Become What You Are

by Alan W. Watts

Thus it can neither be lost nor found and you cannot avail yourself of its powers any more than you can dispense with them, for all these conceptions of having and not having, of gain and loss, finite and infinite, belong to the principle of duality.

He is free to think of anything and nothing, to love and to fear, to be joyful or sad, to set his mind on philosophy or on the trivial concerns of the world; he is free to be both a sage and a fool, to feel both compassion and anger, to experience both bliss and agony.

serving God is just living; it is not a question of the way in which you live, because all ways are included in God. To understand this is to wake up to your freedom to be alive.

it is not something which you can get at all, however fierce your efforts, however great your learning and however tireless your virtue.

here all men and all things are equal and whatever they do can go neither up nor down.

if you allow yourself freedom to be yourself, you will discover that God is not what you have to become, but what you are—in spite of yourself.

At this moment the universe is both manifested as a collection of separate individual things, and at the same time each of these things retains absolute unity and identity with its divine source.

We are accustomed to believe that a sage or mystic is one who beholds God or Brahman in all things; but if Brahman is all things, surely an ordinary man in seeing them is doing no less than the sage?

To see things we must be able to distinguish them, which means that we must be able to separate them from other things or from ourselves.

It should rather be said that he feels Brahman, the force of the universe, at work in everything he does, thinks, and feels, and this gives a powerful and liberating impulse to his spirit.

He is freed from himself, which is the only thing that ever bound anyone, because he has let himself go. The unenlightened man keeps a tight hold on himself because he is afraid of losing himself; he can trust neither circumstances nor his own human nature; he is terrified of being genuine, of accepting himself as he is and tries to deceive himself into the belief that he is as he wishes to be.

People imagine that letting themselves go would have disastrous results; trusting neither circumstances nor themselves, which together make up life, they are forever interfering and trying to make their own souls and the world conform with preconceived patterns. This interference is simply the attempt of the ego to dominate life. But when you see that all such attempts are fruitless and when you relax the fear-born resistance to life in yourself and around you which is called egoism, you realize the freedom of union with Brahman. In fact you have always had this freedom, for the state of union with Brahman can neither be attained nor lost; all men and all things have it, in spite of themselves. It can only be realized, which is to say made real to you, by letting life live you for a while instead of trying to make yourself live life. You will soon reach the point where you will be unable to tell whether your thoughts and feelings are your own or whether life put them into you, for the distinction between yourself and life will have disappeared. If the truth be known, there never was any distinction, save in our imaginations. This is called union with Brahman, for “he that loseth his life shall find it.”

In the quest for understanding of life there comes a time when everyone is confronted with “that little tail”—the one tiny obstacle that stands in the way of complete fulfillment.

This curve represents the progress of human intellect towards Enlightenment, grasping more and more subtle nuances of meaning at each stage of its journey.

In the Bhagavad Gita we are told to stand aside from our thoughts and feelings, to realize that they are not the Self and learn that the Self is not the actor in actions but the Spectator of actions.

The first step in Buddhism is Right Motive, and to attain Enlightenment it is said that we must do away with selfish desire. But if we have selfish desire in the beginning, surely the desire to get rid of it is also selfish.

Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or a denial about anything; as soon as we think that This is That or This is not That we have the distinction between This and That.

Whether you can concentrate your thoughts or not, whether they are of compassion or hatred, whether you are thinking about Buddhism or chewing your nails, you cannot by any means diverge from the Tao. You may love life or you may loathe it, yet your loving and loathing are themselves manifestations of life.

For whether we think of the past or the future, and whatever we think about either of them, our thoughts exist in and partake of the eternal Now; otherwise they would not exist at all.

We cannot separate ourselves from this present moment, and if we imagine that Enlightenment consists simply in living in the present, in thinking only about what is going on now, we find ourselves in the dualism of now and then.

The point is that we can only think of what is going on now, even if we are thinking of the past or the future. For our thoughts about past and future are going on now, and ...

Indeed, there is no prescription for enlightenment, for as soon as we start saying that it is this or it is not this, we try to make two realities in the universe instead of one.

