Alan Watts : The Truth About Insecurity

I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of Illusion the question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not that is to say whether the plot is Comic or tragic and if it's tragic you see is it must we say that it's ultimately tragic and the question of who are you and uh are we to say that I myself right down at root am just a little kind of jerk of some kind that really has nothing to do with this Cosmos but just arises in it and is

here on sufferance for a short period and then absolutely nothing follows you see or the alternative to that is what I really am the same as the whole thing that is the works the it or whatever you want to call it Brahman God the da the great void the Buddha nature I don't care the self anything any name you want and uh whereas that attitude you can look at it from various points of view in judging it you can say it's wishful thinking you can say that it's uh insufferable Pride but the point of the

matter is as I tried to show any other way of looking at things is kind of skitso it looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a Barron tree they just got set settled there you know they don't belong the sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether well where is this other domain and how does it relate to this one are they separate I showed you that even when we say that two domains are the poles apart the very fact that

they're poles shows that they have a hidden connection and the hidden connection is the big thing in life all you junkies know that [Laughter] and uh so in other words we get a pattern of organization that is radial rather than an assemblage as if the universe were really a Multiverse a lot of things that got collected together out of the infinite wastes of space and sort of began to M around each other whereas the other pattern which is so much more sensible is Central uh and Radial and I showed you how the crystals and the

stars and the octopuses and even the human beings are all radial structures of course we don't see our radial relationship to the totality of the universe because it isn't obvious it's obvious that a tree is an arm of the earth reaching up and waving at the sky and a mountain is another kind of radiation from the Earth and so is a leg from a body and hair and things like that but what what makes human beings as the highest of the mammals so uh conscious of being independent is that they are topologically an enclosed surface

you see which wanders around independently of the ground what we don't notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all that wandering around uh is something that is entirely related to there being some ground in other words when you run up a hill uh the hill also runs you up it the hill Rises and lifts you as you run you see and uh if you understand that you don't take a hostile attitude to mountains and Hills you're grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air because that's presumably why

you went up that the thing was high it was lifted up you wanted to be lifted up it lifted you up you had to cooperate of course I always like the illustration that I've used before perhaps you haven't heard it of the thistle down the thistle down too comes moving through the sky I once was playing with a with a thing you know and just came out of the blue sky and I caught it like that pulled it under my nose and I it it started to to pull to get away see looks as if

it were a butterfly or something that pulls away when you catch it by by the leg and I thought oh no of course that's not the ftle down it's the wind well which was it you know in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen there were two uh monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind whether it was the wind or the flag that was moving and he said it's neither it's the mind and so in a way the same thing was true about the thistle down the mind

is the moving thing because which point of view will you take which attitude of mind will you take towards this is it the wind moving the thistle down or is it the thistle down that is moving itself with the wind after all when you see a Sailing Boat and there's a man in the Sailing Boat who is moving the boat is it the wind moving the boat or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a sail much smarter way of getting around than rowing you don't have to

work it's intelligence you see the mind that moves the boat and uh so in the same way I thought you know this thistle down has some kind of intelligence it's radial it's organized it's beautiful and uh it's used that to sail itself with the wind to enable itself to pull like a little organism playing with the wind and so in just the same way each one of us uh uses the universe to get around and the universe uses us to play with and to make games and patterns and to do its stuff so uh because

we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin that is a very deceptive thing because the skin is not really the boundary of man you'll notice that in various periods of art you human beings have been shaped in different ways and uh have been more or less transparent at some times at other times opaque and uh at sometimes the emphasis has been on the state of mind which this human being is in at other times the emphasis is on the bodily confirmations and so on in uh the work of painters today one sees

images that at first sight one doesn't recognize as being human there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years ago called the new image of man and uh these things didn't look like human beings at all some of them did but but that's because what does a human being look like that depends on your point of view you see if you are prejudiced that a human being is only what is inside his skin then you think that when anybody Paints the human being Beyond those boundaries that he's lost the

image of man he hasn't necessarily lost it at all you see there's an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man I don't know if youve ever heard that said that man is the microcosm and that the universe as a whole is the macrocosm now as you Plum out into the universe and explore it astronomically it gets very strange you begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote how could they have anything to do with us they are so far off and so unlikely and

in the same way when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and Wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image look at a spermato Zone under a microscope that little tadpole and how can that the creeps sometimes the foreign feeling about yourself if you feel your own pulse or if you're able to look at an exray in some way of your inner organs working see they're all strangers to us we don't know about them and they give

