Video: Alan Watts: Psychology of Mystical Experience – Being in the Way Ep. 13

00:00:03

[Music] thank you [Music] welcome to the Ellen Watts podcast being in the way I'm your host Mark Watts and

00:00:20

today we're going to hear a talk called the psychology of mystical experience this was part of a series of talks that he did at San Jose State College and this particular one was recorded on

00:00:32

March 5th 1972 it's 32 minutes long and after this we're going to hear a talk on nothingness that it was also one of the shorter recordings that he did during that period today's podcast was co-produced with the ramdas be here Now

00:00:47

podcast Network our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records from his album Rhythm experience and now here's Ellen Watson the

00:00:59

psychology of mystical experience from San Jose State March 5th 1972. well then it has been announced that I will talk to you about the psychology

00:01:14

of mystical experience I have through all my life really been a disciple of William James who as you know wrote a book called The

00:01:31

varieties of religious experience I was always fascinated by his approach to this problem because it involved a way in which we might

00:01:52

understand the Dynamics foreign accounts of people's visions of God

00:02:08

of their place in the universe sometimes these Visions might sound very different some people seem to experience God

00:02:24

as extremely far out and other up there as something to be venerated adored and obeyed and other people

00:02:37

wanted to experience God as something completely inside that is the essence of what you really when you come down to it for yourself and it seemed therefore that there was a conflict

00:02:51

between these two forms of experience but likewise when you change this to another domain of experience some people will describe a pain

00:03:06

as a cold sting and others will describe it as a hot Pang because very very cold is pain and very very hot as pain but it's really when it

00:03:21

comes down to it it's the same kind of pain and then when you get into other weird extremes of Human Experience ecstasy think of absolute pleasure

00:03:35

so that there is a domain where Pleasure and Pain reach each other so that we weep for joy and shudder with delight

00:03:50

so therefore I am very very suspicious about these accounts of religious experience whether the people who experience God as the extremely transcendent like Isaiah

00:04:03

where he sees the Lord high and lifted up and the cherubim are veiling their faces with their wings that experience and the experience of the upanishads

00:04:16

tatvamasi you're it whether they are not two different forms of the same thing described in different kinds of language just as we could describe ecstasy in the

00:04:28

language of pleasure and we can describe it in the language of pain and by this sort of thinking I seek to unify the quarrels between religions because I will as willingly

00:04:46

sit in meditation with Buddhists where they cross their legs and look exactly like the image of their venerated being the Buddha on the one hand

00:05:00

and on the other hand Christians or Jews or Muslims who will bow before the Unseen Transcendent presence

00:05:13

I'll go with either one but what it comes to and what is I think a vital interest to every one of us is that we are all aware of being alive

00:05:33

at the end of time in what the Hindus call Kali Yuga things are running out we are haunted by a an insuperable set of problems overpopulation

00:05:53

pollution the nuclear bomb irreconcilable political conflicts and every one of us has the sense The Haunting feeling

00:06:08

that these problems cannot be solved and that probably we have only about 30 more years of life on this planet it may not be so we may muddle through

00:06:26

but the fact of the matter remains that within 30 or 70 years from now all of us will be dead anyway and we know that and it's a haunting

00:06:42

idea in the back of our minds and then what see I'm closer to it Than I Used to Be I'm now 57 years old and a lot of people are dead at 57.

00:06:56

and I look at this problem with complete fascination foreign and you all have to face it you're all going to evaporate and turn into bones and dust

00:07:13

and instead of avoiding that instead of looking the other way instead of saying oh well later let's look at it what would it be like

00:07:27

to go to sleep and never wake up every child thinks about this philosophers disdain the question because they say oh that's a meaningless speculation you're just using words

00:07:45

but for a child assist for an essential person it's very real to think about what would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up now let's face facts

00:07:58

let's not dream of reincarnation or of heaven or of devachan or of Worlds Beyond but supposing it's very real that when you're dead you're dead

00:08:11

you're never going to wake up again well I think I'll scratch my head and I say well that's not going to be like going into the dark forever because darkness is something I can

00:08:26

imagine it's not going to be like being buried alive it's going to be like nothing it's going to be like as if I never had existed at all and never anything else

