by Alan Watts
When you see that there is no way, it is not a gloomy realization, but a very important communication. It is telling you something in the same way that the land is telling the water this is not the way to go. It is really saying, “There is another way — try over here. ”
Sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself. Life is giving you the message that the “you” that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist. In other words, as an ego, I am separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. So the one who is supposed to be in control of them cannot control them because it isn’t there. And as soon as you understand that, things will be vastly improved.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THE WORD “I”?
Now we can go into this and ask, “What do you mean by the word ‘I’?” We are going to try some experiments on a number of different levels, first in the ordinary way: What do you mean by the word “I”? I, myself. Your personality, your ego — what is it?
First of all, it is your image of yourself, and it is composed of what people have told you about yourself. Who you are is based upon how others have reacted to you, and what sort of impression they have given you of the kind of person you are. Your education plays into the process as well, and out of all this an ego emerges that is a conceptual expression of who you think you are. The style of life you then live is a reflection of this image.
But remember, it is an image — just an idea. It is your thoughts about yourself, but in fact you are not this at all. Your total physical organism, your psychological organism, and forces beyond that are all you, because an organism doesn’t exist as an isolated entity any more than a flower exists without a stalk, without roots, without earth, without the environment.
In the same way, although we are not stalked to the ground, we are nevertheless inseparable from the world a round us, and from a huge social context of parents, siblings, and people who know us and work with us. It is simply impossible to cut ourselves off from either our social environment or our natural environment. We are all that, and there is no clear way of drawing the boundary between this organism and everything that surrounds it.
And yet, the image of ourselves that we have does not include all those relationships. Our idea of our personality and of ourselves includes no information whatsoever about the hypothalamus or even the brain stem, the pineal gland, the way we breathe, how our blood circulates, how we manage to form a sentence, how we manage to be conscious, or even how we open and close our hands. The information contained in your image of yourself says nothing about any of this.
Therefore it is obviously an extremely inadequate image, but nonetheless we do think that the image of self refers to something because we have the very strong impression that “I” exist. And we think that this impression isn’t just an idea, it is really substantially there, right in the middle of us. And what is it?
What do you actually sense? When you are sitting on the floor, you feel the floor is there and is real and hard. What is the “you” sitting on the floor, and what do you have the sensation of when you know that it’s you, right here? What is it?
First of all, let’s ask, “In what part of your body do you feel your self — the real “I” — exists?” We can explore this question very deeply, and maybe you want to think about it for a moment before I suggest a preliminary and superficial answer:
The sensation that corresponds to the feeling of “I” is a chronic muscular tension in the body, which has absolutely no function whatsoever.
What do you do when you try, or concentrate, or pay attention? When I was a little boy in school I sat next to another boy who had great difficulty in reading. And as he worked over the textbook with its perfectly piffling information, he groaned and grunted as he read, trying to get the sounds out, as if he were heaving enormous weights with his muscles. The teacher was vaguely impressed that he was trying, and although he seemed to be making a tremendous effort, all of his straining had absolutely nothing to do with getting anything done.
Tying yourself up into a knot has absolutely nothing to do with the way your mind works. If you try very hard, and look very intensely, perhaps you will tighten the muscles around your temples, and maybe clench your jaw a bit, but if it does anything, it will just make your vision blurry. If you want to see something clearly, you relax, and instead of making an effort you simply trust your eyes and your nervous system to do their job.
The other night I was writing and I completely forgot somebody’s name, but I knew that eventually my memory would produce it. I just sat for a while and said to my memory, “You know very well who this person is, please give me the answer.” And there it was, because that’s the way nerves work. They don’t work by forcing themselves, and yet we’ve all been brought up to try to force our nervous activity, our concentration, our memory, our comprehension, and indeed our very love.
We have tried to force it with our muscles — and men will understand me if I say you can’t force yourself to have an erection by muscular effort. Women will understand me if I say you can’t force yourself with muscles to have an orgasm — it just has to happen, and you must trust it to happen. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it by using your muscles. In much the same way, the notion that we have of ourselves, of ego, is a composite of an image of ourselves that doesn’t fit the facts, and a sensation of muscular straining that is futile. When you come down to it and take a closer look, what you conceive to be yourself is the marriage of an illusion and futility.
WE ARE NO LESS THAN THE UNIVERSE
Well what are we, if we aren’t who we think we are? When you take a scientific point of view, your organism is inseparable from its environment, and so you really are the organism/environment. In other words, you are no less than the universe, and each one of you is the universe expressed in the particular place that you feel is here and now. You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at itself and exploring itself.
