by Alan Watts
In the jungles and on the terraces in mountain communities, for as long as anyone can remember people have gotten together to do a thing I call “digging sound.” Some people still play with this sonic energy of the universe, in just the same way as I described somebody playing with the water while swimming. When these people do this, they don’t worry about where they are going, or what their destiny is, or any such nonsense. Instead, they are completely alive.
A VAST CELEBRATION
To better understand all that I am trying to say, I would like to ask if you would for the moment change your basic notions of economics — and by this I mean the economics of energy. We are always scrimping and saving because our economic models are based on scarcity rather than exuberance. But notice that the economics of nature are allegedly wasteful by our standards, and they are based on exuberance. Many more seeds than are necessary for trees and many more spermatozoa than are necessary for people are produced, and there are many more stars than anybody could conceivably want, with galaxies galore. Nature is a vast celebration of energy.
If you complain about this and say, “Oh dear me, it’s all going to run out,” that only means you are still looking for fulfillment in the future. Essentially you are saying, “If there is not enough future, we won’t get the golden reward we are looking forward to at the end of the line.”
At the heart of our economic model is a view of time that is strung out on a line, but in the natural world everything happens in cycles, which is to say in circles. Life moves through the cycles of birth, growth, flowering, and bearing fruit, which in turn casts the seed that begins life. The flowering is our symbol for the exuberance of life, and the fruits the enjoyment of its abundance.
In religious art, the golden flower represents fulfillment, and when a human being tries to symbolize what it is that they really want at the end of the line, very often they think of a flower. It is there in the celestial rose in Dante’s vision of paradise, and in the golden lotus of Mahavairocana, the great Sun Buddha at the center of the mandala. There are rose windows in cathedrals, and always that flower at the end of the line.
Freud says of the flower that it is where everybody wants to go, and, being Freud, he says it is going back to the womb. What is so attractive about the womb? To explain the religious imagery of the flower by analogy with sex is only to add another puzzle. What is so great about sex? What’s so great about going back to the womb? There we are regressed to the place that psychologists don’t really like to talk about, and they may say that in the womb the baby feels omnipotent, but this is of course a fantasy.
We have assumed the Darwinian struggle for existence as our personality, and say of the exuberance of flowers and the abundance of fruit that they flourish only to ensure survival — but this is truly an impoverished view of life, a secular view in which the person in the world is divorced from the womb. In the womb the baby floats, and the floating baby does not know the difference between what is inside its skin and what is outside. It has what Freud calls the “oceanic feeling,” and this is just another form of cosmic consciousness, only the baby does not have the language to express it like an adult. Yet there it is, drifting in the cosmic ocean — and in a way that is what everybody wants, because that is our original nature.
Oscar Wilde described the womb-flower of existence as “the flowers in which the gold bees dream.” Yet that golden flower isn’t at the end of the line — you are living in it. The radiating petals, the mandala, the great circle of the flower is the galaxy in which you live, and it is the whole universe radiating around you. Of course, this radiance is also in a cycle, and that cycling is the dance you are intimately involved in, if you can only realize that the purpose of life is not in the future.
Of course, if you think it is in the future, you will go on and on looking for it there and never find it. The future fades away in the same way the past fades out. You get older and older, and the future never comes, and you just peter out. It was never there, and you may feel vaguely cheated about the whole thing. You thought that there was something coming, that there was some great thing at the end of the line, the golden reward.
And you have been sitting in the middle of that golden reward all the time.
Now all this should be very easy to understand, unless you take a masochistic view and you feel that if you do not suffer the experience is not real. Everybody seems to be looking for new ways of suffering, as if there weren’t enough in life anyway, and trying to get in touch with their “authentic” existence. But in fact, whether you’re in touch with your authentic existence or not, you can’t lose it, so there is no need to worry about losing the feeling of it, no need to say, “I know it’s there because I’ve seen it once, but I am afraid I will lose the feeling of it.”
Just forget about it. When you are trying to feel it — as if you couldn’t — that is pushing it away. You can’t get rid of your real self any more than you can get rid of now. It is you. It’s your being — to be more accurate, your being is not your being, you are the being. It doesn’t matter if you live or die; it doesn’t make the slightest difference. It is nothing just as much as it is something, and nothing and something are simply the alternations and the vibration of energy.
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE AT THIS MOMENT?
How are you feeling now? Just feel yourself. What does it feel like just to be here now? Just feel the feeling — and can you feel, in addition to this feeling, someone feeling it, or is that the same as the feeling?