00:08:38

had existed at all is just going to be like it never was and that makes me think on the one hand of well wasn't that the way it was before I was born when I think backwards in time I can

00:08:56

remember it to a certain distance and then I come to a blank total blank and yet here we are we all came out of it the other thing it makes me think of is

00:09:12

that if I want to realize total blankness as best as I can right now I'm going to try and look at my head with my eyes and no matter

00:09:26

how I turn around I can't see my head and it isn't that there is a black spot behind my eyes there is a total blank same kind of total blank

00:09:40

nothingness as that out of which I came into this world and then I look around me at night into the universe

00:09:51

now I look at the stars I see these vividly real energetic points of Fire scattered all over the sky in the middle of black nothingness

00:10:08

now how would the stars look if there were no space how would space look if there were no stars you see

00:10:22

the two go together you cannot realize what you mean by is unless you have also along with it a

00:10:35

thing that you understand isn't void goes with form the Buddhist Sutra says which means that which is form that

00:10:52

exactly is voidness that which is voidness that exactly is formed now all mysticism is comprised in this mysticism as we use it in a English word

00:11:05

comes from the Greek muin moo and that means the finger on the lips quiet mum's the word

00:11:17

we can't really say it there is a secret there is something that you're not supposed to know but that you should know for your sanity and we're going to pass it on to you on

00:11:32

the QT in ancient times it really was on the QT but nowadays nothing is on the QT everything has been published all knowledge is available there's no possibility any more of the being

00:11:46

anything esoteric you know everybody has smoked marijuana and taken LSD and practiced yoga and so all this is a matter of public

00:11:58

discussion and it is of the essence of scientific honesty to make all information public it's also the essence of democracy

00:12:12

if we are a republic where all men are equal everybody every single citizen of the United States however well or not well

00:12:26

educated has a right to the access to all information that's supposedly what we believe in that is another way of saying listen to this that is simply another

00:12:42

way of saying that you are all God there isn't someone else who's God who's the boss over you because that would be a monarchy and not a republic and the trouble with the United States

00:13:03

is that this Republic is peopled by a lot of people who believe that the universe is a monarchy and therefore they take an attitude

00:13:17

which is paternalistic authoritarian and are in conflict with the basic ideas upon which people like Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin so far founded this Republic

00:13:36

that's the basic social conflict which we have to face I could go into the history of this indefinitely but let it stand at the moment let's go back to death and we can see

00:13:58

there is by a very simple process that when you're dead you go into the negative dimension of unconsciousness like you do when you go to sleep every night now sleep refreshes you

00:14:20

isn't that curious sleep is a very little understood phenomenon by psychologists but being unconscious for a while being nowhere

00:14:34

brings you back to life of course it does because you wouldn't know you were alive unless you had once been dead or unless you occasionally went to sleep

00:14:50

you wouldn't have the feeling of reality of hereness of nowness of uh sensitivity like this when you pinch yourself unless it could be contrasted

00:15:03

with nowhere with nothingness all our knowledge all energy is a phenomenon of contrasts like a wave supposing energy itself is

00:15:16

basically a wave phenomenon there is the crest and there's the trough and it goes and it's upstanding convex

00:15:29

and Down Standing concave and this of course is the difference between the male and the female and if we understand this we're not going to have any more fights about women's lib

00:15:43

the male is upstanding the female is Hollow see and you cannot realize the one without the other

00:15:59

this is absolutely basic you cannot see the figure without the ground you cannot understand what is important imp

00:16:11

it's rather mischievous without what is unimportant Fades into the background all all logic

00:16:26

all discourse or thought all imagination all Consciousness depends upon this contrast and the secret of it is that this is the thing that I was talking about as mums

00:16:41

the word mui is that the two go together that what appear to be things opposed unrelated fighting are really

00:16:59

things that can't do without each other Jung I when I saw Young in 1958 just before he died we had a long talk in his summer house on the edge of Lake

00:17:15

Zurich and there were swans around there unless we walked out at the end of The Talk I said to him is it true that swans are monogamous

00:17:28

he said yes yes it is curious that they are monogamous and you know another interesting fact about swans is that when the male and the female begin to make love to each other they start by

00:17:40

fighting until they discover what they're supposed to be doing he said this has been of great help to some of my female homosexual patients

