Trust the universe to give you what you need - Alan Watts

The great Dao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them. And when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them.

The more, therefore, you relinquish power and trust others, the more powerful you become, but in such a way that instead of having to lie awake at night controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you, so you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it, "I want to wake up at 6:00," and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity, of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe, is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe; that will only disturb it, antagonize it, and make it seem less one with you than ever.

The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as another, as you would another, and say, "Let's see what you're going to do. " But in doing that, you see, in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you, you are also saying it to yourself because, finally, as I pointed out, you do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups, and when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions.

There's this guy, a farmer, who ordered a helper to come in, and he found he was an extraordinarily efficient worker because the first day he put him on sawing logs, and he sawed more logs than anybody had ever sawed. It was fantastic! But it was all done in one day.

So the next day, he put him onto mending fences, and there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm. In one day, he had the whole thing done. So he thought, "What am I going to do with this guy?

" He took him down into a basement and said, "Look, here are all the potatoes that have come in from this harvest, and I want you to sort them into three groups: those that we sell, those that we use for seeding, and those that we throw away. " He left him at that. At the end of the day, the laborer came back and said, "Well, that's enough, mister; I quit!

" "Oh," he said, "you can't quit! I've never had such an excellent worker! I'll raise your salary; I'll do anything to keep you around here!

" He said, "No, it's all right mending fences and chopping wood, but this potato business is decision after decision after decision after decision. " So when we decide, we're always worrying, "Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?

" And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite. So what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this, and then when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment.

I mean, I'm speaking a little extremely, making some fun of it and so on, because after all, we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds, but we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming outright. It's amazing how often it works. But warriors are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen.

So then, when you make a decision and it works out all right, I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control. But somehow or other, you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority. It's why very great businessmen are those who can delegate authority, trust others to work for them, because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism—delegation of authority.

It loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them. And you see then what is happening is this: the more you let go of it and trust it as if it were quite other than you, the more you realize the inseparable identity of self and other. To go back, if you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self, no go.

If, on the other hand, you find it through giving self—that is, control—over to other and trusting that you may make a mistake, you may make a bad gamble, but in the long run, you're acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution. This is the way biological evolution goes on—constant delegation of authority. It's why, obviously, democracy is superior to monarchy.

Was it de Tocqueville who said that democracy is always right, but for the wrong reasons? Because there is operating in a democracy the principle that Buckminster Fuller calls synergy, and synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system, the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members, because that goes back again to this point that we are always entering a new environment. We don't ever know fully what the new environment is because the only environments we know are the past ones.

There is always, then, operating in the development of cellular life on any level a new way of organization, higher than any existing form, and we're not aware. Of it until after it's happened. If you ever saw, for example, the film *Kon-Tiki*, this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsawood raft to sail from South America to the Pacific Islands.

But once he had set this in motion, he discovered that all sorts of unexpected factors cooperated with him. When the wood got wet, it expanded, so that the ties bit into it and held it completely secure; he had never expected that. He found that as he sailed along, a flying fish would simply alight flat on the deck every morning for breakfast.

All kinds of natural factors—it was just that he touched a key where he was flowing with the course of nature, and everything cooperated with him because he had touched the key. He had made the act of faith, and he was just picking up, in other words, a practice which had been, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, followed by others who had worked it out by their great ecological awareness. So we do come out of this way of thinking to something which has, I would say, the most enormously creative and revolutionary social consequences.

It has become not virtuous, not self-sacrificing, and not anything like that; it has become the hardest practical politics to let go control to others, to give up trying to dominate the scene. Also, in a parallel way, it has become, at this time in our history, very much hard practical politics to learn how to enjoy ourselves. You can go to the Protestant people with their Protestant ethic, who are against this kind of thing, and now say to them with great levity: It is your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy yourself.

Why? Because in an age of leisure, people have really got to know how to enjoy themselves, because if they don't, they'll smash the whole future of the human race. So, a Utopia has become not some sort of a dream but an urgent necessity; we can't do without it.

Because if we try to do without it, what's going to happen is that we are going to terminate our race in a mutual massacre of scapegoats. And so the present paranoia in the United States that is going on, where everybody is thinking up a new scapegoat and how great it will be to demolish them or get them out of power—all kinds of bickering and right and left politics—has become irrelevant, because we now have the opportunity of trusting our own intelligence, our own technology, to take the risk of doing what we want, which will work to the extent that we realize that what I want, basically, what I really want, is what you want. And I don't know what you want; surprise me!

But that's my kinship between I and thou. So when I ask, I go right down to the question we should have started with: What do I want? The answer is: I don't know.

When Bodhidharma was asked, "Who are you? " which is another form of the same question, he said, "I don't know; planting flowers to which the butterflies come. " Bodhidharma says, "I know not.

" I don't know what happens when you don't know what you want. You've reached the state of desirelessness. When you really don't know, you see, there's a beginning stage of not knowing and there's an ending stage of not knowing.

In the beginning stage, you don't know what you want because you haven't thought about it, or you've only thought superficially. Then when somebody forces you to think about it and go through and say, "Yeah, I think I'd like this, I think I'd like that, I think I'd like the other," that's the middle stage. Then you get beyond that and say, "Is that what I really want?

" In the end, you say, "No, I don't think that's it. I might be satisfied with it for a while, and I wouldn't turn my nose up at it, but it's not really what I want. " Why don't you really know what you want?

Two reasons: number one, you have it; number two, you don't know yourself because you never can. The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge, just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

"I don't know. " And this "I don't know," uttered in the infinite interior of the spirit, is the same thing as "I love; I let go; I don't try to force or control. " It's the same thing as humility.

