Host
Alan Watts is here in the studio and will read from his autobiography, In My Own Way, just published by Pantheon.
Watts
Never for a moment have I regretted that I forgetfully reincarnated myself as the child of Laurence Wilson Watts and Emily Mary Buchan at Rowan Tree Cottage in Holbrook Lane in the village of Chiselhurst, Kent, England, almost due south of Greenwich, on the morning of January 6, 1915, at about twenty minutes after six, with the sun in Capricorn, conjuncted with Mars and Mercury, and in trying to a moon in Virgo, with Sagittarius rising.
In going back over one’s past, one remembers all too much foolishness. Yet, how can I forgive anyone else if I don’t forgive myself? And how can I believe that now, as I have become and matured, I’m no longer a fool? Basically, my own laughter at myself has something to do with the incongruity of such a clown being God in disguise; of the big act called Alan Watts being a manifestation of the infinite energy of the universe. As I witness the universe getting away with me, I wonder what other uproarious deceptions it will perpetrate. I am a mystic in spite of myself, remaining as much of an irreducible rascal as I am, as a standing example of God’s continuing compassion for sinners—or, if you will, of Buddha nature in a dog, or of light shining in darkness. Come to think of it, in what else could it shine?
Since the age of 42, I have been a freelance, a rolling stone, and a shaman—as distinct from a priest. For the shaman gets his magic alone in the mountains and forests, whereas a priest gets his from being ordained by a guru or bishop. The first—the shaman, that is—goes with the culture of nomads and hunters, and the second with cultures of agrarians or industrialists. Although I am (unofficially and on the side) an ordained priest of the Anglican Communion, my genes must have come from the nomads of Europe, and my reincarnation from the Taoist poets of China, or the Yamabushi (or mountain hermits) of Japan. I am gregarious, but I like to be left alone.
My existence is a coincidence of opposites. On the one hand, I am a shameless egotist. I like to talk, entertain, and hold the center of the stage. On the other, I realize quite clearly that the ego named Alan Watts is an illusion, a social institution, a fabrication of words and symbols without the slightest substantial reality. Nevertheless, I know too that this temporary pattern, this process, is a function, a doing, a karma, in just the same way as the sun, the galaxy, or shall we be bold to say Jesus Christ or Gautama the Buddha?
How can I say this without offense? Without seeming proud, haughty, and pretentious? I simply and even humbly know that I am the eternal. Yet, the idea of my coming on as a messiah or great guru just breaks me up with laughter, because at the same time, I am an unrepentant sensualist. I am an immoderate lover of women and the delights of sexuality, of the greatest French, Chinese and Japanese cuisine, of wines and spiritist drinks, of smoking cigars and pipes, of gardens, forests, and oceans, of jewels and paintings, of colorful clothes, and of finely bound and printed books.
I have also an attraction to being a no-strings-attached Taoist wanderer in the mountains, cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown. And when the mood suits me, I also like to practice Buddhist meditation in the Zen or Tibetan Zangchen style, which is simply sitting quietly or walking rhythmically without thoughts or verbalizations in your head. Walking meditation, I have always preferred to long periods of sitting. For one reason: when walking, there is no need for others to know that you are meditating, and thus to feel guilty or embarrassed for not doing likewise. For another, the self-consciousness of sitting in a special way, of having a special time or place for the practice, does not intrude itself. Thus, I could go out for a walk under the pretext of taking the air, or pace the floor seeming to be thinking out a book, and yet be absorbed in mystical silence of the mind.
And oddly enough, at the same time, it didn’t really occur to me that I was practicing meditation, so that I’ve always considered myself rather lazy and haphazard in respect of this discipline. I didn’t think of myself as doing an exercise, but simply as exploring a state of consciousness out of sheer interest. A Christian writer has said that the monk prays best who does not know that he is praying.
I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus, I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect, and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider exclusive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion as either the best or the only true way an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet, my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination.
If I’m asked to define my personal taste in religion, I must say that they lie between Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism, with a certain leaning towards Vedanta and Catholicism, or rather the Orthodox Church of Eastern Europe. The Russian Cathedral in Paris is for me one of the most joyous shrines in the world. But I am still more at home in the serene and non-militant atmosphere of such Buddhist sanctuaries as Koyasan and Chionin, where the deep and sonorous chant is measured by the easy pulse of a wooden drum, where pines and maple stand beyond the open screens, and the smoke of aloeswood incense hangs in the air.