00:17:54

he didn't explain it further he just dropped it and left it at that system but Make Love Not War you see is a very great statement not of

00:18:09

an ideal but of a necessity something that we're going to have to do whether we like it or not because the opposites

00:18:27

the things that we seem to see as an absolute conflict Consciousness and unconsciousness life and death black and white are absolutely essential to each other

00:18:40

and we can take this you can flip it suddenly into any dimension of Human Experience let's take black people and white people this is a caricature because there aren't really black people and white

00:18:57

people there are brown people and grayish pink people foreign but nevertheless call it black and white and we realize the richness of experience just because there is this

00:19:09

differentiation the way black people swing and behave wouldn't be realizable unless it were in contrast with the way white people behave and the two groups have to learn to be

00:19:27

grateful to each other for their difference like man and woman it's the same thing Vive La Petite difference so also all in groups people who

00:19:42

consider themselves elect and saved right and like the church must realize they could only understand that in terms of an out group

00:19:55

who are the Damned the awful people who live the other side of the tracks or in hell even Saint Thomas Aquinas gives away the secret that the Saints in heaven occasionally

00:20:07

walk to the edges of the battlements and look down at the squirming burning sufferings of the Damned in hell and give praise to God for the administration of divine Justice

00:20:20

he said that so that by contrast with the sufferings of the Damned they know in what Bliss they are so I'm sort of making jokes and giving

00:20:39

Parables to express the point that we know what is what is reality what it is to be alive and to exist

00:20:56

Always by contrast with nothingness space emptiness and death just as we see the stars as points of

00:21:09

brilliant vibrant energy only by contrast with the Blackness of the night and The Emptiness of space the one gives the other look at it in this way what do you mean by the word Clarity

00:21:23

clarity what do you think of when you say clear well one thing you might think of is clear in the sense of wiped clean

00:21:38

transparency empty space finely polished mirror a perfect Flawless lens clear the next thing you think of with the word clear

00:21:51

is completely articulate form something where the outlines are perfectly definite totally in focus

00:22:06

did you see now this is a fascinating thing that in the one idea of clear you have emptiness wiped clean and form

00:22:18

in perfect expression so this is the meaning of course of that Buddhist saying emptiness is form form is emptiness all embraced in the idea of clarity

00:22:44

so therefore we go on another kind of fundamental contrast and experience like form and space is the voluntary and the involuntary

00:23:03

what you do on the one hand and what happens to you on the other now this is absolutely basic to most of us we know or we think we know that there is a thing called

00:23:18

what I'm doing my influence on it and on the other hand its influence on me self and other and our big conflict is to make self win over other

00:23:38

it's what we call the conquest of nature collectively Humanity as self wants to subdue beat down and control what is called other

00:23:56

now we don't really want that because if we succeeded in that Enterprise if we made the element of experience the thing that happens to us that is not in our control if we put

00:24:12

that completely under our control we would be bored to death it would be like screwing a plastic woman nobody wants that when you love someone you want them to

00:24:26

come at you in an unexpected way not too unexpected but anyway fairly unexpected you want to feel that there's something out there that is different

00:24:38

see that will surprise you while sewing exactly the same way you wouldn't know you wouldn't be able to experience the Sensation that you call self

00:24:54

being a source of action more or less in control unless it had the contrasting field of something other that is not in control that you never know what it's going to

00:25:06

do see these two Sensations go together they're back in front of the same coin and so the whole technological Enterprise of the West which is designed

00:25:25

to control the universe by technological methods is in the end not sufficiently conscious of itself to know where it's going

00:25:41

and it is all moving towards because you see we don't understand it is not part of our education that we understand this relationship between opposites

00:25:52

we are so frantic to survive and so terrified of the night of death that we are going to destroy the planet

00:26:07

out of our anxiety to survive the whole colossal military Enterprise that is wasting the energies of the Earth the Americans the Russians and the

00:26:23

Chinese are wasting their substance in the most appalling way in creating so-called defensive Technologies instruments to protect themselves from

00:26:38

each other which can only destroy all of us they can do nothing else they protect no one you know like in the next War join the Air Force and be saved

00:26:53

you're the only people who will be you'll be miles up in the air or away under the ground somewhere women and children can go hang no one is going to protect them anymore

