Become What You Are

by Alan W. Watts

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists forever. This movement and change has been called Tao by the Chinese. . . . A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. But he was not altogether right. For the curious thing is that you cannot get out of accord with it even if you want to; though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment.

Present moment or tao

While living, be a dead man, thoroughly dead; Then, whatever you do, just as you will, will be right.

It is a real communication, a description of something which happens to people—like the rain, or the touch of the wind. It is simply the expression of the universal discovery that a man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position. It

attainment.

themselves.

The point is that these ultimate feelings are as wise as all the rest, and their wisdom emerges when we give up resisting them

When, for example, life compels us at last to give in, to surrender to the full play of what is ordinarily called the terror of the unknown, the suppressed feeling suddenly shoots upward as a fountain of the purest joy.

HAS BEEN SAID THAT THE HIGHEST WISDOM lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chuang-tzu: ‘‘The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.’’ Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal Now. For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this Now; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever. This movement and change has been called Tao by the Chinese, yet in fact there is no movement, for the moment is the only reality and there is nothing beside it in relation to which it can be said to move. Thus it can be called at once the eternally moving and eternally resting. How can we bring ourselves into accord with this Tao? A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. But he was not altogether right. For the curious thing is that you cannot get o...

nice one

I said at the beginning about getting rid of the raft when you have crossed the river, about taking religion as a medicine but not as a diet. For purposes of understanding this point, we must take the raft as representing the ideas or words or other symbols whereby a religion or a philosophy expresses itself, whereby it points at the moon of reality. As soon as you have understood the words in their plain and straightforward sense, you have already used the raft. You have reached the opposite bank of the river. All that remains now is to do what the words say—to drop the raft and go walking on the dry land. And to do this, you must drop the raft. In other words, you cannot, at this stage, think about religion and practice it at the same time. To see the moon, you must forget the pointing finger, and simply look at the moon.

Religion temporary use

entertained.

This is all really a case of our own proverb, ‘‘a watched pot never boils.’’ For if you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into reality, you have stopped concentrating. Real concentration is therefore a rather curious and seemingly paradoxical state, since it is at once the maximum of consciousness and the minimum of ego-feeling,

Real concentration

Nature.

purpose.

For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is—a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism. But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched-up.

But

resignation.

They do not merely insist that human life is impermanent, that man has no immortal soul, and that in time every trace of our existence must vanish. They go on to indicate, as the wise man’s goal, a release from this transient life which seems to be no release at all—a state called nirvana, which may be translated “despair,” and the attainment of a metaphysical condition called shunyata, which is a voidness so void as to be neither existent nor nonexistent! For nonexistence implies existence as its logical correlate, whereas shunyata is so void that it does not imply anything at all.

Because, furthermore, happiness exists only in relation to misery, pleasure in relation to pain, the perceptive man does not try to separate them. The relation is so inseparable that, in some sense, happiness is misery, and pleasure is—because it implies—pain. Realizing this, he learns to abandon all desire for any happiness separate from misery, or pleasure apart from pain.

Relative happiness

To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Lesson One is: “I give up.” What happens now? You find yourself in what is perhaps a rather unfamiliar state of mind. Just watching. Not trying to get anything. Not expecting anything. Not hoping. Not seeking. Not trying to relax. Just watching, without purpose.

Lesson one

In Zen, it is called satori, sudden awakening.

Like Chuang-tzu’s perfect man, they employ their minds as a mirror: it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.

Defination of mirror

Consider life as a revolving wheel set upright with man walking on its tire. As he walks, the wheel is revolving toward him beneath his feet, and if he is not to be carried backward by it and flung to the ground he must walk at the same speed as the wheel turns. If he exceeds that speed, he will topple forward and slip off the wheel onto his face. For at every moment we stand, as it were, on the top of a wheel; immediately we try to cling to that moment, to that particular point of the wheel, it is no longer at the top and we are off our balance. Thus by not trying to seize the moment, we keep it, for the second we fail to walk on we cease to remain still. Yet within this there is a still deeper truth. From the standpoint of eternity we never can and never do leave the top of the wheel, for if a circle is set in infinite space it has neither top nor bottom. Wherever

Life as a wheel analogy

THERE

It has taken many different attitudes to science, ranging from denouncing it as a rival doctrine, through conciliation and adaptation, to a sort of withdrawal in which it is felt that theology speaks of a realm of being inaccessible to scientific inquiry. Throughout, there has been the general assumption on the part of both theologians and scientists that the two disciplines were employing the same kind of language, and were interested in the same order of objective, determinate truths. Indeed, when some theologians speak of God as having “an objective, supernatural reality, independent of our minds and of the sensible world,” it is impossible to see how their language differs from that of science. For it appears that God is some specific thing or fact—an objective existence—supernatural in the sense that He or It is imperceptible within the “wave band” of our sense-organs and scientific instruments. Where this confusion between the nature of religious or metaphysical statements, on the one hand, and scientific or historical statements, on the other, remains unclarified, it will, of course, be difficult indeed to see how modern logical philosophy can make any positive contribution to metaphysics. In a theological system where God plays the part of a scientific hypothesis, that is, a means of explaining and predicting the course of events, it is easy enough to show that the hypothesis adds nothing to our knowledge. One does not explain what happens by saying that God wills ...

Sciemce versus modern philosiphy

To the Asian mind, “Reality” cannot be expressed; it can only be known intuitively by getting rid of unreality, of contradictory and absurd ways of thinking and feeling.

At this point, modern logical philosophy dismisses the problem and turns its attention to something else on the assumption that the unknowable need not and cannot concern us further. It asserts that questions which have neither the physical nor the logical possibility of an answer are not real questions. But this assertion does not get rid of the common human feeling that such unknowns or unknowables as electrons, energy, existence, consciousness, or “Reality” are in some way queer. The very fact of not being able to know them makes them all the stranger. Only a rather dry kind of mind turns away from them—a mind interested in nothing but logical structures. The more complete kind of mind, which can feel as well as think, remains to “indulge” the odd sense of mystery which comes from contemplating the fact that everything is at base something which cannot be known. Every statement which you make about this “something” turns out to be nonsense. And what is specially strange is that this unknowable something is also the basis of that which otherwise I know so intimately—myself.

Basis of reality

void.