When I was about seventeen, I was still reading Suzuki on Zen, and trying to practice some form of Buddhist yoga, zazen, or satipaṭṭhāna, and simply couldn’t make up my mind which specific method to follow, or exactly what state of consciousness was satori, samadhi, moksha, or true enlightenment. I had no spiritual master. I was a shaman on my own in a religious jungle. When, at Canterbury in England, I had become the head boy of my house, I had the privilege of going off by myself to study and meditate in an ancient Elizabethan room, where one could light a fire and stay up until late at night. It was in the autumn of 1932, windy, with fallen leaves skittering along the roads and fields. And I was trying desperately to work out this problem of: what is the experience which these Oriental Masters are talking about?
The different ideas of it which I had in mind seemed to be approaching me like little dogs wanting to be petted, and suddenly I shouted at all of them to go away. I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be my properly spiritual state of mind, or of what should be meant by me. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. All hangups disappeared. I walked on air. And thereupon I composed a haiku:
All forgotten and set aside,
Wind, scattering leaves over the fields.
And one evening, when Eleanor, my first wife, and I were walking home from a meditation session at the Buddhist Society, I began to discuss the method of concentration on the eternal present. Whereupon she said: why try to concentrate on it? What else is there to be aware of? Your memories are all in the present just as much as the trees over there. Your thoughts about the future are also in the present. The present is just a constant flow, like the Tao, and there’s simply no way of getting out of it.
With that remark my whole sense of weight vanished. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I realized that when the Hindus said tat tvam asi, “you are that,” they meant just what they said. For a whole week thereafter, I simply floated, remembering my friend Professor Spiegelberg telling me of the six precepts of the Tibetan Master, Tilopa: no thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention. Let it settle itself.
Now, this was doubtless a premature satori, before I was unable to resist the temptation to write, think, and intellectualize about it. Yet, when I’m in my right mind, I still know that this is the true way of life—at least for me. Conscious thought, reflection, analysis, cultivation, and intention are simply using the mind’s radar or scanning beam for purposes which the mind as a whole can do of itself and of its own with far more intelligence and less effort.
So from the beginning I was never interested in being good at Zen—in the sense of mastering a traditional discipline, as for example, in studying the piano with Schnabel to the point where my recordings of the Beethoven sonatas would be indistinguishable from his. I had already done that kind of thing. And the point here is not to boast, but to explain the real nature of my interest in Zen. For I had, without any formal teacher, unquestionably mastered the art of public speaking, and in the church had become as expert a liturgist as anyone. What I was after was therefore not so much discipline as understanding. And, so far as I was concerned, the formal study of Zen was a kind of busy behavior, to sit hour after hour and day after day with aching legs to unravel Hakuin’s tricky system of dealing with koan, to subsist on tea, pickles, and brown rice, or to master Dogen’s ritual style of life was—although as good in its own way as learning to sail—not what I needed to know.
What I saw in Zen was an intuitive way of understanding the sense of life by getting rid of silly quests and questions. The archetypal situation was when Huike asked Bodhidharma how to attain peace of mind. Bodhidharma said, “Bring your mind out and I will pacify it.” “But when I look for it,” said Huike, “I can’t find it.” “In that case,” the master concluded, “it’s pacified already.”
It is thus that almost every morning when I first awaken I have a feeling of total clarity as to the sense of life, a feeling of myself and the universe as a matter of the utmost simplicity. I and that which is are the same—always have been, always will be. There’s simply nothing special to be achieved, realized, or performed.
The sound of a frog jumping into an old pond is plop—in Japanese, mizuno otto. This plop isn’t physical, material, mental, or spiritual, for plop isn’t a philosophical category. Plop is just plop. This is the simplest thing in the world, but the hardest to explain. If you understand it, you can see that this plop is all of a piece with a thousand galaxies.
Host
This is WBAI in New York. You’re listening to In the Spirit, and Alan Watts is with us and has been reading from his own autobiography, In My Own Way. He’s reading in his own way, which Pantheon Books has just published. Well Alan, what do you think of your autobiography?
