Alan Watts: where it's at
Alan Watts: where it's at
Alan Watts (January 6, 1915 - November 16, 1973) was a philosopher, writer, speaker, and student of comparative religion. His subjects covered personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God, and the pursuit of happiness. He applied his own experiences, his scientific knowledge, and his knowledge of Christianity to his teachings of Eastern religions and philosophies, concentrating most upon Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism.
Alan (Black) has been listening to his talks and lectures for the past seventeen years as they’re broadcast on a local radio station, in addition to obtaining podcasts and reading Mr. Watts’ books. Watts’ scholarship informs much of Alan’s thinking, and has done the same for Anna since we met more than eleven years ago.
Below are eight choice selections from his writings.
Of course, that God exists is your opinion; that God will answer your prayer is your opinion; and your idea of God is your idea of God. If you bought someone else’s script—you bought it! Maybe your mother and father talked to you about God in a very impressive way, but basically, you bought their idea. You may be a father yourself. I am a grandfather now. I have five grandchildren, and I know I am as stupid as my own grandfather must have been. I sit in the position from which they look at me and think, “Oh, wow! there’s an important man!” But I know I am just like anyone else. So I hope my children are not believing things on my authority, because it is always their authority. If I look impressive and make big noises at them, they have just been taken in.
What seems like a good thing today, or yesterday, like DDT, turns out tomorrow to have been a disaster. What seemed, in the moral or spiritual sphere, like great virtues in times past, are easily seen today as hideous evils.
Take, for example, the Inquisition. In its own day, among Catholics, the Holy Inquisition was regarded as we today regard the practice of psychiatry. A heretic was a very sick man. He was much to be pitied because if he held a false view he was doomed to suffer forever in the most exquisite torture chamber ever imagined. Think of entertaining that idea as seriously as we regard cancer or schizophrenia today. We feel that in curing a person of disease almost anything is justified: the most complex operations; people suspended for days on the end of tubes; with X-ray penetration; burning of diseased tissue with lasers; people undergoing shock treatment; people locked in the colorless, monotonous corridors of mental institutions not knowing if they will ever get out because they cannot understand what is expected of them, and the psychiatrists do not know either. It is a kind of Kafka-like nightmare. We think these surgeons and psychiatrists are very good people, that they are righteous men working to alleviate human suffering. Well, they thought exactly the same thing about the Inquisitors. In all good faith, they knew that witchcraft and heresy were terrible things, awful plagues imperiling people’s souls forever. Any means were justified to cure people of heresy; and we have not changed. We are doing the same thing today but under different names. We can look back at those people and see how evil that was, but we cannot see it in ourselves.
We feel we must go on, that it is our duty. We are tired of living and scared of dying, but we must go on. Why? Well, you say, “I have dependents, I have children, and I have to go on working to support them.” But all that does is teach them the same attitude so that they will go dragging along to support their children, who will in turn learn it from them to go dragging along, fighting this thing out.
So I watch with total amazement the goings-on of the world. I see all these people commuting, driving cars like maniacs to get to an office where they are going to make money—for what? So that they can go on doing the same thing, and very few of them enjoy it. Sensible people get paid for playing—that is the art of life.
The point is then that life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present. Just as we have a field of vision that is an expanded width and distance, so the present moment is not just a hairline as the clock indicates. The present moment is a field of experience that is much more than an instant. To hear a melody is to hear the interval between tones. Within the present moment we can hear intervals and see rhythms. Thus, within each moment we can feel a sequence going on.
So when I speak of the eternal now, please do not confuse it with a split second; it is not the same kind of thing. The eternal now is roomy, easy, and rich, but also frivolous!
You see, playfulness is the very essence of the energy of the universe. It is music. And in my opinion, good music, as written by Bach, has no meaning. Classical music, whether it be of the West, of the Hindus, or of the Chinese, has no meaning other than its own sound. And words, like music, have no meaning. Words are noises that represent and point to something other than themselves. Dollar bills represent wealth, maps represent territory, and words always represent something else. The sound “water” will not make you wet. You cannot drink the noise “water.” Therefore, the word is symbolic and points to something other than itself. And yet we say of words that they have meaning. And people get all fouled up because they want life to have meaning as if it were words. Goethe was hung up on this: “. . . all that is mortal is but a symbol.” Of what? What do you mean? As if you had to have a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning. This is the point: the meaning, the goodie about life is exactly here and now. We are not going anywhere. Look out in the street and you will see people frantically thinking they are going somewhere; that they have important business. They have a far-out look in their eyes and their noses stick out in front. They are going somewhere, they are on purpose, they have something to achieve. Here and now, sitting wherever you happen to be, do you realize you do not have to go anywhere? Right where you are is where it is at. That is why the Hindus call the true self of us all the atman, the man where it is at.
True creation is always purposeless, without ulterior motive, which is why it is said that the true artist copies nature in the manner of her operation and understands the real meaning of “art for art’s sake.”
Every kind of culture in this country is dedicated to self-improvement. Why do some people go to the opera or the symphony? Only a small fraction of the audience goes to the symphony to enjoy it. The rest go to be seen there and to see themselves there because that is culture, that is doing what is good for you. Take jogging, that deplorable practice. It is a very nice thing to run and go dancing across the hills at a fast speed, but we see these joggers shaking their bones, rattling their brains, and running on their heels. There is a grimness about it because it is so determinedly good for you. Why do you go to school? There is only one reason for going to school, and that is because someone there has something that you want to find out. The whole point of going to school is that you are interested in something. You do not go to improve yourself, but the trouble is that the schools have the wrong idea—they give people honors for learning. The reward for studying French should be the ability to speak French, to enjoy reading French, and to have fun with French people. But when you get a degree for it, then the degree becomes the point in a game of one-upmanship.
Living, it seems to me, is a spontaneous process. The Chinese term for nature is tzu-jan, which means that which is so of itself, that which happens. It is very curious that because of our grammar, which we speak in all standard European languages, we are unable to imagine a process which happens of itself. Every verb must have a noun as its subject, a director, and we think nothing is in order unless someone or something orders it—unless there is somebody in charge; thus, the idea of a process which happens of itself and by itself is frightening because there seems to be no authority.
Should you wish to have a continuous loop of thought—perhaps like Pink Floyd’s The Wall—you can return to the first excerpt and read about how everyone believes what they believe on no one else’s authority but their own.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008