us the creeps as if they were you know coming across some weird insects in the dark and that sort of feeling but what we will always find out in the end you see when we meet the very strange thing and we look into the distant reaches of space there will one day be the dawning recognition that's me why that's me and the the whole game of the universe you see is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can that's how one keeps variety going that's how one keeps Wonder going and all kinds of

exciting developments how different can you get in the beginning the Lord said get lost to himself you see so uh we we shall find for example that space that you see all around you and containing you and you can in feel space in many ways space is not only something that comes through the eyes the movement of your arms if with closed eyes for a blind person is his way of knowing space and you can hear space audibly lots of uh sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces and silence that goes with

sound corresponds to space and even St Thomas kinus that old Catholic Theologian said that good derives its virtue from Evil just as it is the silent pause that give sweetness to the chant so but space you see that seems to contain space is one's mind this was common sense to people living uh in the early Renaissance for example at the time of Dante there are many references in Dante's poetry to the identity of mind and space and in likewise in a 8th Century text in China the Sutra of the sixth patriarch he Likens the nature

of mind to the nature of space he says just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the people and the mountains and the forests so the nature of mind the nature of Consciousness the nature of oneself contains all these things so you see that if you think that way you have an image of man that is global that is very different from the image in which man is defined as bounded by his skin that's a prejudice udice we think now for example I have my own private thoughts well nobody

has private thoughts because one thinks in images and words and these words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in which you live we think thoughts the the domain of mind is very similar to the grid structure of an electric power supply system you know what happens is there's a network of power stations and Transformers so arranged that if one of them gives out and fails to supply a certain area immediately the grid connects them with other sources of power well in rather a similar way our mines are connected let's

take one very obvious example of it what um northr fry calls the order of words the order of words is all existing literature both rhetoric what is spoken of course and what is written down now it's his theory that as a scholar of literature and the history of literature he can take any piece of writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was written because everything that is written and said is inescapably related to the whole order of words and it's amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away because

he can say well obviously he has read this thinking say of a particular novelist or poet so it must come after the date when that novel was published but he could couldn't possibly use an expression like that to say for example that it was a capital day he would never he would never use that expression living say in contemporary 20th century America that's a victorianism or it's an Edwardian way of talking and so in by all sorts of little Clues like that the scholar can pin down a piece of writing to When It Was Written

you see that is because every individual piece of writing is a function of all writing that's being done well now that's a very specific and uh almost crude illustration of something that's going on in a far more complicated way than that it isn't only all writing all thinking is being done in relation to the total order of thought and uh in a still more subtle way all living is being done in relation to the total order of life to what the shardan calls the biosphere and it goes way beyond that because of the vast interplay

of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields which Embrace everything that there is that is why the Ancients when a person was born cast his horoscope that was a map of the universe at the time of that person's birth and therefore it was a drawing of his soul because the soul is not inside the body the body is inside the soul the soul your soul is the whole universe as it is focused upon your organism now of course astrology is a very primitive science and it interpreted the influence of of the universe upon the

individual in very crude ways and it works mostly by good guess work on the part of the astrologer uh if you know how to tell fortunes at a fair uh you will find out a great deal about how all these predictive uh psychic Sciences work because the the client invariably gives himself away either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his anxiety to conceal it they work equally well now but but there is you see underneath the astrological notion a sound idea that the true map of the soul is the picture of

the universe surrounding the individual it isn't necessarily the your soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born you see it goes along all the time you live because the whole thing expresses itself through you and therefore in that sense the the the map of the Stars the horoscope Etc was an image of man in just the same way as we regard a picture of the human body as an image of man and it's an image from a different point of view it's a bigger image it shows in

other words that your mind is very largely outside your body after all it's inside too it's simultaneous you see I cannot think I can't have a mind without seeing feeling and relating to other people without all the social institutions not only language but the laws the Customs the gestures the rituals by which we relate to each other all those things compose the mind for the mind is a huge network of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity mind and matter are of course polar they go together their two ways of thinking about the

same thing or shall we say two dimensions of the same thing just like our length and breadth or just shall we say like shape and color you see nobody ever saw a shape that wasn't colored nobody ever saw a color that wasn't shaped and yet we can see there's a very clear difference between color and shape but they always go together they're always found together well it's the same sort of Rel relationship between mind and matter and the difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other and saying well the world is

only material or saying on the other hand that it's only mental is the same difference you would have in trying to reduce all shapes to colors or all colors to shapes so perfectly and yet stay so marvelously different that's why the Buddhists say difference is identity identity is difference it sounds goofy but it makes a great deal of sense because what it's saying in is a relational thing that you don't know what identity is unless you know what difference is and you don't know what difference is unless you know what identity is that relationship between