In fact, you can think about philosophy, or about eating and drinking, you can love mankind, you can hate it, you can do as you like, you can do as you don’t like, you can discipline yourself, you can run wild, you can seek wisdom, you can ignore it, but you can’t diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao. Is it? Beware of that “is.” The sting is in the tail.

each single atom contains in itself the whole universe. Therefore, what is done by one individual affects all others; if one man raises himself, he raises at the same time the whole universe.

Trying to work out karma with self-discipline was like trying to pick up soap with wet fingers; the harder you grasp, the faster the soap slips away.

All that is necessary is to give up forever any idea of attaining merit by one’s own power, and then to have faith that one is accepted by the compassion of Amida from the very beginning, no matter what one’s moral condition. One must even give up the idea that faith itself is achieved by self-power, for faith, too, is Amida’s gift.

Then someone tells him that, if only he will open his eyes and see it, he is a Buddha

—in other words, that man is given the sense of freedom to be what he is at this and any moment, free to be both the highest and the lowest that is in him. This results at once in a great relaxation of psychic tension.

if they only realized it, all beings are in Nirvana from the very beginning.

How wondrous strange and how miraculous, this—I draw water and I carry fuel.

Thus it is often remarked in Zen literature that one’s “ordinary thoughts” or “everyday mind” is Enlightenment (satori).

You must not be artful. Be your ordinary self . . . You yourself as you are—that is Buddha Dharma. I stand or I sit; I array myself or I eat; I sleep when I am fatigued. The ignoramus will deride me but the wise man will understand.

He rises quietly in the morning, puts on his dress and goes out to his work. When he wants to walk, he walks; when he wants to sit, he sits. He has no hankering after Buddhahood, not the remotest thought of it.

“If ordinary life is Nirvana and ordinary thoughts are Enlightenment, whatever is Buddhism about, and what can it possibly teach us, other than to go on living exactly as we have lived before?”

“What is the Tao?” “Usual life,” answered Nansen, “is the very Tao.” “How can we accord with it?” “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it.”

Zen wants us to feel nonduality, not just to think it, and therefore when we say, “Nirvana is Samsara,” we are joining two things together that were never in need of being joined.

They are trying to set us free within ourselves, and to make us at home with ourselves and with the universe in which we live. This freedom is known when we give up “contriving” and accept ourselves as we are, but it does not seem to me that the experience can be effective unless there has first been a state of contriving and struggle.

In Zen this is self-discipline; in Shin it is coming to an acute awareness of one’s insufficiency through a previous attempt at self-discipline.

The danger of continuing in the jiriki way is that one may so easily become a victim of spiritual pride, expecting to make oneself into a Buddha; the danger of the tariki way is that the experience may come so easily that its true meaning is unseen and its force unfelt.

Spiritual freedom, however, involves much more than going on living exactly as you have lived before. It involves a particular kind of joyousness, or what the Buddhists term bliss (ananda).

There are no longer any obstacles to thinking and feeling; you may let your mind go in whatever direction it pleases, for all possible directions are acceptable, and you can feel free to abandon yourself to any of them.

Yet, in the life of the spirit, it is much harder to receive than to give; it is often such a blow to human pride to have to accept from Amida, God, or life what it would be so much more distinctive to achieve for oneself.

And Reality is non-dual.

A second factor which makes for morality is the gratitude felt for the freedom to be all of oneself,

Hence the danger of a merely philosophic understanding. But from the emotional standpoint there appears to be every reason for gratitude.

Thus the experience of freedom or Enlightenment is like discovering an immeasurably precious jewel in one’s littlest acts and lowest thoughts. One discovers it where all jewels are first found—in the depths of the earth, or lying in the mud.

And this very body is the body of Buddha.”

strictly speaking, Enlightenment is no Enlightenment unless it is shared and circulated. It is no one’s property, and those who try to possess it for themselves do not understand it. Service, morality, and gratitude are our response as men for a gift to which we cannot respond as Buddhas.

“The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street—so what?” So what? Well, what else are you looking for? Here is someone who eats out the grocer’s store and still complains that he is starving.

He always thinks of the second and third pieces of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion.