We Worry About Problems We Don’t Even Have - Alan Watts’ Taoist Wisdom

supposing you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning let's take today right here and now here we are in this paradise of the place and some of us have got to go to work on Monday is that a problem for many people it is it spoils the taste of what's going on now when we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we've got to jump that day uh immediately we feel sad and bored and bothered whereas actually we're just lying in bed [Music] so the Taoist trick

says simply live now and there will be no problems that's the meaning of the Zen saying when you are hungry eat when you are tired sleep when you walk walk when you sit sit rinzai the great Tang Dynasty Master said in the practice of Buddhism there is no place for using effort sleep when you're tired move your bowels eat when you're hungry that's all the ignorant will laugh at me but the wise will understand [Music] and at the end of this morning's talk I pointed out to you the immediate way the way through now when

you know that this moment is the Tao and this moment is considered by itself without past and without future eternal [Music] neither coming into being nor going out of being there there is nirvana [Music] you don't there is no such thing as a progression in time the spring does not become the summer [Music] there is first spring and then there is summer so in the same way you now do not become you later this is T.S eliot's idea in four quartets where he says that the person who has settled down in the train to read

the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the platform and therefore also you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door [Music] these states are separate each in its own place and the person sitting here and now is not the person who will die we are all a constant flux and the continuity of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole [Music] you know it goes

round and round and round and the whole thing seems to be going up or going down whichever the case may be but actually nothing is going up or down so when you throw a pebble into the pond and you make a concentric rings of waves there is an illusion that the water is Flowing outwards and no water is Flowing outwards at all water is only going up and down what appears to move outward is the wave not the water our seeming to go along in a course of time it doesn't really happen the Buddhists say

suffering exists but no one who suffers Deeds exist but no doers are found a path there is but no one who follows it and Nirvana is but no one who attains it foreign in this way they look upon continuity of life as the same sort of Illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and in the dark will it and the illusion of a circle is created whereas there is only the one point of Fire [Music] the argument then is so long as you're in the present there aren't any problems things just do what

they do it's just like that a really virtuous person doesn't show his virtue well there's a poem in Chinese which says entering the forest he doesn't disturb a blade of grass entering the water he doesn't make a ripple he looks very ordinary and so his virtue can't be detected he doesn't stink of virtue so now when it comes to taoism this is a point of view that becomes explicit in Chinese history it used to be said that laozza was originally thought to have been a contemporary of Confucius who lived between six and five hundred BC

but the general weight of scholarly opinion today is that the laozza book is about 400 and the book is called the Dao de Jing and so Jing in Chinese means a classical book or scripture Dao is usually translated the way but I would prefer to call it the course the course of Nature and da means virtue but in the sense that we use the word Virtue when we say the healing virtue of a plant and water is very often used by laozza to give the idea of Dao because water always takes the line of least

resistance water is very soft and yet one of the strongest things in the world you can chop water with a sword but leave no wound so what everybody wants to know then is how to acquire that great naturalness how do you do it way way means to act to strain to strive or to interfere and so the Taoist manner of life is woo way Don't Force It always go with the stream you may need to use a rudder but don't ever go against the Stream if you are swimming and you're caught in a very strong

current you will be lost if you try to swim against it you must swim with it and Edge to the side that's duh you see that's magical power but it all comes about through not using effort not straining at anything never strength