so-called opposites is is called in the Chinese technical toist vocabulary Mutual arising so they say to be and not to be arise mutually high and low are mutually posited long and short are mutually delineated and so on now what we see then is the totality of the cosmos focused at each point you see uh gives rise to the illusion of the independence of the point from the whole just as the human being by virtue of having an enclosed epidermis and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground presents the

illusion of being separate and so that's why I asked uh V to do these demonstrations last night because he showed visually the interdependence of the figure and the background and how the two play together how you can switch from paying attention to one to paying attention to the other and in each case it's significant that is an art that we have lost in our day-to-day perception of life and it leads practically speaking to the serious problem of ecological blindness that is to say to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer from especially in

our culture that they are inseparably related to their physical environment it looks as if we aren't it looks as if we can go out with bulldozers and insecticides and uh every kind of a gadget and make over our physical environment as it suits our whims but then we discover to our conation that we've upset all sorts of balances that the house we made such a nice flat lot for on the hillside suddenly SL slides down the hill when there's a rainstorm because we took away all the Shrubbery that was binding the hill together and you

know this happens in Hollywood every day and and nobody ever seems to learn and that's you see there this immense importance of overcoming uh the illusion of SE separateness but people are afraid of that because they think it's communistic they think that uh the West the the grand style the great thing about Western Civilization is its stress on individual personality and its value and that we have created the ideal of personal integrity that is to say that the most important thing in the world is the individual all Collective it is corporations States and so on

exist as Servants of the individual and if they get in his way and they interfere with his private Enterprise whatever that may be uh it's a bad thing man the individual is the crown of creation from this point of view and therefore When anybody suggests that individual man is not what you thought was an individual but is in some way um United with grounded in the totality then if you're this kind of rugged individualist you mix up your vocabulary and you call the totality the Collective Now the collective and the totality are two completely different

things the idea of collectivism is based on individualism it's the idea that the Society of mankind and the physical environment Bey Beyond it is a collection with nothing of the kind that's that's the that's the idea of cosmic flum and jsum that all floated together into a collection and that's the obverse of individualism you know American indiv individualism is the same philosophy as Marxist collectivism seen from the other side because they're both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality and what people don't understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter

of being isolated it's a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one's relationship to the whole surrounding Cosmos let's suppose that I'm uh preparing to make a date with some lady and she's such an individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself to never thinks about anything that isn't herself well she's an awful bore she has nothing to say she's not interested in any books in any landscapes in any works of art in any literature in any other people she's a total bore but the more on the other hand she would uh

be interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself the more of a colorful personality she becomes so the the the rule is to get away you see from these ideas of the individual uh as finding his individuality and uniqueness through Independence but rather finding his individuality and unique uness through being related because you see that's what makes us look at look at the word relation from another point of view when we talk about our friends and relations supposing I come across some individual who I can't make out what kind of a

thing he is I can't make out where he came from his accent isn't American it isn't British it isn't particularly middle western it certainly doesn't have the overtones of New York or New England he just talks flat and as to his style of clothing it's utterly nondescript well I think this is pretty much of a bore what I like to see in an individuality in in a physical individual is ways that I can relate him to his ancestry that he has this little subtle accent or this mannerism or this eccentricity or whatever it is that

connects him with a great background you see but it's his connection with his background that makes him so significant if I can't see that connection he becomes uninterested so there is no thought in this approach to devalue the individual what really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or political philosophy that overstresses his isolation and this is something that uh Californians in particular need to take note of and uh because many many people feel you see that the development of technology and of centralized government is a direct threat to the value of Personality

well in some ways it is but that is only because technology is being developed by personalities who don't understand what personality is they're working on the old individualist Dash collectivist Point of View they're the same so then you see this is then the illusion created that the individual is operating all by himself that actions and thoughts and uh Deeds proceed solely from inside his skin so that we can say there's where it started you see well that's the game of praising and blaming the game of who started it who can we give candy to who

can we bang on the head uh in other words somebody has to be it as in The Farmer in the Dell you know and finally you get the end the cheese stands alone the cheese stands alone hi thereo the cheese stands alone well why who started it the group well uh another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility if they see through the illusion of separateness that no philosophy of History has really succeeded in making anybody more or less responsible in other words let's say that you are a Christian a Catholic of

the oldfashioned medieval type who believes that you've got an individual soul with Free Will and that you're under responsibility to God to obey his law and that if you don't the most disastrous consequences imaginable will befall you you'll fry in Hell forever there's no evidence whatsoever that believing in that made people any more virtuous than they are today none at all indeed clergy who believed in all this owned whouses and uh all kinds of things um uh they were just as contemptuous of Law and Order as anybody could be now and part of the reason

