Alan Watts & Eckhart Tolle - What Lies Beyond The Mind

that is a way of demonstrating the basic experience which underlies some of the major forms of oriental philosophy and actually this way of demonstrating it is taken from a kind of Chinese and Japanese buddhism called zen which i'm going to be talking about quite a bit today because zen is one of the best examples of a philosophy shall we call it in which this experience is dominant zen of course is a Japanese word and it's spelled z e n that is the Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese word chan and this in turn is the

Chinese way of pronouncing an indian sanskrit word dhyana and dhyana refers to the kind of experience which has been represented in this circle another word for it would be a third a second sanskrit term and the nearest we can translate shunya in english is emptiness or void and so we might say this is an experience of the void before trying to explain what this is and you know the funny thing is it really can't be explained because it has to be felt because it's a transformation of one's basic feeling one's basic consciousness of life but

i should mention first that it is characteristic of eastern philosophy to be based on experience rather than ideas you see philosophy in the western world especially as it's taught in our universities and academies is mainly a matter of thinking it's a matter of trying to arrive at certain clear positive ideas about the nature of man the nature of the universe and so on and so forth and also religion in the west is somewhat similar because religion is largely concerned with belief in certain ideas in these basic forms of eastern philosophy on the other hand such

as zen which is a kind of buddhism or taoism the basic native philosophy of china or in vedanta which is the central form of indian philosophy what is basic to them is not ideas but a way of experiencing a way of feeling and this might be called as it is here the void demonstrated by this circle because it is not a void which is just emptiness this isn't the idea that there are people in the backwood world of the backward worlds of asia who think that the universe is ultimately nothing at all it is rather

that the void represents complete spiritual freedom or you might say if you don't like the word spiritual complete psychological freedom and therefore i want to try if i can to communicate to you to give you some idea of what this experience is in Japanese in zen it is called satori i'll write that down it's an unfamiliar word s a t o r i and i like the way that that's pronounced in southern Chinese they pronounce it because it's something that happens to you sudden now let me try if i can possibly to put into some

sort of words what this experience is this experience which so far as they are concerned is the objective of human life to get this is to understand the meaning of human nature and destiny only because it's a transformation of consciousness because it's something you feel rather than something you think it is for this reason difficult to put into words but it is as if you saw quite suddenly and indeed this experience could have happened to you it can come without warning to anybody and so what i'm going to be saying may strike a familiar ring

in some years but it is as if quite suddenly you became totally convinced that the way everything is in this universe and at this moment is absolutely right and that's almost putting it too weakly i'm not trying to talk about a sort of pollyanna feeling where we say well this is the best of all possible worlds and everything however evil and however wrong is going to work out all right in the end because it's a means to an end in some master design i'm not saying that i'm saying it is suddenly feeling that everything is

right the way it is now however appalling however terrible and you know it beyond a shadow of doubt there are two other aspects to this experience as well and although you feel them all together we have to talk about them separately while the first aspect is feeling that everything just as it is is so right that you could say of it this is why i'm alive this is what life's all about the second is that everything you see and feel seems to come to life in an extraordinary way you feel the world as you've seen

it before was seen almost in a dream but it is as if just the ordinary things that were confronting you suddenly went yeah and came alive and the third aspect of it is that you no longer feel yourself and what you are experiencing to be separated although you don't lose the feeling of the outline of your skin you don't forget that i or joe dokes is a possible name by which you can refer to yourself nevertheless it suddenly seems to you that your skin is no longer what divides you from the world it's what joins

you to it what you see outside you is also you now we ordinarily restrict the idea of ego of highness or of youness to some sort of psychological entity or process inside us which is in control of things and we identify ourselves with a sort of controlling center but in this experience it is as if that center was suddenly enlarged to include the whole universe you almost feel as if you were god except that in eastern thought one doesn't think of god as a kind of omnipotent person i mean there are lots of people in

our asylums who say well i'm god i was like the story of the woman who insisted that she was god and to humor her someone said well if you're god will you please explain how you managed to create the universe in six days she said i never talk shop it isn't feeling god in that sense as if you could do anything but it is feeling that you and this whole world are one and that in this experience of oneness and the sudden coming alive of everything and the profound rightness that's the only word i can

use the profound rightness of each moment of this moment however far it may seem to be short of one's ideals of perfection this is it and you say having seen this i can die content this is what it was all about underneath it all there is this vast realm of conscious presence there is a presence there without which you wouldn't be able to perceive anything you wouldn't be able to think anything it's a little bit like i compared sometimes too before you live on the surface of the ocean you're a little ripple on the surface

of the ocean and this ripple only knows itself as a ripple and it is it it looks at other ripples and sometimes feels threatened by other ripples or wants to use other ripples to enhance its own sense of self and it's always fearful it always compares itself to other ripples very unpleasant and frustrating way to live it hasn't realized the depths of its being because the ripple is only a temporary expression of the vastness of the ocean but it doesn't know that so if the rebel for a moment comes to us if if the the

continuous thought in this analogy the rebel of course is the human being and the rebel when the ripple stops thinking for a moment and this is the key for a moment you come to a cessation of the stream of thinking and what's left when you're not thinking about your your history your personal history or the future you're just becoming aware of this moment yourself this moment but what is that self it's no longer the historical self all you can't say very much about it there is an underlying sense of presence of a life conscious presence

it's still it's alive the awakening can begin with realizing that you are not the thoughts that go through your mind that's the beginning now what has arisen at that moment awareness suddenly you realize that there is a dimension of consciousness in you that's not thinking but just conscious and that is your essence identity to be rooted in that it's ultimately very simple i don't know why they don't teach that at school i mean the most important life lesson is the transcendent dimension of of of life of who you are to find all the ancient teachings

using different terms and different words they all point to this possibility of realizing the transcendent dimension of who you are whether the buddha calls it the buddha actually calls it the translation is shunyata emptiness but better translation would be spaciousness that's the essence of who you asked in the utter spaciousness jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven which in my translation is not i translated kingdom i translate this time i translate it as dimension and heaven which is the vast heaven when you look up at the sky that's the closest thing you can get to

spaciousness in in the sense perceived world the closest thing you can get to species if you look at the vastness of the sky or heaven in many languages heaven and sky is the same word so you look at the vastness of sky which is vast spaciousness so the kingdom of heaven is the dimension of spaciousness it's a dimension of consciousness this is why then they asked jesus where is the kingdom of heaven when is it going to come and he said the kingdom of heaven cannot come with signs to be perceived you can never say

it's over here or it's over there because the kingdom of heaven is within you in fact he was saying it is the essence of who you are consciousness is but it's not only the essence of who you are it's the essence of the universe itself because you are you are just a microscope of the universe so when you realize the essence of who you are the universe is realizing its own essence through you this little thing through you the ideas of alan watts and eckhart tolle are fundamental contributions to the wisdom on this channel but

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