Alan Watts on Symbolic Reality vs. Real Reality – Being in the Way Ep. 30 (Black Screen, No Music)

[Music] you all know what reality is and it doesn't have to be explained to you and if you try to Define it you become a professional philosopher and you will eventually shrivel up and die but you know what it [Music] is welcome to the alen Watts podcast being in the way I'm your your host Mark watts and today we're going to be hearing more new material on dosm this is a session called flow and it's from a seminar by that name given by my father and by Charlotte silver in the mid-60s in New York City

at Charlotte's Loft and together they did sessions there on sensory awareness and my father would give the audio part the verbal part of the presentation and Charlotte would lead awareness exercises and also physical movement pieces that were really fine art all kinds of interesting uh permutations of movement Arts that she had perfected over the years so this is a meditation a guided meditation on flow with alen watts and today's podcast is brought to you in conjunction with the Romos be here Now podcast Network and our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records

now here's Alan Watts in a guided meditation on Flow so then I was talking to you this morning about the Dynamics of energy about the way in which we select vibrations and about the basic principles of meditation as it is understood in yoga and in Buddhism and in Zen as a process for bringing about mental quiet which is not pure passivity mental limp just as physical relaxation is not physical limpness as if you were a wet rag over a clothes line in the process of meditation one is completely aware of all sensory inputs you don't

try to to shut off your senses and although it may be helpful say to begin in meditation by closing the eyes in uh the Zen philosophy of meditation You Don't Close Your Eyes if you do you are called a Denison of the dark Cavern you look at the floor in front of you about 4 feet and you will allow the light to play with your eyes without putting any names on these patterns of light and shade and color just as you allow the sound waves in the air to play with your ears but you don't

put any name upon it you allow yourself to be in a non-conceptual way now the importance of this the Practical uh effect although when you are in meditation you're not concerned with practical effects practical effects acre as a byproduct just as happiness which cannot be pursued is only a byproduct of being interested in something else but the disease of civilization is that we confuse the world of symbols with the world of reality as I said this morning you all know what reality is and it doesn't have to be explained to you and if you try

to Define it you become a professional philosopher and you will eventually shrivel up and die but you know what it is it's this so we are in a very serious condition in the world today we are trying to make as the goals of Life the attainment of pleasures that really exist on paper only and the chief example of this is lots of money there are no limits to the amount of money you can make if you're sufficiently clever and sufficiently ruthless you can go on and on and on and on but there are very strict

limits to the amount of beef you can eat at one meal to the amount of girls you can give to whom you can give adequate satisfaction to the number of houses you can live in to uh the amount of clothes you can wear you can have supposing you wore three suits a day and you want it to be different all the time all right there are 365 days of the year multiply that by three and that's enough for anyone with dresses also then that there is a real limit and uh you would consider if you

were wearing a completely different suit for onethird of the day and you never wore it again after a while that would become a bit absurd you might find a favorite suit one that you felt Su suited you what is a suit except something that suits you and would go back to it and you would want that one again same with a woman you'll find you've got a favorite one and you want to go back to her and uh keep her around see and you have a house you can have hundreds of houses if you're very

rich but you find you have a favorite one and you want to go back so there are limits to what we can enjoy in a material physical real sense although I must say when I say real and I also join with that the word physical and material uh the real world is not necessarily physical or material the ideas that come out of the history of Western culture that we say physical or material these are purely conceptual you see when somebody says I'm a materialist and I think there is nothing but but material see and all

the spiritual stuff is just fantasy the idea of material is itself fantasy these flowers are not Material material is an idea is a concept these flowers you can only understand by looking at them and feeling them we don't know what they are we see the patterns of energy and uh the Delight of them but a person who says well this is just material doesn't realize that he's some kind of a fantast he's trying to say he's trying to put his personality up against the spiritual people who say the real thing in life is beyond all

these things that we see and hear so on there is a Happy Land Far Far Away uh you know there is some kind of a thing beyond all this and that's a kind of oneup people in religion are the worst game players in the world they're always trying to outface each other and say well you don't have quite the right conception even among the most Orthodox con fraternities say Orthodox Catholic theologians they're always trying to one up each other Z yes you you believe that your explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity is very correct

but there are certain subtle respects in which you haven't quite got the point and they go round and round and round on this forever because it's not really religion at all it's a form of personal a contest because everybody in the world almost is challenging someone else to say you're not real are you you're not really sincere you don't actually mean what you say do you love me do you really love me prove it I don't think you can everybody's going so everybody's frightened everybody's guilty and everybody else knows how to exploit everybody else's fear

