What is Reality- Alan Watts

you because it's too fundamental to give it a title I'm going to talk about what there is now the first thing though are that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about the basic ideas which as Westerners living today in the United States influence our everyday common sense our fundamental notions about what life is about and there are historical origins for this which influenced us more strongly than most people realize ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use and of our ideas of logic and of what makes sense all together and these basic ideas I call myth not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense a myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world now for example and this in in a way is a metaphor if you want to explain electricity to someone who doesn't know anything about electricity you say well you talk about an electric current now the word current is borrowed from rivers it's borrowed from hydraulics and so you explain electricity in terms of water our electricity is not water it behaves actually in a different way but there are some ways in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricity and so you explain it in terms of water or if you're an astronomer and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved space you say well it's as if you had a black balloon and there are white dots on the black balloon and those dots represent galaxies and as you blow the balloon up uniformly all of them grow and grow farther apart but you're using an analogy the the actual universe is not a balloon with white dots on it so in the same way we use these sort of images to try and make sense of the world and we at present are living under the influence of two very powerful images which are in the present state of scientific knowledge inadequate and one of our major problems today is to find an adequate satisfying image of the world well that's what I'm going to talk about and I'm going to go further than that not only what image of the world to have but how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of the world that we can manage to conceive all right now the two images which we have been working under for 2, 000 years and maybe more are what I would call two models of the universe and the first is called the ceramic model and the second the fully automatic model the ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of Genesis from which Judaism Islam and Christianity derive their basic picture of the world and the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact it is made as a Potter takes clay and forms pots out of it or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it don't forget jesus is the son of a carpenter and also the son of god so the image of god and of the world is based on the idea of God as a technician Potter carpenter architect who has in mind a plan and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan so basic to this image of the world is the notion you see that the world consists of stuff basically primordial matter substance stuff as pots are made of clay now clay by itself has no intelligence clay does not of itself become apart although a good potter may think otherwise because if you were a really good potter you don't impose your will on the clay you ask any given lump of clay what it wants to become and you help it to do that and then you become a genius but the ordinary idea I'm talking about is that simply clay is unintelligent it's just stuff and the Potter imposes his will on it and makes it become whatever he wants and so in the book of Genesis the Lord God creates Adam out of the dust of the earth in other words he makes a clay figurine and then he breathes into it and it becomes alive because the clay becomes in formed by itself it is formless it has no intelligence and therefore it requires an external intelligence and an external energy to bring it to life and to put some sense into it and so in this way we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts as being made and it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother how was I made or who made me and this is a very very powerful idea but for example it is not shared by the Chinese or by the Hindus a Chinese child would not ask its mother how was I made a Chinese child might ask its mother how did I grow which is an entirely different procedure for making you see when you make something you put it together you arrange parts or you work from the outside to the in as a as a sculpture works on a stone or as the Potter works on clay but when you watch something growing it works in exactly the opposite direction it works from the inside to the outside it expands it virgins if blossoms and it happens all over itself at once in other words the the original simple form say over the living cell in the womb progressively complicates itself and that's the growing process and it's quite different from the making process but we have thought historically you see of the world as something made in the in the eye the idea being that trees for example are constructions just as tables and houses are constructions and so there is for that reason a fundamental difference between the maid and the maker and this image this ceramic model of the universe originated in cultures where the form of government was monarchic Oh and we're there for the maker of the universe was conceived also at the same time in the image of the king of the universe King of Kings Lord of lords the only ruler of princes who dust from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth and quoting the Book of Common Prayer and so all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way feel related to basic reality as a subject to a king and so they are on very very humble terms in relation to whatever it is that works all this thing I find it odd in the United States the people who are citizens of a republic have a monarchical theory of the universe because we are carrying over from very ancient Near Eastern cultures the notion that the Lord of the universe must be respected in a certain way people kneel people bow people prostrate themselves because the ruin and you know what the reason for all that is that nobody is more frightened of everybody else than a tyrant he sits with his back to the wall and his guards on either side of him and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can't use weapons that way when you come into his presence you don't stand up and face him because you might attack and he has reason to fear that you might because he's ruling you all and the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch Aziz the one who succeeded in crime the other people pushed aside because they the criminals the people we lock