Some of you may have what you would call negative feelings — depression, anxiety — and you may feel tension in the chest, a funny feeling in the stomach, or pressure in the head. Or if you are sick in a chronic way, you may feel trouble from the center where the sickness is located. But, at this moment, don’t name that feeling— just explore it. It is there, whatever it is. Now you may want to change that feeling, but suppose you can’t. For a while you may be able to think about something else, but now let’s say to ourselves, “I feel the way I feel, and I can’t really do much about it.” As we have seen, that is because the “I” that is supposed to be separate from and controlling the feeling is only imaginary.
INNER AND OUTER WORLDS
So if that is the case, then what you are is the totality of this present experience — the inner feelings, the discomfort and rumblings and pulsations inside your organism, together with your outer feelings, because actually your outer sensations are happening inside your brain. What you see out in front of you is the state of your optical nerves, which are inside your head. What you hear is the state of your auditory nerves, which are inside your head. So inner and outer are really so mixed up with each other that there is no difference.
The skin is the bridge between the world “inside the skin” and the world “outside the skin.” But there would be no external world if there weren’t an internal one, and vice versa. Your internal world is in my external world, and my internal world is in your external world. It all goes together in a great mixed sensory field where everything is essential to everything else, like backs to fronts and fronts to backs.
So here it is, and you can feel everything happening. Your breath is going along. Your ears are working. The people across from you are moving, the trees and buildings are coloring and shaping. It is all that kind of a happening.
Now we can equally well define this happening as your doing. This whole happening that is going on — that is you, if there is a you, a self, in any sense what-soever. So if you try to change it, you are differentiating yourself from it. You are standing away from it and, in that moment, you split the unity.
But don’t worry if you find yourself habitually standing away from it. Simply treat that as part of the happening. If you can’t stop standing away from it — objectifying it, as it were — that is also part of the happening and it is going on. If there are some things you can’t accept, and you are fighting them, that fighting is part of the happening too. So don’t try to inter
fere with it, just let be whatever is.
There is no hurry, and no place else to be. I suppose you can go away if you want to, if you are nervous and want to do something else. But has it occurred to you that there may be really nowhere to go, because you take yourself with you if you go somewhere else? And if you have a problem here, you will have a problem some-where else, because you are the problem. So there is no hurry, and in a way there is no future. It is all here — so take it easy, take your time, and get acquainted with it.
WATCH QUIETLY
Just watch quietly this “going on.” Whether you close your eyes or keep them open makes little difference. You find yourself once again tending to put names, words, descriptions on everything that you experience, and that’s not necessary. Don’t try to stop yourself putting names on things, just regard your doing that as an activity that is happening, like the sound of a car going by. If you ask, “Why am I doing this?” just hear the sound — “why am I doing this, why am I doing this”— as “da da da, dadada.”
When you feel those outside sounds and activities and motions, they may seem strange because they are no longer under your voluntary control — but neither are your belly rumbles or the mechanisms of your optical nervous system. None of this is under your control, but it is all definitely you. The idea that you control something really isn’t under your control either, because when we move our fingers, we’re using energy, but we don’t control that energy. Our thoughts are just energy too — it is all bubbling up in us, and we don’t know why.
In the same way, all the happenings that are by social definition outside your skin — not under your voluntary control and so not you — are just as much you as the belly rumbles and the energy bubbling up inside you. This whole experience is you going along, and if you try to control it, you will again begin all sorts of absurd straining, like trying to lift an airplane off the g round by pulling at your seat belt. So just let all this that you are feeling happen, because in fact there is nothing else you can do. There is no choice; it is going to happen anyway.
YOUR FULL BODY, YOUR REAL SELF
Now in this state it is your full body that you are experiencing, the whole body of your experience.
In the Far East, the Buddhists say that our full body, our real body, is composed of a trinity of three bodies: Nirmanakaya is the functioning body, the physical body with which we usually identify. Sambhogakaya is the body of our mental and emotional activity, and it is our capacity to enjoy, for it is the energy of eternal delight. Dharmakaya is our ultimate body, our real body, which consists of nothing less than the whole quantum field of the universe, for, in truth, we are One with All That Is.
Feel it, it is happening.
Your wandering thoughts are just happening. The buzz in the head is just happening. There you are.
It is not being pushed around by anything. It is the big happening, and that means it’s free. It isn’t happening to you, it is you happening, and that’s the difference.
Meet your real self.
PART II
THE ESSENTIAL PROCESS OF MEDITATION
CHAPTER THREE
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEDITATION
I AM BY NATURE a person who has the fundamental feeling that existence is extremely odd.
Other people apparently think that existence is quite even — that is to say, ordinary — and not to be questioned, but I have always had in the bottom of my heart the sense that it is very strange indeed that I am here at all. The feeling of “I” gives me what I can only describe as a funny feeling, and I do not take it for granted.