and guilt and emotions say like guilt are absolutely useless because uh they always uh frustrate their own objective guilt is supposed to make you good but it's like alcoholism the more terrible and alcoholic feels about his dependence on alcohol the more he drinks same the same with jealousy if I uh I'm jealous of the girl I love terribly jealous and won't allow her to have any other men she hates me all the more for being jealous of it I can't keep a Girl by being jealous of it and she can't keep me by the inverse

process so all those emot deny themselves so we have to see that all these games of spiritual one-upmanship we have to see through them every Guru spiritual teacher comes on like he's got something that you don't have more insight more relaxation more happiness more Oneness with God whatever it may be and this is the bait which catches you now there are two kinds of gurus one kind of Guru really believes he's got more than you have and he can do nothing for you except lead you into a bag that's the ordinary Minister who believes that

he is a representative of the true and authentic religion and that uh he is going to get you into the church and he's going to get you hooked on the religion so that you become a religious addict and so of course so long as you're a religious addict just like an addict on heroin will have to F out 50 bucks a day to get his connection so you're going to have to tithe your income or whatever it is to pay off the mortgage on the church buildings and to keep the clergy alive and that's why

they want to get you hooked on it there's another kind of Guru he makes his living in an entirely different way he uh wants to get rid of you he's got some way of liberating you so that you can function on your own without having any Guru at all and without belonging to any religion because he treats his Doctrine his practice as medicine not as diet and eventually you take the medicine you understand and you can function on your own and you go away but when you go away you say hey to everybody else I

got this Guru you know he was just fabulous and he set me free so what happens is the the this kind of Guru instead of having a permanent group of followers has a big turnover and he gets on all right I'm just explaining the economics of spirituality and uh there's another side to this incidentally wherever a guru happens to liberate people instead of enslaving them uh other people will want to uh do the same thing and that's all right uh if you're a close type Guru with a you know want people to stick around to

pay the mortgage uh you don't want any other gurus in competition with you because that's taking away the business I had a very funny adventure in Thailand I was wandering around a temple and uh I was sort of looking my gate was cast downwards and I suddenly came across a bookstall and there was a book on uh the kind of meditation they do in southern Buddhism and I said oh I was just sort of talking out loud to myself that must be satian and a voice said you practice Sati patana and I looked up and

there was a yellow robed monk who spoke English standing in charge of the bookstall he's kind of red eyed and I looked at him and said well not exactly um uh I practice Zen or Zen not satiana well I said it's all kind of the same thing it's like yoga no no Sati patana not yok now listen I said you Buddhists are supposed to be open-minded and believe that there are many many ways of realization no satiana only correct way well I said uh you talk like a Roman Catholic they say they have the only

true way I said you know what you like you've got a ferry boat concession a ferry booat concession to take a ferry across the river and a few miles down the river somebody else opens up a ferry boat and you complain to the police and the government say he shouldn't open up because he's in competition with me now the truth of the matter is this I'm talking still about the economics of spirituality in London there's a street called Harley Street where every eminent physician and surgeon wants to have an office this was years ago and

so Harley Street became completely full with Physicians and surgeons well you would say naturally they were all in competition with each other but nothing of the kind happened they all became equally prosperous so that they had to open up wimple Street which was the next street to Harley Street and when they had filled that up they opened up Welbeck Street which ran along next to it and when they filled that up they got Queen an Street which run parallel and the whole area is nothing but Physicians surgeons and dentists and they are all fantastically prosperous

because they've got the right address see one once you got into Harley Street you're there so let's like uh you you're a guru and you set up in sorito or big S or Hollywood uh whatever you know uh you're you're in the right place and we can take any number and they'll all the more we have the more prosperous everybody will be this is the economics of of Plenty and it's all based you see if if you really work it right it's based on a big turnover you don't try to capture people you don't try

to make them faithful to you don't want to tie them up but you see if you do that and you set them all free you really get them going that's what you're supposed to do that's your job to liberate and then they're grateful and they send their friends to [Laughter] you so the the craft of mysticism you see I I just want to be very Frank with you because after all you pay to come to these seminars and in India it's considered very very immoral to ask for money for Spiritual teaching but that's a different