And so the Upanishads say, "If you think that you understand Brahman, you do not understand, and you have yet to be instructed further. If you know that you do not understand, then you truly understand; for the Brahman is unknown to those who know it and known to those who know it not. " The principle is that any time you, as it were, voluntarily let up control—in other words, cease to cling to yourself—you have an access of power, because you're wasting energy all the time in self-defense, trying to manage things, trying to force things to conform to your will.

The moment you stop doing that, that wasted energy is available. And therefore, in that sense, having that energy available, you are one with the divine principle. You have the energy.

When you're trying, however, to act as if you were God—that is to say, you don't trust anybody, and you're the dictator, and you have to keep everybody in line—you lose the divine energy, because what you're doing is. . .

Simply defending yourself, so then the principle is the more you give it away, the more it comes back. Now say, "I don't have the courage to give it away. I'm afraid," and you can only overcome that by realizing you better give it away because there's no holding on to it.

The meaning of the fact you see that everything is dissolving constantly, that we're all falling apart, we're all in a process of constant death, and that, uh, the worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns to ashes, or it prospers. And like snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting a little hour or two, it’s gone. You know all that Omar Khayyam jazz; you know the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the great globe itself—all which it inherit shall dissolve.

And like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind. All falling apart. Everything is.

That's the great assistance to you—see that? That fact that everything is in decay is your helper. That is allowing you that you don't have to let go because there's nothing to hold on to; it’s achieved for you, in other words, by the process of nature.

So once you see that, uh, you just don't have a prayer and it’s all washed up and that you will vanish and leave not a rack behind, and you really get with that, suddenly you find you have the power, this enormous access of energy. But it's not power that came to you because you grabbed it; it came in entirely the opposite way. And power that comes to you in that opposite way is power with which you can be trusted.

Of course, what we've been talking about is not so much a set of ideas as an experience, or shall we say, experiencing. And, uh, this kind of seminar, in comparison with encounter groups or workshops of various kinds, or experiments in sensory awareness, is now being called a conceptual seminar, although I'm not talking about concepts. But the crucial question arises that an understanding, a real feeling understanding, of the polar relationship between the individual and the world is something that operates, uh, as we say, in your bones and isn't just a view that you hold or a belief that you hold.

It's so curious that the emphasis of the Western tradition in religion is primarily upon right belief—do you believe in the right dogmas and the right doctrines? —and only secondarily upon right action, because what you believe is, in Christianity at any rate, far more important than what you do, because one is saved through faith, not by works. And early in its history, the Christian Church rejected the movement in the church which had been known as Gnosticism, from the Greek gnosis, which means knowledge.

And in a way, there were some sound reasons for doing so because the Gnostics were what I would call anti-materialists. They divided human beings into three classes that were called, respectively, pneumatic, psychic, and hylik, the last one being H-Y-L-I-C from the Greek hy, or they would call it now el, el meaning wood. So, the people were spiritual, psychological, and wooden.

And, uh, that is to say, the wooden people were those most absorbed in materiality and most closely identified with their bodies. Orthodox Christianity rejected this sort of distinction because of the perfectly correct idea that material existence is not inconsistent with spirituality. This is something which most Christians have forgotten, but they do believe, as the central principle of Christianity, in what's called the Incarnation—that in, uh, the Jesus of Nazareth, Almighty God did in fact become material, become human, and by this process initiated a transformation of the cosmos.

In the words of St. Athanasius, "God became man that man might become God," and you don't hear that from the pulpit very often. The Christian Church, therefore, emphasized pistus, or faith, as against gnosis, or knowledge, because they said you can never know God; God could never become an object of knowledge.

And in this funny roundabout way, the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus. Only the Hindus do call this knowledge of God through faith; they call it jñāna, which is the same as the Greek word gnosis. But just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings, we now have a class of person called an agnostic, and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn't commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things; he just says he doesn't know.

But the original word agnosia in Greek meant a special kind of knowledge. It was called the dark knowledge of God—the knowledge of God in the Cloud of Unknowing, to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th-century English monk. This monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite.

Dionysius was a fifth or sixth-century Syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from Pseudo-Dionysius, who got it from Plotinus, who was a Neoplatonist and who probably got, uh, a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of Alexandria. And Alexandria, in the early years of the Christian era, was a tremendous exchange place between East and West. Buddhist monks visited Alexandria; it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India.

And as you may know, all Rome's gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper, and as a result of this, the Roman economy collapsed. They bought too much luxury from India; India, in exchange, got Roman architecture. And, uh, you'll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples.

But Alexandria was the great center for the Gnostics and for Christian theology, and some of the greatest theologians—Clement. . .

Origin, Athanasius, and St. Sirel all worked out of Alexandria. But now, going back to this strange monk, Dionysius, it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing as the knowledge of God by faith, by agnosia, really by unknowing.

In a book which he wrote—a very short book called the *Theologia Mystica*—he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God, which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads in certain parts of it. The last section of it reads like the Manduk Upanishad because it's a series of negations. It says what God is not, and he goes very far because he says that God is not one; our idea of unity falls far short of what God is.

So does our idea of Trinity, so does our idea of spirit, our idea of mind, of justice, of love. All these things are not really God. He says in another place that if anybody, having seen God, understood what he had seen, what he would have seen would not have been God but some creature of God, less than God—some sort of angel or something like that.

It's perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had. Writing under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, he became identified, you see, with St. Paul's first convert in Athens, and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul, where he's known as St.

Denis. St. Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite as having the highest authority, and you could, if all the texts of Dionysius's work had been lost, restore most of it from quotations in St.

Thomas.