Derivations on a Theme -- The Fruits of Evil

Trey Smith

But briefly, he [Alan Watts in The Supreme Identity] argues for a God that, rather than being absolutely good, is the source of both good and evil (in the finite, relative realm), while transcending both Himself. Towards the end of the chapter he says something like how, from our limited perspective, evil seems absolutely terrible, yet, from the standpoint of the infinite, it is an integral part of the finite duality, and even the most atrocious acts are worth it, for the overall beauty of the whole Creation. He likens it to standing with your face pressed to a painting; stepping back, you suddenly see that those ugly shadows are what give shape, form, balance, and identity to the light and color.
~ from Was It Worth It? by Brandon at Notes From the Outside ~

I've been doing some pondering about the concept of heaven. Supposedly, it is a place of perfection. Depending on one's faith perspective, you may be feted by nymph-like virgins or so much is provided that you no longer have a care in the "world." It is a place in which all who enter are pure of heart and every pure desire is quenched.

How could a place like that genuinely exist? More importantly, who really would want to live there!?

Evil provides necessary definition to our lives, whether physical, emotional or spiritual. Love is a meaningless concept without its antithesis. If evil finally was vanquished, what would we be left with?

Absolute boredom!

Evil serves a necessary function. Without it, life simply wouldn't be worth living. There would be no challenges to overcome and no opportunity to gain wisdom.

Now this is not a backdoor way of arguing for hedonism -- all lives lived to achieve maximum individual pleasure at the expense of others. I am also not suggesting that we should strive to be evil as a way of providing our lives with deeper definition. All I am suggesting is that the love/evil dynamic is just as much a part of existence as the yin/yang dynamic.

Imagine a world filled with sages. Each person lives in tune with their inner nature (Tao). Would that mean that evil had been cast away forever?

Me thinks not. Even people pure of heart who follow their own paths will find that these paths sometimes collide. Colliding paths necessarily will engender conflict and conflict often serves as the root of evil.

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 7/7

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 6/7

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 5/7

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 4/7

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 3/7

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 2/7

Afternoon Matinee: Watts on Chuang Tzu 1/7

Alan Watts Didn't Get It

Alan Watts Didn't Get It
by Scott Bradley

Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen is a classic interpretation of Zen for the West. When we read the testimonies of people whose interest in Zen began more than a couple of decades ago, it becomes clear that Watts had a significant influence upon many of them. Though my active interest does not go back more than about five years, because I somehow stumbled onto a copy, he has also greatly influenced me.

I was somewhat taken aback, therefore, when a friend who has put serious time and effort into the study and practice of Zen, told me “Watts didn’t get it”. Aitken likewise mentions how D.T. Suzuki, referring to a Wattsian interpretation of a passage, in his humble way, said, “He didn’t understand that statement.”

But I don’t think I ever truly believed that Watt’s did get it. And this, I think, is what makes his interpretation of Zen so appealing. He was not, strictly speaking, a believer. He was not a partisan. He spoke with deep appreciation and insight of a way of being into which he had not himself been immersed and was thus able to present the matter without a religious reek.

About thirty some years ago a friend gave me a book on Zen, explaining that he was unable to get past the first page. Neither was I. I am not sure, but I think it was by Suzuki.

On this first page, the author essentially said that Zen was the superior way. My nostrils stung and I could go no further. My aversion to the religious-mind is longstanding.

I was actually quite interested to know about Zen at that time. And had that book been by the non-partisan, non-religious Alan Watts, perhaps I would have begun my return to things spiritual way back then. But then, if that had been the case, perhaps I would myself now be writing that Zen is the superior way.

Perhaps there is a sense in which Watts, in not getting it, understood Zen better than those who do get it. If this seems counter-intuitive to the extreme, perhaps that is because it also Zennish. The Zen masters are not alone in having the right to smack people upside the head. We, the people, have the right to smack them right back — that is, to smack them back to where they belong, back into the realm of non-partisan, non-religious, undiscriminating Reality.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Strained Muscle

Now, if you want to find an intelligent solution to a problem, your brain can do the work. You have all the necessary intelligence inside the bone in your skull. However, most people never use their brains; they use their minds instead, and they use their minds the same way they use their muscles. You can strain your head just as if it were a muscle, and work very hard trying to arrive at an answer, but it doesn't really work that way.
~ Alan Watts in Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ~

What is this bloke talking about? Brain? Mind? Two words that mean the exact same thing, right? He's making a distinction where none exist!