culture from ours in the United States it would be immoral not to ask money because in the United States people disrespect anything they get free and they have to give money as a token of their sincerity just as say in India or in China you have to give something else uh you have to wait a long time you have to be persistent in token of your sincerity but in this country the hangup is money so naturally uh one asks uh for money uh person like myself only needs a relatively small amount of money and so

uh if you make an awful lot of it by being a successful Guru you give the rest away or do something creative even imagine it Alan Ginsburg uh has a foundation he he makes a great deal of money by being a crazy poet and he gives all that he doesn't need to help other poets so then the point I'm making is this med ation you are not trying to gain anything to alter your State of Mind from what it is now into some other state which you think it ought to be in you are centering

in Where You Are but you see the difficulty for us with this is that we do everything we even eat we play We Dance under the fundamental assumption that all this is good for us we go to concerts to improve our culture to the theater to the movie in order to be able to say we have become more educated we have improved and as a result of this kind of motivation we don't really do those things at all if you go to the concert to become more cultured you are not really listening so meditation above

all things because it's got a slightly disciplinary flavor to it a slightly religious flavor to it is something that people use uh somehow to uh get ahead in the game of spiritual one-upmanship and I get sick and tired of people who go uh and study Zen and come back and brag about the long hours of meditation they put in and how much their legs hurt and what a great ordeal it was and how good it was for them and how you who haven't gone through this discipline are a kind of underling see I've had this

put on me for years because uh I didn't go to Japan and didn't sit around in zenos and uh worked it my own way and they say well you're just a diletant see you haven't suffered as much as we have and uh you you really ought to suffer you ought to put up with those long long endurance test now the reason why in meditation one sits in a certain way whether you sit like I'm sitting now or whether you sit in the Lotus posture your legs become a little uncomfortable and the reason for that is

not self- punitive it's merely that it's it helps you to stay awake that's all and if you don't if you got you know if you were floated in a hot tub with supporters in a completely dark room in one of the sensory deprivation chamber you would very likely go to sleep but the point in meditation is to be wide awake without however the intellectual chatter going on in the head and so a posture which involves a very certain subordinate degree of discomfort keeps you awake actually when you get used to sitting this way I can

sit this way without extreme discomfort for at least 40 minutes even longer and uh it becomes natural but as I explained the point is to be wide wide awake and aware of your total sensory input without confusing it with the symbolic world of words and Concepts so that you experience life naked and directly experience you naked and directly without uh having in your head the concept of who you are as a role player as a personality as an ego and this becomes in due course a very pleasant thing to do so that meditation becomes not

um something uh that you put in so much time out like you might put in time in a jail but becomes a pleasure of course from the point of view of our religion in the United States that's almost sinful religion isn't supposed to be a pleasure because it's supposed to be joining with Christ and suffering on the cross look there's enough inevitable suffering going on anyhow you're going to die one of these days uh everybody in count as difficulties in their lives you don't need to go out of your way to seek them so now

there are two fundamental approaches to meditation one you see this morning Charlotte was getting us to bounce on our heels and to stretch as tight as we could to overcome gravity and then after that she said see what happens when you don't do it so one of the methods of meditation is to stretch as tightly as possible to concentrate with your whole energy on a point and to use the maximum amount of effort you say in yoga there's an exercise called Kumba which is a way of breathing which is it's a kind of force holding

the breath as long and as tightly as you can that was like the stretching we did that's like those people who say in the uh tendai Temple up on Mount hi over Koto who practiced bowing thousands and thousands of bowings they stand up they kneel down and prostrate themselves on the floor get up again stand up kneel down prostrate them on the floor and there are those Tibetan Monks who do the Luma uh do running through the the Mountain trails with enormous leaps and they do like ninski could do those leaps where you know you

pause a little bit in the and seem to overcome gravity and then drop again and they go on and on and on bouncing along a road or there are other pilgrims who prostrate themselves at every step traveling a long journey there are people who uh run the streets of Kyoto a 100 miles through the streets of Kyoto every day at a jog Trot there are all kinds of things like that where you work your yourself to a limit in struggle because in doing that you get a thing which Runners call Second Wind and Second Wind

in running is where you are no longer running but it runs you where in other words the ego energy in the running is displaced and the energy of the whole organism takes over and that is all the energy of the whole universe when you get second wind so you get Second Wind in uh this Fierce kind of meditation alternatively there's another way in and in this way is a kind of uh so-called easy way and one uses it for a different type of Personality there are certain people who uh must have the difficult way because

