Become What You Are

by Alan W. Watts

To use another Buddhist simile: The doctrine is like a finger pointing at the moon, and one must take care not to mistake the finger for the moon. Too many of us, I fear, suck the pointing finger of religion for comfort, instead of looking where it points. Now it seems to me that what the finger of religion points at is something not at all religious. Religion, with all its apparatus of ideas and practices, is altogether a pointing—and it does not point at itself. It doesn’t point at God, either, for the notion of God is part and parcel of religion. I might say that what religion points at is reality, except that this merely puts a philosophical notion in place of a religious one. And I can think of a dozen other substitutes for God or reality. I could say that it points at one’s true Self, at the eternal Now, at the nonverbal world, at the infinite and ineffable—but really none of this is very helpful. It’s just putting one finger in place of another. When Joshu asked his teacher Nansen, ‘‘What is the Tao, the Way?’’ Nansen replied, ‘‘Your everyday mind is the Tao.’’

If you can concentrate the mind for two seconds, you can do it for two minutes, and if you can do it for two minutes, you can do it for two hours. Of course, if you want to make this kind of thing horribly difficult, you begin to think about timing yourself. Instead of concentrating, you begin to think about whether you are concentrating, about how long you have concentrated, and about how much longer you are going to keep it up. All this is totally off the point. Concentrate for one second. If, at the end of this time, your mind has wandered off, concentrate for another second, and then another. Nobody ever has to concentrate for more than one second—this one. This is why it is quite literally off the point to time yourself, to compete with yourself, and to bother about your progress and success in the art. It’s simply the old story of making a difficult job easy by taking it one step at a time.

We want to enjoy ourselves, and fear that if we forget ourselves there will be no enjoyment—an entertainment without anyone present to be entertained. This is why self-consciousness is a constant inhibition of creative action, a kind of chronic self-frustration, such that civilizations which suffer from an overdose of it go raving mad, invent atom bombs and blow themselves up. Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.

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.

The only way to enter into this state is precipitately—without delay or hesitation, just to do it. This is why I ordinarily avoid discussion of all the various kinds of Asian meditation techniques, such as Yoga. For I am inclined to feel that for most Westerners, these are not aids but obstacles to concentration. It is not unaffected and natural for us to assume the lotus posture and go through all sorts of spiritual gymnastics. So many Westerners who do this kind of thing are so self-conscious about it, so preoccupied with the idea of doing it that they never really do it at all.

Therefore, the important thing is simply to begin—anywhere, wherever you are. If you happen to be sitting, just sit. If you are smoking a pipe, just smoke it. If you are thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily,

While modern astronomy tells us of our insignificance beneath the stars, it also tells us that if we lift so much as a finger, we affect them. It is true that we are transient, that we have no abiding self, but the fabric of life is such that one broken thread may work immeasurable ruin. The magnitude of the world with whose destiny we are bound up increases rather than diminishes our importance.

Lao-tzu didn’t actually say very much more about the meaning of Tao. The Way of Nature, the Way of happening self-so, or, if you like, the very process of life, was something which he was much too wise to define. For to try to say anything definite about the Tao is like trying to eat your mouth: you can’t get outside it to chew it. To put it the other way round: anything you can chew is not your mouth. So, too, anything you can define or imagine, anything you can understand or desire, is not the Tao. We can’t know it, we can’t feel or sense it, for the very simple reason that it’s the whole substance of knowing, feeling, and sensing, of living and existing. It’s too close to be seen and too obvious to be noticed or understood.

This is why our principal problem in life is ourselves—why we are so tormented with anxiety about self-preservation and self-control, why we are so mixed up that we have to make laws to regulate our behavior, employ police to keep ourselves in order, and equip armies with explosives to prevent us from blowing ourselves up. In the more intimate sphere of personal life, the problem is the pain of trying to avoid suffering and the fear of trying not to be afraid.

Your aim is to preserve and perpetuate yourself, but in the larger context of the universe there is no reason, no purpose for this aim.

But the kind of seriousness which drags man down to the earth and kills the life of the spirit is not the child of sorrow but of a sort of playacting in which the player is deceived into identifying himself with his part. There is a seriousness in the play of children, but even this is different, for the child is aware that it is only playing and its seriousness is an indirect form of fun. But this seriousness becomes a vice in the adult, because he makes a religion of the game, so identifying himself with his part or position in life that he fears to lose it. This is especially so when the unenlightened man attains to any degree of responsibility; he develops a heaviness of touch, a lack of abandon, a stiffness which indicates that he is using his dignity as stilts to keep his head above adversity. His trouble is that instead of playing his part, his part plays him and makes him the laughingstock of all who see through his guise.

One does not explain what happens by saying that God wills it. For if everything that happens is by divine intention or permission, the will of God becomes merely another name for “everything that happens.” Upon logical analysis, the statement, “Everything is the will of God,” turns out to be the tautology, “Everything is everything.”