00:27:07

the whole technology of the military world is completely wasteful and destructive but it's all being financed in the name of survival

00:27:19

in other words you want to survive so badly that you're going to have to commit suicide [Applause] so the point is you don't need to survive

00:27:35

we don't really have to go on living because the nothingness of death being the opposite of Life simply generates it like the space the empty space of the

00:27:49

sky is what is generating the Stars like the womb generates the living being The Emptiness is the form that's not in our logic

00:28:02

it was left out of our education we never saw it and therefore we have anxiety all the time we think to be or not to be that is the question it isn't to be

00:28:16

is not to be and not to be is to be they imply each other they are the background to the figure the figure to the background and so stop worrying

00:28:32

and I'm saying this not just to be a kind of a sophist and play at you with funny ideas but to suggest that it is very important at

00:28:46

this time that human beings cool it that we reduce the volume of our anxiety and take things easy

00:29:08

that we eat less run around less about being there I'm really seriously suggest this now

00:29:23

look a lot of people don't know they're alive unless they're making a tremendous vibration a lot of people need to get behind the wheel

00:29:38

of a car or a plane that goes wow and they really know they're there you know that's it oh my I'm a man no and this is following the atmosphere

00:29:59

and creating an immense noise is making a great impression yes but really seriously do you have to expend all that energy

00:30:11

to realize you're there thank you I have to hit someone they have to get in a fight they have to know I can knock you down and that tells me that I'm real

00:30:27

what is this necessary and I'm would suggest instead that you can equally well know that you're real instead of going to watch a spectacle of prize fighting

00:30:43

instead of making a colossal din you could equally well realize reality and its energy by simply humming to yourself or humming with other people

00:30:59

now we can all have a mutual hum oh [Music] um then you can dig that you can get with it you get right into it see and you can

00:31:26

feel that soft deep energy and you won't have to go roaring around knocking people over their head and so on so you just get with this that that is the life thing going that is God that is

00:31:40

the energy and you can hold hands and sit around the circle and go oh and it sounds silly to Americans they say what will happen to progress if

00:32:00

people do that [Applause] [Music] well as GK Chesterton said progress is finding a good place to stop

00:32:17

[Music] foreign we are aboard the ferry boat Vallejo which is tied up at the North End of Sausalito close to San Francisco

00:32:45

and this is where I live and you may think this place is rather weird that's because I've always loved weird things I remember when I was a little boy people used to say to me Alan you're so

00:32:58

weird why can't you be like other people well I thought that was just plain dull like having the same thing for dinner every day and as is well said variety is the spice of life

00:33:12

so you will indeed find this place rather strange and some of the things that are weird are weird because they are just obvious and nobody ever thinks of them

00:33:28

some of the most fascinating scientific discoveries have been made by people who called Ordinary common sense in question like anybody can see that the Earth is flat and people know

00:33:39

it's flat and calling that fundamental assumption in question is really the beginning of geography and when I think over the weirdest of all things I can think of you know what

00:33:53

it is nothing the whole idea of nothing is something that has bugged people for centuries

00:34:08

especially in the West because we have a saying in Latin ex nihiloni Hill fit which means that out of nothing comes nothing you can't in other words get something

00:34:20

out of nothing and it's occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions that lies at the root of all our common sense not only in the west but in many parts of

00:34:34

the East as well and it comes up as a kind of Terror of nothing a put down on nothing on everything to do with nothing everything associated with nothing such as sleep passivity rest and even the feminine

00:34:49

principle is often equated with the negative principle although women's lib people don't like that kind of thing but when they get through understanding what I'm going to tell you I don't think they'll object

00:35:01

because what has struck me is that nothing the negative the empty is exceedingly powerful

00:35:16

I would say not ex nihiloni he'll fit out of nothing comes nothing but I would say you can't have something without nothing but how do we basically begin to think about the difference between something

00:35:30

and nothing I can say there is a cigar in my right hand and there is no cigar in my left hand and so we get the idea of is here and isn't or empty here

00:35:43

but behind that of course lies the far more obvious contrast of solid and space now we tend to think of space as nothing

00:35:57

when we talk about the conquest of space there's a little element notice of hostility in that phrase but actually we're talking about the conquest of distance space as such that is to say whatever it