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be. But just as my whole body has a little nerve end centered here, which is exploring and which contributes to the sense of touch, you are just such a little nerve end for everything that is going on. Just as the eyes serve the whole body, you serve the entire universe. You are a function of all that is.
Yet if this is so, the facts just do not fit the way we feel, because we feel it the other way around: “I am a lonely little thing out here exploring this universe and trying to make something out of it. I want to get something out of it and do something with it. And I know I am going to fail because I know I’m going to die one day.” So we are all fundamentally depressed, and as a result think up fantasies about what is going to happen to us when we are dead, and try to make ourselves feel better about it.
But if you are essentially the universe, what is going to happen to you when you are dead?
What do you mean by you? If you are the universe, in the greater context that question is irrelevant. You never were born and you never will die, because what There is, is you. That should be absolutely obvious, but from an egoistic perspective it is not obvious at all. It should be the simplest thing in the world to understand that you, the “I”, is what has always been going on and always will go on, coming and going forever and ever.
We have been bamboozled, however, by religionists, by politicians, by our fathers and mothers, by all sorts of people who tell us, “You’re not it.” And we believed it.
So, to put it in a negative way, you can’t do anything to change yourselves, to become better, to become happier, to become more serene, to become more mystical. But if I say you can’t do a damn thing, you can understand this negative stat
ement in a positive way. What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
AN ELEMENT OF DOUBT
You may have an element of doubt in you, however. We all object to ourselves in various ways, and in a sense there is nothing wrong with that either, because that is part of the flow, of what is going on. That is part of nature, and a part of what we do. To deliver you from the sense of guilt, I am going to teach you that you needn’t feel guilty because you feel guilty.
They taught you as a child to feel guilty, and you feel guilty — that’s no surprise. If somebody comes along and says you shouldn’t, that is not the point. I am not going to say that you shouldn’t — but I say that if you do, don’t worry about it. And if you want to say, “But I can’t help worrying about it,” I’m going to say, “Okay, go ahead and worry about it.”
This is the principle called judo in Japanese, which means the gentle way. Go along with it, go along with it — and then you can redirect the energy to go your own way.
The most interesting thing you can do in life is really the most natural thing to do: to call into question the rules of the game. If we say, “Let’s all be honest with each other,” what do you mean by honesty? Do you know what the truth is?
If you call these things into question, a curious thing happens, and that is that nobody knows what they are supposed to do. And this is the most embarrassing situation in life. When we are all here and we don’t know what we’re supposed to do, now we are really up against our view of reality.
THE ESSENTIAL PROCESS OF MEDITATION
This is the beginning of meditation. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do, so what can you do? Well, if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, you watch. You simply watch what is going on.
When somebody plays music, you listen. You just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. The point can’t be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music it self.
In exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences, because all experiences of any kind are vibrations coming at you. As a matter of fact, you are these vibrations, and if you really feel what is happening, the awareness you have of you and of everything else is all the same. It’s a sound, a vibration, all kinds of vibrations on different bands of the spectrum. Sight vibrations, emotion vibrations, touch vibrations, sound vibrations — all these things come together and are woven, all the senses are woven, and you are a pattern in the weaving, and that pattern is the picture of what you now feel. This is always going on, whether you pay attention to it or not.
Now instead of asking what you should do about it, you experience it, because who knows what to do about it? To know what to do about this you would have to know everything, and if you don’t, then the only way to begin is to watch.
Watch what’s going on. Watch not only what’s going on outside, but what’s going on inside. Treat your own thoughts, your own reactions, your own emotions about what’s going on outside as if those inside reactions were also outside things. But you are just watching. Just follow along, and simply observe how they go.
Now, you may say that this is difficult, and that you are bored by watching what is going on. But if you sit quite still, you are simply observing what is happening: all the sounds outside, all the different shapes and lights in front of your eyes, all the feelings on your skin, inside your skin, belly rumbles, thoughts going on inside your head — chatter, chatter, chatter. “I ought to be writing a letter to so-and-so. . . .I should have done this” — all this bilge is going on, but you just watch it.
You say to yourself, “But this is boring.” Now watch that too. What kind of a funny feeling is it that makes you say it’s boring? Where is it? Where do you feel it? “I should be doing something else instead.” What’s that feeling? What part of your body is it in? Is it in your head, is it in your belly, is it in the soles of your feet? Where is it? The feeling of boredom can be very interesting if you look into it.