up in jail simply the people who didn't make it so now truthy ah the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him and so when you design a church what does it look like Catholic Church with the altar as it used to be it's changing now because the Catholic religion is changing but the Catholic Church has the altar with its back to the wall at the east end of the church and there the altar is the throne and the priest is the chief vizier of the court and he is making a basin to the throne front but there is the throne of God the order and all the people are facing it and kneeling down and a great Catholic cathedral is called a basilica from the Greek basileus which means king so a basilica is the house of a king and the ritual of the Catholic Church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium a Protestant church is a little different but basically the same the furniture of a Protestant Church is based on a judicial courthouse the pulpit the judge in a the judge in an American Court was the black robe which wears exactly the same dress as a Protestant minister and everybody sits in the fox's like there's a jury box there's a box for the job as the box it is the box of that and those were pews in an ordinary kind of colonial type Protestant Church so both these kinds of churches which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe decorate themselves are architectural II constructed in accordance with political images the universe one is the king and the other is the judge your honor a sense in this so when in court you have to refer to the judge as your honor it stops the people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude this a certain sense to that but when you want to apply that image to the universe itself to the very nature of life it has limitations for one thing the idea of a difference between matter and spirit this idea doesn't work anymore long long ago physicists stopped asking the question what is matter they began that way they wanted to know what is the fundamental substance of the world and the more they asked that question the more they realized they couldn't answer it because if you're going to say what matter is you've got to describe it in terms of behavior and that is to say in terms of form in terms of pattern you tell what it does you describe its small the smallest shapes of it that you can see do you see what happens you look say at a piece of stone and you want to say well what is this piece of stone made of well you take your microscope and you look at it and instead of just this block of stuff you see ever so many tinier shapes little crystals so you say fine so far so good now what are these crystals made of and you take a more powerful instrument and you find the bear made and molecules and then you take still more powerful instruments to find out what the molecules made of and you begin to describe atoms electrons protons Nissan's all sorts of sub-nuclear particles but you never never arrive at the basic stuff because there isn't them what happens is this stuff is the word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out-of-focus fuzzy stuff the idea of stuff is that it's undifferentiated as some kind of a goo and when your eyes are not in sharp focus everything looks fuzzy when you get your eyes into focus you see a form you see a pattern but when you want to change the level of magnification and go in closer and closer and closer you get fuzzy again before you get clear so every time you get fuzzy you go through a thinking there's some kind of stuff there but when you get clear you see a shape and so all that we can talk about is patterns we never never can talk about the stuff of which these patterns is supposed to be made because you don't really have to suppose that there is any it's enough to talk about the world in terms of pattern it describes anything that can be described and you don't really then have to suppose that there is some stuff which constitutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that play constitutes the essence of pots clay then and so for this reason you don't really have to suppose that the world is some kind of helpless passive unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to inform and make it into intelligent shapes so the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff potted clay but patent a self moving self designing pattern they dance and we haven't yet our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with us well now in the course of time in the evolution of Western thought the ceramic image of the world ran into trouble and changed into what I call the fully automatic model or image of the world in other words Western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature and it got that idea from Judaism and Christianity and Islam that in other words the Potter the maker of the world in the beginning of things laid down the laws and the the law of God which is also the law of nature it's called the logos and in Christianity the lagos is the second person of the Trinity incarnate as Jesus Christ who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine law so we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws as if in other words the laws of the world were like the rails on which a streetcar or tram or a train runs and these things exist in a certain way and all events respond to these laws you know that Limerick there was a young man who said down for it certainly seems that I am a creature that moves indeterminate grooves I'm not even a bus on a tram [Music] here's this idea that there's a kind of a plan and everything responds and obeys that plan well in the 18th century Western intellectuals began to suspect this idea what they suspected is whether there is a lawmaker whether there is an architect of the universe and they found out or they reasoned that you don't have to suppose that there is why because the hypothesis of God does not help us to make any predictions nor does it in other words that put it this way if the business of science is to make predictions about what's going to happen science is essentially prophecy what's going to happen by studying the behavior of the past and describing it carefully we can make predictions about what's going to happen in the future that's really the whole science and to do this and to make successful predictions you do not need God as a hypothesis because it makes no difference to anything if you say everything is controlled by God everything is governed by God that doesn't make any difference to your prediction of what's going to happen and so what they did was simply drop that hypothesis but they kept the hypothesis of law because if you can predict if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved and you've got some