Become What You Are

by Alan W. Watts

Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature.

Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions.

Without exception, everything that we attain or create, even the memorials that survive our death, must perish without trace, and that our quest for permanence is pure futility. Because, furthermore, happiness exists only in relation to misery, pleasure in relation to pain, the perceptive man does not try to separate them.

To want pleasure is to lack it.

Buddhism suggests nirvana with terms that are negative and void, and not with the positive and desirable imagery which surrounds the notion of God.

Nirvana, release from suffering and desire, is called unattainable—not because it does not happen but because there is no way of seeking it.

Now the point of the emphasis upon impermanence is that every object of search, of desire, is in the end ungraspable and futile.

Likewise, to desire nirvana is simply to make nirvana another name for ever-elusive pleasure.

But there is no Way. Nobody knows the Way.

Life is not going anywhere; there is nothing to be attained. All striving and grasping is so much smoke in the clutch of a dissolving hand. We are all lost—kicked off into a void the moment we were born—and the only way is to fall into oblivion.

To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Lesson One is: “I give up.”

We are all familiar with the many involuntary acts of the human body which never happen so long as we are trying to make them happen, so long as we are anxious about them—going to sleep, remembering a forgotten name, or, under certain circumstances, sexual excitation.

Well, there is something like this which happens upon the sole condition that we are not trying to make it happen, that we have realized quite clearly that we cannot make it happen.

They must happen by themselves.

There are those who say that to attain the highest wisdom we must be still and calm, immovable in the midst of turmoil. And there are those who say that we must move on as life moves, never stopping for a moment either in fear of what is to come or to turn a regretful glance at what has gone.

Both points of view, however, are true, for to attain that highest wisdom we must at once walk on and remain still.

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.”

The point which emerges is that what we are counting or measuring in physics, and that what we are experiencing in everyday life as sense data, is at root unknown and probably unknowable.

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.

Western man has a peculiar passion for order and logic, such that, for him, the entire significance of life consists in putting experience into order. What is ordered is predictable, and thus a basis for “safe bets.”

the baffling is also the wonderful.

Speculative metaphysics

Wonder and liberation

This is why Buddhism speaks of release, nirvana, as deliverance from the Wheel, and of seeking Reality as “like looking for an ox when you are riding on one.”

There would be no need whatsoever to wonder what I am unless in some way I felt strange to myself.

Now, consciousness, the ego, feels uprooted so long as it avoids and refuses to accept the fact that it does not and cannot know its own base or ground.

By the familiar “law of reversed effort,” this refusal of the unknown brings the feeling of insecurity, and in its train all the frustrating and impossible problems, all the vicious circles of human life, from the exalted nonsense of ontology down to the vulgar realms of power politics, where individuals play at being God.

“That are thou”—without ever giving a positive designation of what that is. The man who tries to know, to grasp himself, becomes insecure, just as one suffocates by holding one’s breath.

Conversely, the man who really knows that he cannot grasp himself gives up, relaxes, and is at ease. But he never really knows if he simply dismisses the problem, and does not pause to wonder, to feel, and to become vividly aware of the real impossibility of self-knowledge.

telling us that in every statement in which we think we have grasped or defined or merely designated Reality, we have uttered only nonsense.

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.”

In all its fullness, this admission is precisely faith—the recognition that one must ultimately “give in” to a life-source, a Self beyond the ego, which lies beyond the definition of thought and the control of action.

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

No hell is worse than that in which one lives without knowing it.

One may pretend that it does not exist, that one has surrendered it, but one must sincerely answer the question, “If I could satisfy that desire, would I?”

Thus the first step on the Path is to know what you want, not what you ought to want.

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.

Zen is itself a Japanese word, derived from the Chinese Ch’an or Ch’an-na, a form of the Sanskrit dhyana, which is usually rendered in English as “meditation” or “contemplation.”

The Buddha, who lived some 600 years BCE, taught that life, as we live it, is necessarily unharmonious because of the selfish, possessive attitude we adopt towards it. In Sanskrit this attitude is called trishna (often mistranslated “desire”), and though there is no one word for it in English, it may be understood as the craving to resist change, to “save our own skins” at all costs, to possess those whom we love; in fact, to hold on to life “like grim death.”

Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain.

it is so easy to represent the doctrine of “letting go” as an utter denial of life and the world, and Nirvana as a state infinitely removed from all earthly concerns.

And a bird is a bird; you hear its song, but you cannot seize the notes to make them continue.

It just is, and is gone, and you feel the beauty of its song precisely because the notes do not wait for you to analyze them.

The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao.

There are some who never live, who are always having thoughts about life and feelings about life; others are swept away on the tides of circumstance, so overwhelmed by events that they have nothing of their own.

a thing like a beam of light which can be seen and used, but never caught—loved, but never possessed. And by that we may know that Zen is life.

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 that all possible things, events, thoughts and qualities are aspects of a single Reality which is sometimes called the Self of the universe.

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

Someday, we think, it might be possible for us to delve down into the deepest recesses of our souls, lay our fingers on this mysterious universal essence and avail ourselves of its tremendous powers. This, however, does not seem quite the right way to took at it.

sometimes it is called the principle of “nonduality” because nothing else exists beside it and nothing is excluded from it.