When you really want to find an answer to something, what you need to do is contemplate the problem. Visualize your question as well as you can, and then simply wait. If you don't, and if you instead try to find the solution through brute mental strength, you may be disappointed, because any solution that comes in that way is likely to be wrong. But when you have waited for a while, the solution will come of itself.
~ more from Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ~

The man's crazy! In our highly competitive world, you gotta strike first, while the iron is hot. Ya know, the early bird catches the worm. Those who tarry often fail. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

That is how to use your brain, and it will work for you in the same way your stomach will digest your food for you without your having to supervise it consciously. Our attempts to supervise everything consciously have all led to consequences that aren't too good for our stomach, and the reason for that is quite simple. Conscious attention, which employs words, cannot think of very much. We are forced, therefore, to ignore almost everything while we are thinking. We think along a single track, but the world doesn't proceed along a single track. The world is everything happening altogether everywhere, and you just can't take all that into consideration because there isn't time. However, your brain can take it all into consideration because it is capable of handling innumerable variables at once, even though your conscious attention cannot.
~ more from Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ~

Me thinks Alan Watts was a very wise man indeed! Like with Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu before him, he said and wrote things that, on the surface, sounded nonsensical. However, if you do not allow your prejudices to interfere and listen to the whole thought, it makes a lot of sense! If you pay attention with your mind, but allow your brain to process the information, then it rings oh so true.

Lazy Ways

Following the watercourse way argues always for a high order of intelligence, for it is more intelligent to sail a boat than to row it, even though sailing is a lazier way of doing it. Technologically it is easier to use the wind than to work against it, but in the West we haven't really awakened to the fact it would be much more intelligent for us to use the sun, the wind, and the tides as sources of energy rather than using fossil fuels. And so we live in a state of foolish ignorance.

~ Alan Watts in Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ~

For decades, here in the US and around the world, the vast majority of subsidies and research and development funds have gone to the oil, coal and nuclear power industries. All three are far more labor intensive and polluting than solar, wind or water energy. Unfortunately, we are only now beginning to see the folly of this strategy.

The US -- the largest per capita energy user in the world -- seems very resistant to change. Our energy policies continue to be driven solely by economic and political concerns, not by environmental health concerns. As is all too typical, so-called American ingenuity shows a strong tendency to work against, rather than with, nature. And even though the ecological writing is on the wall, we continue to plow ahead in the wrong direction.

This offers yet another example of not following the principle of wu wei. Rather than allow our society to unfold in natural ways, our nation is willfully forcing things in nonsustainable ways and, when force is used, it creates tremendous amounts of friction and tension which leads to stress -- stress of the people, the national psyche and the natural world.

More on Words

The order of the world is very different from the order we create with the rules of our syntax and grammar. The order of the world is extraordinarily complex, while the order of words is relatively simple, and to use the order of words to try to explain life is really as clumsy an operation as trying to drink water with a fork. Our confusion of the order of logic and of words with the order of nature is what makes everything seem so problematic to us. [emphasis added]

~ Alan Watts in What is Tao? ~

Held Hostage by Words

Words and symbols are magical savers of time and effort otherwise spent in pointing at things, drawing them, or dragging them around in the intellectual equivalent of barter. It is no wonder at all that words have been felt to be supernatural, and because of their astonishing power, to have greater reality and antiquity than the material universe. But this, possibly superstitious, conception has had quite remarkable consequences for the further development of consciousness. It has laid the foundations for anxiety and guilt. It has made it possible for man to compare himself as he is with himself as he should be, and to realize that the world of events falls far, far short of the rationality, simplicity, orderliness and intelligibility of the world of words.

~ Alan Watts in Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship ~

It's interesting how the human mind continuously confuses the various fingers pointing at moons to be the moons themselves. We too often treat words like love, hate, compassion, freedom, heaven, democracy, etc., as if solely the word itself is the tangible thing we're talking about. It's nothing more than a symbol or an abbreviation for a concept that defies words.

Words, we can say, represent a double-edged sword. On the one hand, words allow us the ability to exchange ideas and make complicated formulations. Words are the breeze that lifts our sails through the water and aid us in getting from point A to point B and beyond.

At the same time, words confine us -- they hold us as virtual hostages. We begin to think that we must put every feeling, every sensation, every sense of knowing into words or else these feelings, sensations and knowing-ness are useless.

But language belies true knowledge. Most of us understand this intuitively, but we continue to flail at trying to find the right words and phrases to express it. But when we try to express it -- both externally AND internally -- we cheat it of its very essential nature.

And by writing what I'm writing right now, I'm doing it too. So, I'll stop.

A Word About Flies

One of the first things everyone should understand is that every creature in the universe that is in any manner of speaking conscious regards itself as a human being. That is to say, if a creature is sensitive, it knows and is aware of a hierarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it. Even such a tiny creature as the fruit fly, which lives only a few days, is aware of all sorts of weird little animals and pollens and spores floating in the atmosphere that we don't even notice, unless we happen to be looking through a microscope.

Indeed, the fruit fly may well criticize these spores and think they are inferior to it, and at the same time human beings are incomprehensible, from its perspective, because we are outside its perceptual range as a quasar is outside of ours. And actually, our universe may be inside an atom in somebody else's world, and all our galaxies may be part of the same speck of dust sitting on a giant piano.
~ Alan Watts in Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ~

The above quote really resonates with me. What about you?

Open-ness

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness -- an act of trust in the unknown.
~ Alan Watts in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ~

Why do we each believe this and not that? Why does one set of beliefs resonate to the depths of our souls, while several others seem like nothing more than insane poppycock?