regularities in the behavior of the universe you call that law although it may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word assent of regularity and so they what they did was they got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law and so they conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism something in other words that is functioning according to regular talk like mechanical principles mutants whole image of the world is based on billions the atoms are billiard balls and they bang each other around and so your behavior you hear every every individual therefore is defined as a very very complex arrangement of billiard balls being banged around by everything else and so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists blind energy in say the the metaphysics of a mistake or and th Huxley the world is basically nothing but energy blind unintelligent force and likewise in parallel to this in the philosophy of Freud the basic psychological energy is libido which is blind lust and it is only a fluke it is only as a result of pure chances that resulting from the exuberance of this energy there are people with values with reason with languages with cultures and with love just a fluke like you know 1000 monkeys typing 1000 typewriters for a million years we'll eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica and of course the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia Britannica they will relapse into nonsense and so in order that that shall not happen because you and I are flukes in this cosmos and we like our way of life we like being human if we want to keep it say these people we've got to fight nature because it will turn us back into nonsense moment we let it and so we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it from outside and so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature and we talk about the conquest of space the conquest of Everest and the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer the rocket you know compensation for the sexually inadequate male crew ah sir is going to conquer space you know we're in space already way out if anybody cared to be sensitive and let what's outside space come to you you can if your eyes are clear enough aided by telescopes aided by radio astronomy aided by all the kind of sensitive instruments we can devise we are as far out in space as we're ever going to get but you know sensitivity isn't the pitch in in especially in the waa SP culture of the United States we define manliness in terms of aggression you see because we are not we a little bit frightened as to whether we are really men and so we put on this great show of being a tough guy is completely unnecessary uh you know if you have what it takes you don't need to put on that show and if you don't need to beat nature into submission why be hostile to nature because after all you are a symptom of nature you as a human being you grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree so let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples using Apple as a verb and a world in which human beings arrive is the world that peoples and so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in you as a human being you grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree so let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples using apples a verb and a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples and so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in just as spots on somebody's skin symptomatic of chickenpox just as hair on a head is symptomatic of what's going on in the organism but we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths the ceramic and the fully-automatic not to feel that we belong in the world so our popular speech reflects it we say I came into this world you didn't you came out of it we say face facts we talk about encounters with reality as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies and the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists inside a bag of skin the center of consciousness which looks out of this thing and what the hell's are going to do to me you see I recognize you you kind of look like me and see myself in a mirror and you look like you might be people so maybe you're intelligent maybe you can love too and they're made perhaps you're all right some of you are anyway got the right color of skin or you have the right religion or whatever it is you're okay but there are all those people over in Asia Africa and they may not really be people when you want to destroy someone you always define them as unpeople so but we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition the myth the absolutely unfounded theory that you yourself exists only inside your skin now I want to propose another idea altogether and other astronomers there's a two great theories going on in astronomy about the origination of the universe one is called the explosion theory and the others called the steady state theory the steady state people say never was a time when the world began it's always expanding yes but always as a result of free hydrogen space with the free hydrogen coagulates and makes new galaxies but the other people say there was a primordial explosion enormous bang millions of years ago billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space now let's take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened it's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall smash and all that eats bread and in the middle it's dense isn't it and as it gets out on the edge the little droplets are finer and finer and make more complicated patterns see so in the same way there was a big bang in the beginning of things and it's spread and you and I sitting here in this room as complicated human beings are way way out on the fringe of that bang we're the complicated little patterns on the end of it very interesting but so we define ourselves as being only that if you think that you are only inside your skin you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue way out on the edge of that explosion way out in space and way out in time billions of years ago you were a big bang and now you're a complicated human being and when then we cut ourselves off like this and don't feel that we are still the Big Bang but you are depends how you define yourself you are actually if this is the way things started if there was a big bang in the beginning you're not something that is a result of the Big Bang you are not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process you are still the process you are the Big Bang the original force of the universe coming on as whoever you are see when I meet you I see not just what you define yourself as mr.

so-and-so miss song so mrs.

