking medicine. But if a person really tries to do it—so, you know, this is the way Christianity is rigged—you should be very sorry for your sins. And though everybody knows they’re not, but they think they ought to be. And so they go around trying to be penitent—or trying to be humble. And they know, the more assiduously they practice this, the phonier and phonier the whole thing gets.
So in Zen Buddhism, exactly the same thing happens. The Zen master challenges you to be spontaneous. `Show me the real you.’ One way they do this is getting you to shout: shout the word `MU!’. And he says now, `I want to hear you in that shout. I want to hear your whole being. And you yell your lungs out. And he says: `Listen [laughing], that’s no good. That’s just a fake shout. Now I want to hear absolutely the whole of your being—right from the heart of the universe—coming through in this shout.’ And these guys scream themselves hoarse. Nothing happens, until one day they get so desperate that they give up trying, and they manage to get that shout through, when they weren’t trying to be genuine. Because there was nothing else to do. You just had to yell. And so, in this way—what they call the technique of reductio ad absurdum—if you think you have a problem, you see—that you’re an ego, and that you’re in difficulty—the answer that the Zen master makes you is `Show me your ego. I want to see this thing that has the problem.’ When Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen, came to China, a disciple came to him and said, `I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind’. And Bodhidharma said `Bring out your mind here before me and I’ll pacify it.’ But he said `When I look for it, I can’t find it.’ So Bodhidharma said, `There! It’s pacified.’
Because when you look for your own mind—that is to say, your own particularized center of being that is separate from everything else, you won’t be able to find it. And the only way you’ll know it isn’t there is if you look for it hard enough to find out that it isn’t there. And so everybody says, all right, `Know yourself. Look within. Find out who you are.’ Because the harder you look you won’t be able to find it—and then you’ll realize that it isn’t there at all. There isn’t a separate you. Your mind is what there is: everything. So, the only way to find that out, is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible. That’s one way. I didn’t say `The only way.’ But it’s one way. And so, almost all spiritual disciplines—meditations, prayers, etcetera, etcetera, are ways of persisting in folly: doing resolutely and consistently what you are doing already. So, if a person believes that the earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that. He knows it’s flat. Look out of the window and see: it obviously looks flat. So, the only way to convince him that it isn’t is to say, `Hey, well let’s go and find the edge.’ And in order to find the edge you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles—you’ll never find it that way. So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line, due west, along the same line of latitude. And eventually, when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the earth is round. That’s the only way that’ll teach him. Because people can’t be talked out of illusions.
Well now, there is another possibility, however. This is more difficult to describe. Let’s say we take as the basic supposition—which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori, or awakening, or whatever you want to call it—that this now moment, in which I am talking, and you are listening, is eternity. That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary, and that we may not feel very well—and that we’re sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed—this is It. So you don’t need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn’t try not to do anything: because that’s doing something. It’s just the way it is. In other words, what is required here is a sort of act of super-relaxation. It’s not ordinary relaxation. It’s not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you’re heavy, and so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It’s not like that. It’s being with yourself as you are without altering anything. And how to explain that? Because there’s nothing to explain. It is the way it is now, you see? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up.”