Of course, the true believer will tell you that they believe what they believe because it's true! The only problem with this line of defense is that it's NOT true. Truth is -- when we each get down to the bottom line -- science, religion, philosophy and almost anything else in existence is based on a type of faith.

For example, if I say the sun will rise tomorrow morning, I genuinely don't know that it will. I have a great deal of faith in that statement borne of past experience, but, just because the sun has risen everyday of my life, doesn't guarantee that it will indeed rise ever again. Science tells me the mathematical chances of the sun not rising tomorrow are exponentially minute, but nothing can be predicted 100% of the time.

How many times in our lives have we tried to instruct someone else on how to do something and said, "Works for me every single time"? And then it doesn't work! We go through all the steps that we've employed countless times before and it still refuses to produce the result we KNOW it should. All we are left with is "That's the darnedest thing."

So, I return to my previous question: Why do we each believe this and not that?

You Are the Universe

Comments?

More Watts

...that Western cultures have bred a type of human being who feels strongly alienated from everything which is not his own consciousness. He is a stranger both to the external world and his own body, and in this sense he has lost his connection with the surrounding universe. He does not know that the "ultimate inside" of himself is the same as the "ultimate inside" of the cosmos, or that, in other words, his sensation of being "I" is a glimmering intimation of what the universe itself feels like on the inside.

He has been taught to regard everything outside of human skins as so much witless mechanism which has nothing whatsoever in common with human feelings and values. This style of man must therefore see himself as the ghastly and tragic accident of sensitive and intelligent tissue caught up in the cosmic toils like a mouse in a cotton gin.
~ Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship by Alan Watts, p. 6 ~

Polarity

At the very root of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes through much of the world.

To the traditional way of Chinese thinking, this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that + and -, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.

People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is "to make the world a better place" -- to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness.

But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially "good and healthy" are creating more problems than they solve. We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study.

As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself. Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves -- that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from themselves...This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare...
~ Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, from Chapter 3 ~

Yes, it is a long quote, but I thought it important to thresh out fully the point Watts is making. So, what say you?

Living in the Past

I think we've all met a person who seems fixated on the past. Such people don't seem "with it" and have a great amount of difficulty dealing with people and situations in the here and now. We tend to think that people like this need psychiatric help.

It dawned on me last night that such individuals are not atypical at all. No, what we view as abnormal only is the breadth of their fixation. It's only when the past they refuse to let go of is from a different era or a decade or two ago that we say they've "lost touch with reality".

Every person's mind lives in the past. Each time we encounter anything in life, our minds are able to interpret stimuli and thoughts only AFTER they have taken place. Sprinters don't begin to run the exact moment the starter's pistol is fired. It takes a fraction of a second for the mind to compute the sound before impelling one's feet to get in gear.

When we hear a song on the radio, our minds are always half of a beat behind as we listen to the words and music. Because we recognize the melodic chords or the words of the song, it only seems that we are in the present.

In his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Allan Watts States that,

"From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive."

The only way to live IN the moment is turn off our minds and allow our brains and other senses to encounter the present. This process is often referred to as meditation.

Eureka! I've Got It!

One of the things that supposedly separates the human species from other life forms is our ability to conceptualize. While animals react based on instinctual patterns and plants behave as they do based on whatever, we humans are the captains of ideas. Utilizing our highly rational minds fused with the emotional spark of creativity, we have the ability to conjure up a solution to any problem or the poetic verse to paint any picture.

When faced with a problem or a project, we fasten on our thinking caps. Sometimes we do our thinking in solitude. At other times, we do it collectively. We bring together all the known information at our disposal and then we try to construct a new way of understanding.

Of course, the process isn't truly that straightforward. If it were, we could devise a simple recipe for the creation of innovative ideas. Too often, however, the very act of trying to develop an innovation causes our minds to freeze up entirely. Writers know what I'm referring to -- writer's block.

In time, we often are able to move beyond our mental gridlock. It's as if to say, "Eureka. I've got it". We then spend an inordinate amount of energy patting ourselves on the back for our sheer brilliance or accepting plaudits from our friends and colleagues.

But do we deserve the credit?

From this Taoist's perspective, no and yes.

Since everything -- the ten thousand things -- is part and parcel of the one universal reality (i.e., Tao), every idea is too. All the ideas, thoughts, and innovations that we could ever "think of" already exist. Consequently, there genuinely is no such thing as an independently original idea. None of us deserves credit for thinking one up.

There is a common saying that encapsulates this notion -- An idea whose time has come. It suggests the idea itself is already present and is only waiting for the proper time and place to make itself known!

If any credit is due, the credit should be focused on those who allow an idea to take root within them. Alan Watts explains this as allowing our brains to think without letting our minds get in the way!

If we allow ourselves to be open to the mysteries of life, we are more apt to find ideas alighting upon and within us.

In my book, instead of saying "Eureka. I've got it" it would make far more sense to exclaim, "Eureka. IT got me."