so-and-so I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way I know I'm that too but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it and so the one of the what I would call a kind of a basic problem we've got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things that is to say separate things or separate events that that is only a way of talking if you can understand this you're going to have no further problems I once asked a group of high school children what do you mean by a thing and first of all they gave me all sorts of synonyms they said it's an object which is simply another word for a thing it doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing finally a very smart go from Italy who was in the group said a thing is a noun she was quite right a noun isn't a part of nature it's part of speech there are no nouns in the physical world there are no separate things in the physical world either the physical world is Wiggly it's something like this [Laughter] maybe that's a cloud the clouds mountains trees people are all Wiggly and only when human beings get working at things they build buildings and straight lines and try and make out that the world isn't really Wiggly but here were we sitting in this room all built on straight lines but each one of us is as Wiggly as all get-out now then when you when you want to get control of something that Wiggles is pretty difficult isn't it you try and pick up a fish in your hands and the fish is Wiggly and it slips out what do you do to get hold of the fish you use a net and so the the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world and so if you want to get hold of this wiggle you've got to put a net over it you see now what's going to happen and that is something regular and I can number the holes in a net so many so holds up so many holes across and if I can number these holes I can count exactly where each wiggle is in terms of a hole in that net that's the beginning of calculus the art of measuring the world but in order to do that I've got to break up the wiggle into bits I've got to call this a specific bit and this the next bit of the wiggle and this the next bit and this the next bit of the wiggle and so these bits are things or events bits of Wiggles which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle in order to measure it and therefore in order to control it but in nature in fact in the physical world the wiggle isn't bitted like you don't get a cut-up fryer out of an egg but you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it you bite it but it doesn't come bitten so the world doesn't come thing it doesn't come event it you and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean the ocean waves and the universe people's and as the wave I wave at you and say you the world is waving at you at me with you and saying hi I'm here but we are consciousness are the way we feel and sense our existence being based on a myth that we are made that we are parts that we are things our consciousness has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that we feel we have been hypnotized literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins that we are not the original band but just something out on the end of it and therefore we're scared stiff my wave is going to disappear and I'm going to die and that be awful we've got a mythology going now which is the father mask we'll put it we're nothing but something that happens between the maternity ward in the crematorium and that's it and therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable no this is what people really believe today you may go to church you may say you believe in this that in the other but you don't even Jehovah's Witnesses who are the most fundamentalist fundamentalists they are polite when they come around the knock at the door but if you really believed in Christianity you would be screaming in the streets but nobody does you'd be taking full-page ads in the paper every day you would have the most terrifying television programs the churches would be going out of their minds if they really believe what they see but they don't they hope they think they ought to believe what they teach they believe they should believe but they don't believe it because what we really believe is the fully automatic model and that is our basic plausible common sense you are a fluke you are a separate event and you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it baby that's it now why does anybody think that way there's no reason to because it isn't even scientific it's just a myth and it's invented by people who wanted to feel a certain way they want to play a certain game see the game of God begotten gone embarrassing you begin the idea of God as the potter the architect of the universe is good and it makes you feel that life is after all important there's someone who cares it has meaning it has sense and you are valuable in the eyes of the Father but after a while it gets embarrassing you realize that everything you do is being watched by God he knows your tiniest inmost feelings and thoughts and you say after a while quit bugging me I don't want you her happen so you become an atheist just to get rid of it then then you feel terrible after that because you got rid of God but that means you got rid of yourself you're just nothing but a machine and your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too so if you're a smart kid you commit suicide and Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question which is whether or not to commit suicide I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions the first one is who started it the second is are we going to make it the third is where are we going to put it the fourth is who's going to clean up and the fifth is it serious but but still I should you are not commit suicide this is a good question why go on and you only go on if the game is worth the candle now the universe has been going on for an incredible long time and so really a satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that's worth betting on that's a very seems to me absolutely elementary common-sense if you if you make a theory of the universe which isn't worth betting on why bother just commit suicide but if you want to go on playing the game you've got to have an optimal theory for playing the game otherwise there's no point in it but the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very funny game what they wanted to say was this all you people who believe in religion are old ladies and wishful thinkers you got a big daddy out there and you want a comfort and thing but life is rough life is tough and success goes to the most hard-headed people that was a very convenient theory when the European American world was colonizing the natives everywhere else is that we're the end product of evolution and we're tough see I'm a big strong guy because I face facts and life is just a bunch of junk and I'm going to impose my will on it and turn it into something else is he and I'm real hard see that's the way of flattering yourself and so it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world works in academic circles no other theory of the world and the fully automatic model is respectable because if you're an academic person you've got to be an intellectually tough person you want to be prickly these are basically two kinds of philosophy once called prickles the others called goo and prickly people are