The Resilient Mind - We Are All One - Alan Watts

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Alan Watts was a British-American philosopher and speaker known for bringing Eastern wisdom into the heart of Western culture. With a poetic yet playful style, he made complex ideas from Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism feel beautifully human and deeply accessible.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with T & H: https://www.youtube.com/@tradgedyandhopeSpeech licensed from https://mindsetdrm.comMusic written by Barry Gilbey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to We Are One with Alan Watts. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Any experience that we have through our senses, whether of sound or of light or of touch, is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects, one called on and the other called off. vibration seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs

and so life is a system of now you see it now you don't and these two aspects always go together for example sound is not pure sound it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence and that's simply the way things are only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are in safe separable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don't encounter in life people with fronts but no backs, just as you don't encounter a coin that

has a heads but no tails. And although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different. They're at the same time one. And one has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things can be inseparable, that what is explicitly two can at the same time be implicitly one. If you forget that, very funny things happen. Because you see the human awareness is a very odd mechanism. We have as a species specialized in a certain kind of awareness which we call conscious attention. The price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field.

I would rather say ignorance than ignorance. You tend therefore to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things and events seriously. imagining that these really do exist when actually they're what you make out of it. Now, in Western culture, it is practically a basic assumption that existence is serious. This is particularly true among people who call themselves existentialists. When they talk about a person who exists authentically, they mean that he takes his life seriously and other people's life.

and other people's lives seriously. But the poet and essayist G.K. Chesterton once observed that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. If the angels take themselves lightly, how much more so the Lord of the Angels. But you see, we have been brought up in a mythological context where the Lord God definitely does take himself seriously and is indeed the serious person. So that when we go into church, laughter is discouraged in the same way as it's discouraged in court.

This is a serious matter, and everybody has to have the right expression on their faces. Because this is the great, great authority figure. This is grandpa. This is, blah, blah, blah, all you kids, you know. And we don't realize that he has a twinkle in his eye. But the basis of it all is this, then. If we say, you must survive, or I must survive. life is earnest and I've got to go on

then your life is a drag and not a game now it's my contention my personal opinion that existence the physical universe is basically playful there is no necessity for it whatsoever it isn't going anywhere

that is to say it doesn't have some destination that it ought to arrive at, but that it is best understood by analogy with music, because music as an art form is essentially playful. We say you play the piano. You don't work the piano. Why?

Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. And of course, we, because being a very compulsive and purposive culture, are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster till we eliminate the distance between places. What happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place.

In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition. But we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We've got a system system of schooling which gives a completely different impression and yeah you go to

kindergarten you know and that's a great thing because when you finish that you'll get into first grade and then come on first grade leads the second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school you got high school and it's revving up the thing is coming then you're gonna go to college and by Joe then you get into graduate school and when you're through with graduate school you go out to join the world and then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance and they've got that quota to make and you're going to make that and all the time the thing is coming it's coming it's coming that great thing the success you're

working for then when you wake up one day about 40 years old you say my God I've arrived I'm there and you don't feel very different from what you always felt and there's a slight let down because you feel there's a hoax and there was a hoax a dreadful hoax they made you miss everything by experts Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they're 65, they don't have any energy left, they're more or less impotent, they go and rot in an old people's senior citizens community. Because we've simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played. So then if you see on the other hand that existence is musical in nature, that is to say that it is not serious. It is the play. You've got to let go and let it happen because if you don't you're going to be all clutched up.

You're going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only if you don't try. And when people, when you think a bit what people really want to do with their time, what do they do when they're not being pushed around

and somebody's telling them what to do? They like to make rhythms. They listen to music, they dance, or they sing, or they do something of a rhythmic nature, playing cards or raising their elbows. Everybody wants to spend the time swinging. And that's the nature of this whole thing we're in, you see.