they don't know they exist unless they're sitting on a spike and those those kind of people who don't believe they're real unless they hurt have to follow the difficult way but there is a subtle way which is the datic approach wherein instead of trying to master and dominate your body mind you let go of it and you you let it do whatever it wants to do let's suppose for the sake of example for a moment you just close your eyes and allow your [Music] eardrums to respond to any sound going on there are no proper

sounds or improper sounds you may feel free to shift Shuffle cough sneeze as you will don't try to identify locate or name the sounds that you hear just let the Rippling air play with your eardrum and as you hear the sound of my voice coming across to you listen to what I have to say simply as tones your brain will take care of understanding you don't try to understand in other words allow your ears to hear anything they want to hear and to assist you in this keep your tongues relaxed in the lower joob listening

to every sound in the whole field of air vibrations as he would listen to music as he would listen to Bak or Ravi shanka without trying to see any meaning there is no hurry this is what there is well now of course one can do that through all the senses not just the ears but the body feeling skin contact the breath sense of smell taste and also of course the eyes it's more difficult to do it with the eyes because our culture as Marshall mcluhan has pointed out is excessively Visual and because of uh the

Gutenberg Galaxy because of making sense out of print and the enormous valuation placed on literacy we've overbalanced one sense which is the visual sense when we say to somebody you smell that's uncomplimentary we should say of course correctly you stink if we mean you have a bad smell but everything connected with smell is repressed and therefore because we still continue to smell it is an unconscious sense through which we relate to each other in ways that we don't know you take an instinctive liking to someone because you like the smell but you don't know that

you take an instinctive dislike to someone because you don't like the smell but you don't know that all sorts of things all sorts of messages have passed through the nose but we are not aware of them we don't have an adequate vocabulary of smell only three adjectives in English are associated with smell uniquely accurate pungent fragrant all the others are associated with borrowed from other senses think how many adjectives we have for vision for sound for Taste although Taste of course is inseparable from smell so the second way of meditation which I was demonstrating to

you allowing your ears to hear whatever they want to hear in the same way you allow your uh breath to breathe bre any way it wants to breathe you allow your muscle skin to feeling you know the sense of touch to feel any way it wants to feel you allow your eyes to see anything they want to see and finally you allow your mind to think anything it wants to think Let It Go this is the relaxed way the other way is the tense way they come to the same conclusion you go around this way

take the right hand path and go there take the left hand path and go there I'm not going to evaluate between one and the other it's up to the individual but the way Charlotte and I have been interested in for a long time is the way which is natural which doesn't Force things and which lets the organism with its own inner sense of what is correct do it by itself so if you will let your mind see alone you don't try to concentrate it you don't try to discipline it you merely let it do whatever

it wants to do whatever thoughts want to flow through your head let them flow don't try either to uh get with them and uh make something of it and don't try to stop them just let them go besides who are you and as distinct from your thoughts as distinct from your visual auditory tactile Al Factory uh Sensations who might intervene and say you do otherwise because when we get that terrific split between our experience our feelings our Sensations on the one hand and on the other something called the experiencer the uh control agent who has

and who directs all these things there's the root of our trouble because we are confusing ourselves with an image of ourselves and under those circumstances we Define the living organism as a material object the body which corrupts and which is somehow antithetical to Spirit not realizing that the idea of the body as something antithetical to Spirit is purely a conception this is not a conception and as we see it now from the standpoint of 20th century quantum physics it's a shimmering phenomenon of electrical energy it's a light show this isn't what we used to think

of as physical at all you know block chunky stuff it's a zzing dance it's like fire that's the meaning of the Buddhist figure fudo this guy with a sword in one hand and a rope in the other with a fierce face and Flames all around fudo means immovable he's showing you everything is f just like I said this morning a flame seems to be a flame a flame a thing that sticks in one position so food though this flaming god with a sword which cuts off all entanglements and the Rope I don't know what the

ropes for maybe just for wiggling he cuts loose our conceptions so that we can see this all too solid flesh dissolve [Music] you've been listening to Flo in a guided meditation on being in the way the alen Watts podcast I'm your host Mark watts and today we've been exploring a unique recording that is also part of the book Dow for now which is now available in both digital and print format this program is also available on the play. Allen watts. org Network that's play. Allen watts. org online and there it will come up both as

a seminar session and also as a series called philosophy of The Da which includes three sessions from the philosophy of The Da series and a session an extended session of the flow meditations again I'm your host Mark Watts this has been Alan Watts in being in the way our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records and this podcast has been produced in conjunction with the Romos be here Now podcast Network [Music]