precise rigorous logical like everything chopped up and clear goo people like it vague there for example in physics prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of matter of particles goo people believe it's waves and in in philosophy prickly people a logical positivists and GU people are idealists and they're always arguing with each other and what they don't realize is that they neither one can take his position without the other person because you wouldn't know you advocated prickles and this was somebody else advocating goo you wouldn't know what a prickle was unless you knew what goo was because life is not these are prickles or goo it's gooey prickles and pretty cool they go together like back in front male and female and that's the answer to philosophy see I'm a philosopher and I'm not going to argue very much because if you don't argue with me I don't know what I think so if we argue I say thank you because they're going to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view I understand what I mean so I can't get rid of you but however you see this this this whole idea that the universe is just nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it he is a put-down theory of the world people who had a an advantage to make a game to play by putting it down and making out that because they put the world down they were a superior kind of people so that just won't do we've had it because if if you seriously go along with this idea of the world your what is technically called alienated you feel hostile to the world you feel that the world is a trap it is a the mechanism it's electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught and you poor thing have to put up with being in a body that's falling apart and the get cancer that gets the great siberian itch and it's just terrible and these mechanics doctors are trying to help you out but they really can't succeed in the end and you're just going to fall apart and it's a grim business and it's too bad so if you think that that's the way things are you may as well commit suicide right now unless you say well I down because they're really after all there might be eternal damnation in the back of the thing if I did that or then I identify with my children or something and I think of them going on and without me and nobody does support them because if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them I shall merely teach them to be like iron and they all go on dragging it out to support their children and they won't enjoy it and they'll be afraid to commit suicide and so will their children they all learn the same lesson so you see what all I'm trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world that is influencing most people in the United States today the fully automatic model is simply a myth if you want to say that the idea of God the Father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth in the bad sense of the word myth so is this other one it's just as phony and as just as little for supportive as being the true state of affairs why let's get this clear um if there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty well you found it in other people in other words it exists in us as human beings and as I said if it is there in us it is symptomatic of the scheme of things we are a symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree or the rose of the rosebush the earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells the earth is geological yes but this geological entity and grows people and our existence on the earth is a symptom of the solar system and it's balances as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies goodness only knows what that's in but you see when as a scientist you describe the behavior of an living organism you try to say what a person does it's the only way in which you can describe what a person is described what they do then you find out that in making this description you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin in other words you can't talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor because when I walk I don't just dangle my legs in empty space I move in relationship to a room and so in order to describe what I'm doing when I'm walking I have to describe the room I have to describe the territory so in India describing my talking at the moment I can't describe this just as a thing in itself because I'm talking to you and so what I'm doing at the moment is not completely describe unless your being here is described also so if that is necessary if in other words in order to describe my behavior I have to describe your behavior and the behavior of the environment it means that we've really got one system of behavior but what I am involves what you are I don't know who I am unless I know who you are and you don't know who you are unless you know who I am it was a wise rabbi once said if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I then I am NOT I and you are not you in other words we are not separate we define each other we're all backs and fronts to each other you know you can't for example have two sticks you lean two sticks against each other and they stand up because they support each other take one away and the other falls or you know that Valentine beer trademark also a symbol of the Holy Trinity where there are three three interlocked rings if you pull one out the other two separate they interdependent and so in exactly that way we and our environment and all of us and each other are interdependent systems we know who we are in terms of other people we all look together and this is again and again the serious scientific description of how things happen and to such an extent that they in any good scientist knows therefore that what you call the external world is as much you as your own body your skin doesn't separate you from the world it's a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it just for example as a whirlpool in water you could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape you have a definite form all right here is it what a flow of water and it suddenly it does a whirlpool and then it goes on the Whirlpool is the definite form but no water stays put in it the Whirlpool is something the stream is doing and exactly the same way the whole universe is doing each one of us and I see you today and I recognize you tomorrow just as I would recognize a whirlpool in the stream I'd say oh yes I've seen that well flew before if this near son says house on the end of the river and it's always there so in the same way when I meet you tomorrow I recognize you you're the same whirlpool you were yesterday but you're moving the whole world is moving through you all the cosmic rays all the food you're eating the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything is just flowing right through you when you're wiggling the same way the world is wiggling the stream is wiggling you but the problem is you see we haven't been taught to feel that way the myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe but only parts of it only in it only confronting it aliens and we are I think quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal universe each one of us otherwise we're going to go out of our heads we're going to commit suicide collectively with courtesy of h-bombs and all right supposing we do well that will be that and it will be life making experiments on other galaxies maybe they'll find a better game.