00:36:13

is that lies between the Earth and the Moon and the Earth and the Sun is considered especially since the Michelson Molly experiment which proved there was no ether is considered to be just nothing at all

00:36:27

but to suggest how very powerful him and important this nothing at all is let me point out to you that if you didn't have space you couldn't have anything solid

00:36:40

to begin with without space outside the solid you wouldn't know where the solid's edges were for example you can see me on the camera because

00:36:52

you see a background here and all around me and that background shows up my outline but if that wasn't there then you would notice say only the beads

00:37:09

and the microphone here and this would become the background but you always have to have a background to see a figure you just can't do without it

00:37:20

so that means that the figure and the ground the solid and the space in some way are inseparable and go together now we find this very commonly in the phenomena of

00:37:33

magnetism and electricity a magnet has a North Pole and a South Pole and a battery has a positive pole and a negative Pole there is no such thing as a magnet with

00:37:46

one pole only that's supposing we equate with North with South and North with ears and South with isn't then we see we can't do without the two of them you can chop the magnet in two

00:38:00

supposing it's a bar magnet and you'll just get another North Pole and South Pole on the end of each piece and so in the same way a current will not flow through an electric circuit until the negative

00:38:13

pole is connected as well as the positive because the current does not wait in the wire like water in a hose and then begin to flow when you as it were connected with the negative pole like turning on

00:38:27

the nozzle there won't be any current in the wire at all until its end point which is the negative is established so what this is trying to get into our

00:38:40

basic logic is this that there isn't a sort of fight between something and nothing you know the famous words of Hamlet to be or not to be that is the question it

00:38:54

isn't to be or not to be is not the question because as I think I've shown you can't have a solid without space

00:39:06

and therefore you can't have an is without an isn't a something without a nothing a figure without a background and we can turn that right the other way around and say you can't have space

00:39:20

without solid because imagine nothing but space space space space with nothing in it at all forever but there you are imagining it and you're something in it

00:39:33

to have the whole idea of there being only space and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless because we always know what we mean by

00:39:45

contrasts we know what we mean by white in comparison with black we know life in comparison with death we know pleasure and comparison with pain up in comparison with down but you

00:39:59

will notice of all these things that they must come into being together you don't have first something and then nothing or first nothing and then something something and nothing are two

00:40:13

sides of the same coin and as you know if you take a coin and you file away the tail side of it and you file that side of it away completely the head side will disappear

00:40:26

as well so in this sense the positive and the negative the something and the nothing are inseparable they go together and in this way you could say that the nothing

00:40:41

is the force whereby the something can be manifested without space we couldn't see the stars the Stars not only occupy space but have

00:40:54

space between one point of the sphere and the opposite point so the space everywhere has absolutely basic to there being anything at all now ordinarily we think that what is

00:41:08

basic to the physical world is something we call matter and then Mata has various shapes we think of tables as made of wood

00:41:22

we think of pots as made of clay but I ask you is a tree made of wood in the same way as a table is now that would be stupid isn't it because a tree is wood it isn't made of

00:41:36

wood wood and tree are two different names for the same thing but there's in the back of our mind the notion as a root of common sense that everything in the world is made of something

00:41:50

made of some kind of basic stuff and physicists through the centuries have of course wanted to know what that was and physics began as a quest

00:42:05

to discover the basic stuff out of which the world is made and with all our advances in physics we've never found it what we have found

00:42:17

is not stuff but form we have found shapes we have found structures because when you turn up the microscope and you look at things

00:42:31

where you thought there was some sort of stuff you find instead form pattern structure you find the shapes of crystals and you go in beyond the shapes of crystals and

00:42:43

you find molecules and you go in Beyond molecules and you find atoms and you go in Beyond atoms and you find electrons and positrons between which there are vast spaces

00:42:57

and we can't make up our minds as to these electrons whether they're waves or whether they're particles and so we call them wave equals but they're very tiny and if you want to ask what stuff are

00:43:11

electrons made of we might be able to make a further analysis but what we will come up with will never be stuff it will always be a pattern a moving pattern which can be described

00:43:25

and measured but we never get to any stuff for the simple reason that there isn't any you see what stuff is actually is

00:43:38

when you see something unclearly or out of focus it becomes fuzzy you know we say stuffing in something like K-pop in a cushion or stuff like clay because when we look