was of course that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty like the hbomb uh it's just too big to think about and really brings justce into disrespect because it uses such crude and clumsy methods you know it's like uh using a hit a steam Hammer to drive in tax responsibility is a thing like a nice face which you either have or haven't uh certain backgrounds certain interests certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings and they they live that way not because they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time

that they ought to be responsible it's because they're intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all around that's all there is to it and uh of course that's all is a big all but you you won't in other what I'm saying is the people who are frightened that people will other people will abandon responsibility never did have any way of thinking that would guarantee that people would be responsible there is no such guarantee if there were we should be automet now I want to switch to another aspect of

Illusion the quickness of the hand deceives the eye and that is of course the great illusion of what we call matter density impenetrability opacity I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter because I'm a materialist that is to say I like material and though I may seem to you to be quite self-contradictory for example a wine should have body pure alcohol doesn't and it's terribly important in human character for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism between sensuality and spirituality you see people who are purely sensuous and materialistic get very

boring you can fill your lives with all good things with uh Alpha Romeos and high fives and wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and Criss crafts and uh dry martinis and Chanel Number Five you know and after a while if that's all you've got it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the martinius taste like medicine and and somehow you get a distaste for life and even for mountains and trees and Waters and then on the other hand the purely spiritual approach to things is uh too rarified too Earnest too

abstract too uh purely ukian and uh the people who are intensely spiritual and don't have any sensuality are always desperately serious colorless lacking in humor and never are able to meet one as manto man with a kind of a friendly Lear in the eye that's terribly [Music] important they live at a level of the Frantic intensity I see these two extremes need each other say spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp and sensuality needs a a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the Stars you know to wonder about the

sensualist as such the materialist as such has no wonder and the Mystic the pure Mystic has no body he's pure alcohol spirit so if then one should say that material is an illusion this seems to be selling out to the spirit people and to the mystics and so Christian scientists are generally speaking as personalities totally lacking in in materialism and they're prissy and uh lacking in color and their churches are very very disagreeable they're all reading desks and they're too bookish and they they have no ritual no ceremonies no no Verve you see it's all

cereal and uh likewise um when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism they go into this same Ultra mysticism they start disbelieving in all material Pleasures as crutches and it's very bad to have crutches you see uh you shouldn't take aspirin when you got a headache you shouldn't wear glasses uh you shouldn't um show dependence on anything you mustn't like your food too much because that's become uh gluttonous so you eat very plain food which is not spiced and you eat it out of a sense of Duty that is to keep the body

functioning uh you drink only water because other drinks might cause certain dependences and give you too much pleasure and because the idea is you see you've got to control your mind and keep it absolutely calm and still so that you are not dependent on matter and that's altogether the wrong approach because uh well I mean it is a game you can play it is one of these possible things I mean you can play the Jehovah's Witness game you can play the three speed in three seed in the spirit Baptist game all these are various things

which you can play just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or uh fishing or something like that but what happens is you see that the the the notion that the material world is an illus illusion is turned into a judgment of value if it's an illusion therefore it's bad I ought not to be under this illusion well the reality of the matter is that if you see that the material world is an illusion you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn't a true materialist therefore is one

who knows that material is an illusion then he's not afraid of it then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest because you see if you're a false and a fake materialist what's happened you've borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac an impressive house a ranch style with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool and you've bought uh a lot of stock and you somehow wangled the money and borrowed it and you keep lying a nights wondering if you're going to make the payments well there's no point in that

at all what how can you possibly enjoy all those Jazz if that's the kind of jazz you want to enjoy if you got to worry about whether you pay for it or not and you get hopelessly involved you get commitments here commitments there and fin you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself the only way to enjoy material and is to disbelieve in it just as one can disbelieve in money uh then you you can have zest for it you see otherwise it's much better to be poor I mean if you if you have no

taste for the this kind of life and uh no real interest in it but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons much better to stay poor not have any of that stuff at all so then this is the important thing I'm trying to say material isn't illusion but a great illusion and the point is to swing it and not to run away from it on the one hand or to get stuck on it in the other then you can play with it it's just like a wheel going round if the wheel

is too loose on the axle it wobbles all over the place if it's too tight it won't revolve but you kind of sit loose you see to this thing not too loose though now in what way then is the material world an illusion well we know a lot about this now from our physics and we know that what we call solidity is force contained Force the agitation of particles or wavicles or whatever they are at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations so that when I put my foot on the floor