It likes to swing. That's why it does it. I remember once it was looking in the open air and one of the glorious little sizzled-down things came and I picked it up like that and brought it down. and it looked as if it was struggling to get away, just as if you caught an insect by one leg. It seemed to be struggling to get away,

and at first I thought, well, it's not doing that. That's just the wind blowing. Then I thought again, really? Only the wind blowing? Surely it is the structure of this thing which, in cooperation with the existence of wind, enables it to move like an animal.

but using the wind's effort, not its own. It is more intelligent being than an insect, in a way, because an insect uses effort. Like a person who rose a boat uses effort, but the man who puts up a sail is using magic. He lets nature do it for him with the intelligence to use a sail. Without your using very much effort, gets everything to cooperate with you.

Look at it in this way. Supposing the President of the United States were as unknown to you by name as the local sanitary inspector, the man who looks after the drains and the sewage disposal and all that kind of thing. This is not a glamorous figure, you see? But for that very reason, he probably does his job more efficiently than the President. because the president wastes enormous amount of time in interviewing various groups

from the Elks and the Girl Scout and conferring honors and all this kind of thing the poor man's life must be an utter torment because he's so well known and therefore has absolutely no time to give to the government of the country so that if he was someone quite anonymous

and that we didn't have to think about he would be a very very good ruler. In just the same way, for example, you don't have to attend unless you're sick to the government of your own body. It happens automatically. It goes on day after day after day, and the better it is, the less you have to think about it.

When you see well, you do not see your eyes. If there is something wrong with your eyes, you start seeing spots. those spots are spots in your eyes. When you hear well, you'd never hear your ears. But when they start singing, you know, then you're starting to hear your ears

and your ears are getting in the way of their own hearing. So on the deepest level, a person as a whole can get in the way of his own existence by becoming too aware of himself. In English, the word heartless has a very bad connotation, as does the word mindless. A heartless person is an inconsiderate, unfeeling person, a mindless person is an idiot.

But a person who has mooshin, or no mind or no heart in Chinese, is a very high order of person. It means that his psychic center doesn't get in its own way. It operates as if it wasn't there. Zhuangza says that the highest form of man uses his shin like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep.

And the poem says when the geese fly over the water and they are reflected in the water, that the geese do not intend to cast their reflection and the water has no mind to retain their image. So the whole thing is, you see, to operate in the world as if you were absent, being absent as a condition of being present. Well, Joancher says, when your belt is comfortable, you don't feel it. When your shoes are comfortable, it is as if you weren't wearing any. The more you are aware of these things, the less properly they are made.

or the less properly they fit. Because in the state of being in accord with the Tao, there is a certain feeling of weightlessness, parallel to the weightlessness that people feel when they get into outer space or when they go deep into the ocean. This is, of course, connected with the sensation that you're not carrying your body around.

What is this, then, weightlessness? It means, of course, partly, that you're not moving around in constant opposition to you. Most people move in constant opposition to themselves because they are afraid that if they don't oppose themselves all the time, something awful will happen. When the human being developed the power to be aware of himself, to know that he knows. In other words, when the cortex was formed over the original brain, he fell from grace. That was the fall of man. When he felt he had the sensation of being in charge,

of being in control of himself, and you can only have that sensation when you are aware of what you're doing, he got anxious. Am I aware enough of myself? Have I taken enough factors into consideration? Have I done all that should be done? And then he started trembling.

And this is the great human predicament. The development of self-consciousness, the development of the possibility of reflecting upon one's own knowledge. And Laoza says, sir, regard the universe. He says, the stars come out invariably every night. The sun rises and sets. The birds flock can migrate without exception. All flowers and trees grow upwards without exception. you, by your talk of charity and duty to one's neighbor, you're just introducing confusion into the empire.

Your attempt to eliminate self is a positive manifestation of selfishness. You are like a person beating a drum in search of a fugitive. In other words, try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or a disadvantage. You never really know whether something. is fortune or misfortune. We only know the momentary changes and as it alter our sense of hope about things. The Taoist is wise enough eventually, you see, to understand there isn't any fixed good or bad. And so his point of view is what is called non-chewing. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.

Thank you.