00:43:52

at it with a naked eye it looks just like goo we can't make out any significant shape to it but then when you put it on the microscope you suddenly see shapes it comes into

00:44:03

clear Focus as shape and you can go on and on and on looking into the nature of the world and you will never find anything except form

00:44:15

because think of stuff why you wouldn't know how to talk about it even if you found it how would you describe what it was like you couldn't say anything about a structure in it you couldn't say

00:44:29

anything about a pattern or a process in it because it'd be just absolute primordial goo well what else is there besides form in the world obviously between

00:44:43

the shape the significant shapes of of any form there is space and space and form in that sense go together as the fundamental things we're dealing with in this universe

00:44:58

and that's why there's a Buddhist saying really the whole of Buddhism is based on this saying which is that which is void is precisely formed and that which is

00:45:10

form is precisely void and let me illustrate this to you in an extremely simple way when you use the word clarity what do you mean by clarity what's the first thing you think of when

00:45:26

I say clarity well it might be a perfectly Polished lens or mirror or a clear day when there's no smog and the air is perfectly transparent like

00:45:40

space now what's the next thing you think of clarity the next thing you think of is form in clear Focus all the details articulate and perfect

00:45:55

so the one word Clarity suggests to you these two apparently completely opposite things the clarity of the lens of the mirror and the clarity of articulate form

00:46:11

and it is in this sense then you see that the Buddhists say form is void void is form or we could put it in another way instead of saying is we could say implies or the word that I invented goes with

00:46:25

spelled all in one like a front goes with a back a male goes with a female and so on so form always goes with void

00:46:38

and there really isn't in this whole universe in his stuff form indeed is inseparable from the idea of energy and frisky form especially when it's moving in a very

00:46:54

circumscribed area appears to us as solid in the same way for example when you spin an electric fan the empty spaces between the blades sort of disappear into a blur and you can't push

00:47:06

a pencil much less your finger through the fan so in the same way you can't push your finger through the floor because the floor is going too fast but basically what you have down there

00:47:20

is nothing except nothing and form in motion I know there was a physicist at the University of Chicago he was rather crazy like some scientists and

00:47:33

this impressed him so much the ins in solidity the instability of the physical world that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers now for Fairy should fall through the

00:47:46

floor but here it is this Common Sense notion that the world is made of some kind of stuff is shown to beasts a a nonsense idea in the back of our minds

00:48:02

it isn't there at all but instead form and emptiness now we all know that energy is always vibration

00:48:21

pulsation whether it be the energy of light or the energy of sound it's always on and off and in the case of light

00:48:37

say you get very fast light very strong light even say with alternating current you don't notice the discontinuity because your retina retains the

00:48:50

impression of the on pulse and so that carries over during the off pulse and you don't notice the off pulse except in a slow light like an arc lamp and it's exactly the same thing with

00:49:04

sound when you hear a high note that goes it seems much more continuous that's because the vibrations are faster than a low note as when I go oh

00:49:25

now in that you can hear a kind of graininess and that graininess is because you are hearing the rapid alternations of on and off on a lower note

00:49:37

so that all wave motion then is this process and It's Curious isn't it when we think of waves and talk about waves we think about the crests

00:49:51

we think about this point and we say that is waves and that is because the crests stand out from the underlying uniform bed of water

00:50:05

which is relatively solid in comparison with the space above so that these crests are perceived as the things the forms the waves

00:50:17

but isn't it obvious that you cannot have the UPS without the downs you could call you see you get this dividing line here

00:50:29

between above and below Now isn't it obvious first of all you cannot have the emphasis called a Crest the concave

00:50:41

without the de-emphasis or convex called the trough they necessarily go with one another so as to have anything standing out there must be as it were something standing

00:50:56

down or standing back so in this way we must realize that if you had this part alone the up part that would not excite your senses in any

00:51:14

way because there would be no contrast in other words when sound comes upon your ear the eardrum vibrates when the on pulse

00:51:25

of the sound comes the eardrum is driven in a little when the off succeeds the eardrum comes out again and so the eardrum Wiggles if you just pushed it in uniformly and

00:51:40

left it there you wouldn't hear anything in the same way if there is no sound and the eardrum is not being pushed at all you have silence but to have sound you must have the