This feeling is not something that I can just toss off, and then go on with my everyday business — and yet the curious paradox of this is that, at the same time, I do not take it seriously. On one hand I have the feeling that to be alive, to participate in this universe, is so wonderful I simply don’t know what to say about it, but on the other I can’t identify myself with any of the parts or the social roles that people play.
THE PROBLEM WITH EXISTENCE
There does seem to be a problem with existence, and with being alive. What that problem is about, at the sort of nitty-gritty level, is the very basic idea in our thinking that one must live, that we need to survive to go on, and Therefore we need money for food and shelter. We feel we must go on, even though we know that we are not going to get away with it for very long, and we know that after a certain number of years we are going to die and that this thing we call life is going to end.
When life ends the thing that we call “I” is going to go somewhere else, maybe into a deep sleep, maybe even without dreams. Between now and that inevitable event we may experience the most ghastly pains — not only the pains of physical disease, or of being wounded or hurt, but perhaps the pains of worrying about the failure of our responsibility to people who depend on us. So we suffer other people’s suffering simply because we are sensitive and have imagination; we do it so much that our adrenaline levels respond simply by imagination to the sufferings of other people.
Obviously all these problems cannot be solved on the physical level — we don’t expect in our lifetime that medical skill will make us exempt from death. We also don’t seriously expect that human beings will all learn to be nice to each other, and will refrain from war, racial prejudice, and horrors of that kind. We don’t seriously expect to find a method of being protected against all possible disease and pain by taking some sort of drug.
ANOTHER WAY AROUND THESE PROBLEMS
Over the years I have begun to wonder if there is another way around these problems. Perhaps instead of resolving these issues at the technical level, we could solve them at the psychological and spiritual levels by disciplining ourselves so that we wouldn’t be afraid of them anymore. And so, in accord with that motivation, we seek out spiritual and psychological teachers.
We wonder if we could somehow be made over so that we would not have to worry about our problems. But if you examine the desire to overcome this mess through a spiritual discipline, you will see that this wanting to overcome the mess and not to have it anymore is precisely the mess. The thing that we object to about ourselves is precisely what we continue to do in our attempts to overcome it; in other words, the activity that we employ in overcoming the mess is the mess that we object to. It is very important to realize this, and if you do realize it, it raises the question “Then what can I do?” What can I do to transform this quaking mess into the state of mind of the true mystic?
Now, if you are the mess, there is obviously nothing that you can do to transform yourself into the state of mind you idealize as that of a true mystic, a saint, or even the Christ. But by pursuing this line of thought you may realize that all your ideals are simply manifestations of the mess trying to get away from itself.
You are put in the position of feeling that it is absolutely necessary to be different from the way you are, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it because being the way you are, you can’t be different from your self. It’s as if one were to say, “I know that I shouldn’t be selfish, and I would very much like to be an unselfish person, but the reason why I want to be an unselfish person is that I am very selfish. And really I would love myself far more and respect myself far more if I were unselfish.”
The same is true of people who believe that they ought to love God. One might well ask, “Why do you want to love God?” And the answer is invariably, because God is the most powerful ruler, and it is always best to be on the side of the big battalions. Most often that is the real reason why people believe in God, and it comes down to the fact that they are looking out for the safety of their own spiritual skins.
All sophisticated saints have known this, including Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Martin Luther. None of these great men knew what to do about this contradiction, because if people believe in it there is really nothing to be done. But apparently something has to be done — however, when you really look into yourself, you realize there is nothing you can
do. There is nothing anyone can do to be anyone else than who they are, or to feel any other way than the way they feel at this moment.
We are this mess that has the capacity to know the horrors of what life can do to us — yet this is not as much of a blind alley as it seems to be. If you discover yourself in a blind alley, or even a cul-de-sac, the fact that you found yourself there will invariably tell you something.
Watch the flow of water when it floods an area of land and you will see that it puts out fingers, and some of them stop because they come to blind alleys. But the water doesn’t pursue that course; it simply finds its way a round. The water never uses any effort, however, only its weight and gravity, and by following its level it finds the path of least resistance.
As human beings we do the same thing, and when we think that we have come to a dead end or a blind alley we try to find another way around. Suppose the water, when it reaches a place where a finger of water stretches out over dry ground and doesn’t go further, were to say to itself, “I failed!” Why, we would say it was just being neurotic. “Just wait,” we would advise, “and you will find the way to get through.”
Now when you discover that you are like the water, and that there is no way of transforming yourself, you become a fearless, joyous, divine being, as distinct from a quaking mess.