Simply watch everything going on without attempting to change it in any way, without judging it, without calling it good or bad. Just watch it. That is the essential process of meditation.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION
W HAT WE CALL MEDITATION or contemplation — for want of a better word — is really supposed to be fun. I have some difficulty in conveying this idea because most people take anything to do with religion seriously — and you must understand that I am not a serious person. I may be sincere, but never serious, because I don’t think the universe is serious.
And the trouble comes into the world largely because various beings take themselves seriously, instead of playfully. After all, you must become serious if you think that something is desperately important, but you will only think that something is desperately important if you are afraid of losing it. In one way, however, if you fear losing something, it isn’t really worth having. There are people who live in dread, and then drag on living because they are afraid to die. They will probably teach their children to do the same, and their children will in turn teach their own children to live that way. And so it goes on and on.
But let me ask you, if you were God, would you be serious? Would you want people to treat you as if you were serious? Would you want to be prayed to? Think of all the awful things that people say in their prayers. Would you want to listen to that all the time? Would you encourage it? No, not if you were God.
In the same way, meditation is different from the sort of things that people are supposed to take seriously. It doesn’t have any purpose, and when you talk about practicing meditation, it’s not like practicing tennis or playing the piano, which one does in order to attain a certain perfection. You practice music to become better at it, maybe even with the idea that you may someday go on stage and perform. But you don’t practice meditation that way, because if you do, you are not meditating.
THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION
The only way you can talk about practice in the context of meditation is to use the word practice in the same way as when somebody says that they practice medicine. That is their way of life, their vocation, and they do it nearly every day. Perhaps they do it the same way, day after day — and that’s fine for meditation too, because in meditation there is no right way and there is no idea of time.
In practicing and learning things, time is usually of the essence. We try to do it as fast as possible, and even find a faster way of learning how to do things. In meditation a faster way of learning is of no importance what-soever, because one’s focus is always on the present. And although growth may occur in the process, it is growth in the same way that a plant grows.
THE PERFECT PROCESS OF GROWTH
Once upon a time in China, there was a farm i n g family, and they were having dinner. The oldest son came in late, and they asked him, “Why are you late for dinner?”
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve been helping the wheat to grow.”
They came out the next morning and all the wheat was dead. It turned out that the son had pulled each stalk up a little bit, to help it grow.
The point is that growth always occurs in a being as it does in a plant, and it is perfect at every step. No progress is involved in the transformation of an acorn into an oak, because the acorn is a perfect acorn, and the sapling is a perfect sapling, and the big oak tree is a perfect oak, which again produces perfect acorns. At every stage perfection is there, and it cannot be otherwise.
Practicing meditation is exactly the same. We should not talk about beginners as distinct from experts, and we should develop, if we can, a new vocabulary because it is very difficult in th
e context of our competitive world to speak about things like this. To bring a cross the idea of doing something that is not acquisitive — something you are not going to get anything out of — is difficult. And it’s even more difficult when there is no one to get anything. When “you” understand the art of contemplation, there is no experiencer separate from experience, and there is no one to get anything out of life, or therefore to get anything from meditation.
REVERSED EFFORT
We have a principle here of reversed effort, something to understand as a background to anything said about techniques — because whenever we talk about techniques, we seem to be talking about the competitive, and about mastery. The idea of mastery of technique is very important if you play a musical instrument, because technique is the key in the making of a satisfactory sound. But if you force the learning of technique, or force the performance of it, everyone will hear it, and you will hear the forcing yourself.
To be musical you have to address yourself to the playing of an instrument without hurrying, and without forcing anything. You will find there is a point then where the instrument seems to play itself, and when you get the peculiar feeling that the sound coming out of a flute or a violin string is happening of itself. Then you are playing the instrument properly.
It’s the same when you sing: there comes a point when your voice takes over. This is the difference between perspiration and inspiration.
You may say, as Christians do, that the act of worship is inspired by the Holy Spirit. When monks are chanting, they believe that the Holy Spirit is chanting through them, and they are flutes for the Holy Spirit. This is a very precise and particular phenomenon because there is a way of resonating the breath and of harmonizing sound so that it comes of itself and you don’t do it. We attribute that way of producing sound to the “Holy Spirit,” but it is based on breath.