00:51:52

alternation of sound silence sound silence sound silence and so you get that oh which you can hear on a very deep note now the same thing is true of all life

00:52:06

together we shouldn't really contrast existence with non-existence because actually existence is the alternation of to be and not to

00:52:18

be of positive and negative of on and off so you could say existence is eternal if we are to consider existence as this alternation of now you see it now you

00:52:32

don't now you see it now you don't now you see it now you don't it is that contrast that presents the sensation of there being anything at all

00:52:44

now in light and sound these waves are extraordinarily rapid so that we don't hear the interval between them but there are other circumstances in which the waves are extraordinarily slow as in the alternation of day and night

00:52:57

light and darkness and the much vaster alternations of life and death of the great slow cycles of the world that these alternations are just as

00:53:10

necessary to the being of the universe as in the very fast motions where we get it in light and in sound and in the sense of solid contact where it's going so rapidly that we

00:53:23

notice the continuity or the is side and we ignore the intervention of the isn't side but it's there just the same just as there are vast spaces within the

00:53:36

very heart of the atom now another thing that goes along with all this is that it's perfectly obvious that the universe is a system which is aware of itself

00:53:51

in other words we as living organisms are forms of the energy of the universe just as much as the stars and the galaxies and through our sense organs

00:54:06

this system of energy becomes aware of itself but there's a puzzle in this which again relates back to our basic contrast between on and off and

00:54:21

something and nothing which is this that the aspect of the universe which is aware of itself that is to say the aspect which

00:54:35

to put it in a very clumsy phrase does the a wearing does not see itself in other words you can't look at your eyes with your eyes

00:54:50

you can't kiss your own lips you can't bite your own teeth you can't observe yourself in the act of observing all scientists

00:55:02

neurologists physicists have wanted to do that but they can't do it just as you can't touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger no matter how hard you try

00:55:14

and that therefore creates on the backside of all observation a blank spot just for example as behind your eyes from the point of view of your eyes

00:55:27

however you look around there is blankness behind them that's the unknown that's the part of the universe in other words which does not see itself because

00:55:41

it is seeing and so we always get this division of experience into one half known one-half unknown we would like of course

00:55:53

it would be fascinating if we could know the always unknown but if we say examine the brain and the structure of the nerves behind the eyes we're always looking at somebody else's

00:56:06

brain out there we're never looking at our own brain at the same time as we're investigating somebody else's brain so there always remains this blank side of experience

00:56:18

now what I'm suggesting to you is this that the blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side

00:56:29

as the off principle of vibration has to the on principle do you see that there's a fundamental division the Chinese call them the positive side the Yang and the negative

00:56:44

side the in that corresponds to the idea of one in our language and zero all numbers can be made of one and zero

00:56:57

that's the called binary arithmetic which is used for computers and so it's all made up of off and on and therefore equally of conscious and unconscious

00:57:10

but the unconscious is so to say the part of experience which is doing Consciousness just as the

00:57:21

trough manifests the wave the space manifests the solid the background manifests the figure and so all that side of life which you

00:57:35

call unconscious unknown impenetrable is unconscious and is unknown and is impenetrable because it's really you in other words the deepest you

00:57:51

is the nothing side is the side which you don't know so in this sense don't be afraid of nothing I could make a joke and say there's

00:58:04

nothing in nothing to be afraid of but people in our culture are terrified of nothing they are terrified of death they are uneasy about sleep because they think it's a waste of time and they have

00:58:16

a lurking fear in the back of their minds that all this universe is eventually going to run down and end in nothing and it will all be forgotten buried and dead

00:58:30

but this is a completely unreasonable fear because it is just precisely this nothing which is always the source of something think of it once again in the image

00:58:42

of clarity we say crystal clear nothing is what brings something into Focus and this nothingness symbolized by the

00:58:58

crystal is your own eyeball your own consciousness and the clear space in which all the stars have freedom to

00:59:11

be seen our podcast today was produced in conjunction with the ramdas foundation and the be here Now podcast Network and our theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records from his

00:59:26

rhythm experience album if you'd like to find out more about Alan and his spoken works please visit us at Alan watts.org thank you for listening thank you

00:59:42

[Music] foreign [Music]