the reason it doesn't go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can penetrate like an airplane propeller you can't put your head through it without getting it chopped off only that if it were going far faster still it wouldn't even cut your head off it would just be like banging your head against the brick wall and it has to be going fast too within an extraordinarily small and restricted space the airplane propeller is whizzing around through

a considerable space in relation to the size of a head but if it were going much faster but through much smaller spaces you see then it would be like banging your head against the brick wall so what we've got in our so-called physical objective world is um the a behavior of energy where the where matter arises from it through its behavior in restricted spaces density is a quality of space rather than a quality of matter if you see what I mean I gave the illustration of the airplane propeller to try and show that so that

uh all this is an electronic diaphanous World very similar to uh other creations of electronic patterns the dance of forms on the TV screen the uh rainbow [Music] uh the Aurora Borealis uh it's all fundamentally like that only we are of the same kind of jazz you see our bodies are this dance too and therefore the the the physical world feels real to us in other words it feels solid because we are something of the same kind if we were on a different wavelength we'd walk right through it in the same way as radio waves

come right through the house they are of such a nature that they can penetrate the in the spaces the interes or uh in some way uh Jazz signals through and uh but we are on the same wavelength you see as the wall and so don't go through it but nevertheless uh the the whole Cosmos is therefore a function of energy or you could say of light something like light and therefore we and it are all diaphanus now it's easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren't so dense there's only one

other creature as intelligent as man and this lives in a medium that is less dense and this is the dolphin the dolphin is a mammal and many millions of years ago it seems that Dolphins were living on the land but they are very clever and they decided that the land was no place to live because getting food was difficult and you had to Lug yourself around and uh there were many many bad shows about the land it had very curious changes of temperature it became unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot and you had in fact to

work well no sensible person ever works I never work I get paid for playing and everybody should do that that's the the mark of an educated man is that eventually he gets a job where he's paid for playing and a worker or a proletarian isn't necessarily a poor man lots of poor I mean a poor man like say uh s morganth or Eric Barker around here they're not proletarians a proletarian is a person who is feted to the process of work that is to say to doing chores every day that he really doesn't like and

that aren't in the least interesting in order to go on living so the PO the the the Dolphins decided this is ridiculous this land existence and they went back to the water and it's pretty easy to fish you see there are plenty of fish in the water and things to eat as we know the ocean is the greatest food supply in the world and when they'd eaten a few fish or whatever they need they decided just to have a ball so the dolphin can get a breast of a ship get one of the with the

wakes coming out on the side can set its tail at an angle of 26° no and be pushed Along by the ship and it's not going anywhere there's no reason to go along there as you know as if it had to get to another part of the sea the sea pretty much the same all through but they're just going boom and they chatter and dance and they they're they're really highly civilized beings and so uh please don't anybody ever kill dolphins or be unkind to dolphins because they're exemplary high-minded creatures and we shall soon discover

this as soon as we can set up communication with them they will tell us all about it and we will uh then invent new style of civilization based on FR [Laughter] Frolic but you see they they they dance in the in the mode of water now human beings as toin has pointed out as their civilization progresses they begin to lose their roots and they are less and less tied to the land they go into the air and what's going to happen uh as if man develops without blowing himself to bits if he can get over

the hurdle you see that dangerous point is that gradually all roads are going to disappear and the Earth will have centers of human habitation you see but no roads they'll be as obsolete as railroad tracks because everybody will fly and once you the the medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of water and as we fly you see on the land your values are all values of permanent solidity firmness they architectonic in the sense of our great stone structures pyramids and things like that but in the air and on the water all

values are fluid and what you have to know to be a good Airman is of course stars like white throats and other migrating birds migrate by the Stars imagine but once you start relating yourself to the Stars you realize that you're living in a universe where directions are all relative and you become a being capable of existing in non-s solidity and that's why Buckminster Fuller you know believed that all Technics and really all culture came from the sea The Men Who first learned to sail were the wise men he has a fantastic idea that there

were initiates great priests who were ship's captains and that though some of their humble seamen didn't know all the secrets but these priests were the first people who knew that the world was [Music] round and that uh that gives one an entirely different theology you see than if you believe that the world is flat and uh so from the the the priests of the ocean the landsmen learned how to use cranes blocks and tackles how to build how what a good house and overturned ship made and so to this day a cathedral has a Nave

as its Central Auditorium Nave from Latin navis ship showing the connections between ships and the first temples so Fuller goes on to say now if you're a good architect as the ancient Architects learned from the ocean first thing you should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane Factory and understand the the the beautiful thing that man has made in a fine fine plane you see which is as great as a bird in its own way because that's the architecture of insecurity and that really lives with insecurity well let's

have an intermission