We have perhaps forgotten that there was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. . . . Something unknown is doing we don’t know what—that is what our theory amounts to. It does not sound a particularly illuminating theory. I have read something like it elsewhere: The slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. There is the same suggestion of activity. There is the same indefiniteness as to the nature of the activity and of what it is that is acting.4

For example, when logical philosophy asserts that “true meaning is a verifiable hypothesis,” it must recognize that this very statement is meaningless if unverifiable. Similarly, when it insists that the only realities are those “facts” which are elicited in “scientific observation,” it must recognize that it cannot, and does not, answer the question “What is a fact?” If we say that “facts” or “things” are the segments of experience symbolized by nouns, we are merely shifting the irreducible element of nonsense in our definition from “fact” to “experience.”

Language can hardly dispense with the word “is,” and yet the dictionary can only inform us that “what is” is “what exists,” and that “what exists” is “what is.”

Belief, in the popular Christian sense, falls short of this faith, since its object is a God conceived as having a determinate nature. But to the extent that God can be a known object of definite nature, He is an idol, and belief in such a God is idolatry.

#faith #god #religion

“Brahman is unknown to those who know It, and is known to those who do not know It at all.”

#faith #religion #god #reality #theEternal

Nothing is easier than to give up the world because one is incompetent in the affairs of the world. There is no wisdom in scorning riches simply because one is unable to obtain them, nor in despising the pleasures of the senses because one has not the means of fulfilling them. If the desire for these things exists, and if that desire is thwarted by circumstance, to add self-deception to frustration is to exchange a lesser hell for a greater.

A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason.

There are thousands of men and women searching through volume after volume, visiting religious societies, and attending the lectures of famous teachers in the vain hope that they will one day come upon some explanation of the mysteries of life: some saying, some idea, which will contain the solution to the Infinite Riddle. Some continue the search till they die, others imagine that in various ideologies they have found what they desire, and a few penetrate beyond ideas about Truth to Truth itself.

If the doctrines of Christianity are different from those of Hinduism, it does not necessarily follow that the religions are different, for more than one doctrine may describe a single state of mind, and without this state of mind the religion, as a mere collection of doctrines, has no meaning whatever; it is just as if it were a babble of unintelligible words. But doctrines differ because people have different mental backgrounds and traditions; an English person and a Chinese person may have the same feeling but they will speak of it in different ways because they are relating it to different mental contexts. It is therefore most unwise to study religion from the standpoint of doctrine as doctrine, for this is the purest superficiality. Doctrines and conceptual ideas vary as languages vary, but one and the same meaning may be conveyed by both English and French. Christians believe in a personal God and Buddhists do not, but as regards the true essentials of religion this difference is as superficial as the fact that in French every noun has a gender, whereas this is not so in English.

What, then, is a truly deep feeling of salvation? Insofar as this question can be answered at all, perhaps it is best to consider one of the greatest doctrines in all religion in terms of a state of mind. For this purpose the best choice is probably the Hindu or Vedanta conception of Brahman, because this is at once the simplest and the most subtle of doctrines—subtle just because it is so simple. The same doctrine is found in other systems, but Vedanta gives it the best philosophical expression. It is that all possible things, events, thoughts and qualities are aspects of a single Reality which is sometimes called the Self of the universe. In themselves these many aspects have no reality; they are real only in that each one of them is a manifestation of Brahman or the Self. To put it in another way, the true self of any given thing is Brahman and not something that belongs exclusively to the thing in question. Each individual is therefore an aspect of Brahman, and no two aspects are the same. But man’s self is much more than what he considers to be his ego, his personality called John Smith or William Jones. The ego is a device or trick (maya) employed so that Brahman may manifest itself, and man’s innermost self is therefore identical with the Self of all things. Thus if anyone wants to know what Brahman is he has just to look around, to think, to act, to be aware, to live, for all that is known by the senses, thought in the mind or felt in the heart is Brahman.

Beware of the false freedom of doing as you like; to be really free you must also be free to do as you don’t like, for if you are only free to do as you like you are still tied up in dualism, being bound by your own whims.

All those things upon which unenlightened man depends for his happiness are dual, and thus conditioned by their opposites. Life cannot be had without death, pleasure without evil. We cannot, therefore, depend for our ultimate salvation and security upon any one aspect of a given pair of opposites (dvandva), for the two are as essential to each other as back and front are essential to the totality of any object.

The Church, however, proves so often inadequate to cure the spiritual disease of modern man because he finds it impossible to believe its exclusive interpretation of those ancient symbols. For those who can believe, the Church is satisfactory, less on account of that interpretation than on account of the symbols themselves. Whatever we may read into them, they seem to retain a power in themselves which no amount of misunderstanding can destroy. Thus the fallacy of modern scepticism is that in rejecting the Church’s doctrines it has rejected the symbols as well, and so, if the expression is not too crude, has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. However, the reference to the baby is particularly apt, because what is perhaps the most important of these symbols is concerned with the baby, the Holy Child “conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary.” The attention of the Church has often been drawn to the inconvenient occurrence of this same story in other and older religions, as for instance in the legend of Maya and the Buddha, and of Isis and Horus. Whereupon the learned fathers have resorted to somewhat lame replies, calling upon that demon ex machina, the Devil, and suggesting that he put the story in other religions to confuse the faithful.

Apart from life, the self is as meaningless as a solitary note taken from a symphony, as dead as a finger cut from the hand, and as stagnant as air caught from the wind and shut tight in a room.