Watts
Well, it was a very difficult thing for me to write, and I wrote it at the insistence of my editor, Paula McGuire at Pantheon, and my wife. I said, you know: what should I be doing writing an autobiography? I haven’t been a man of adventure, I have achieved no great deeds in life, I have not become extremely wealthy, I have not been an explorer or a great warrior or an adventurer. I’ve been a rather sedentary character, because I was brought up really to be a Brahmin, an intellectual. And so I thought I can’t write a thing like that. But they went on insisting, and so I put myself to it. It took me two years. I wasn’t used to writing the narrative style. I was used to writing philosophy, and that’s as easy as falling off a log. But writing narrative—I always admired novelists, you see, because of their gift of portrayal of human character and of telling stories. And I got sucked into it, slowly, slowly, slowly. It was very hard.
Host
Do you consider yourself an intellectual?
Watts
Yes.
Host
So there’s nothing terrible about that term in your book?
Watts
No, not at all. I think that, although some people think that my position is anti-intellectual, they don’t understand that to be effective intellectually you have to interpose thinking with intervals of mental silence, when you stop thinking altogether. Because, after all, if I don’t stop talking, I can’t hear what you have to say. And then thinking, in my definition, is talking to one’s self or figuring to one’s self in one’s skull. And if you don’t occasionally stop that activity, you don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. So you get unrelated to the real universe.
Host
A couple of your students, you might say, began the thing called Esalen, which is familiar to a lot of us.
Watts
They were students not only of me. This must be emphasized. Michael Murphy and Dick Price, who really started Esalen, were also students of Frederick Spiegelberg, and Michael of Sri Aurobindo. And the confluence of us all together inspired them to start this thing.
Host
Do you think that growth centers, like Esalen, do you think that they may be truly anti-intellectual in a certain way? Do you think they may be sensitivity training, may be a training of the emotions and the openness of the emotions, and perhaps leave out the emotions?
Watts
No, no. The thing is absolutely fascinating what’s happening. Esalen has very scrupulously avoided taking a partisan point of view to any one discipline—although they’ve had very powerful people there, like the late Fritz Bohls, who could have dominated the whole scene. But that never happened. Now, they are equally interested in the strictly intellectual life. For example, next March, the great British mathematician–philosopher Spencer Brown, author of Laws of Form, is coming and he’s going to give a seminar there for ten days for a select group of some of the finest intellects in the United States. And they support that as much as they do sensitivity training and so on.
Host
So you think they’re combining—
Watts
Yes, I mean, these places are the new universities. The university itself has become practically obsolete. It’s a machine shop for turning out—
Host
And there are now hundreds of these growth centers.
Watts
There are. Over a hundred in North America.
Host
Do you think they’ll replace the university, or will there be a place for a straight university?
Watts
There will be a place for a straight university. There has to be because, people need certain kinds of technical training which they can only get there. But—I hate to say this in a democracy—but the intellectual elite will eventually emerge from the growth centers.
Host
It’s not possible they could combine the two kinds of training.
Watts
Well, the universities are interested. There’s no doubt. I mean, let’s not put them down too far. Life is not a black and white situation, and we have some very great universities and great scholars.
Host
What about the other great social institution—at least it used to be—the church? Will these growth centers replace the church?
Watts
Ah, tricky! I don’t know. They are stimulating the church. Let’s put it that way. See, the problem with the church and the synagogue is that they’re too talkative. You go to church on Sunday and they lecture God on what he’s supposed to do, as if he didn’t know. Then they lecture the people on what they should do, as if they could or would. And it’s incessant chatter. And I’m trying to persuade the church to cultivate mental silence. And I’m having some success, funnily enough, because the church is desperate—for no other reason that it’s desperate financially.
Host
Well then, really, you mentioned what I consider the house number when you said silence.
Watts
Yes.
Host
And the cultivation of silence. You are an admirer of Krishnamurti. He’s one of the people you speak most highly of it in your autobiography. And he, of course, is an advocate of mental silence completely. But he also says in many ways and in many places that one shouldn’t cultivate it. It can’t be cultivated.
Watts
It can’t be cultivated.
Host
So how are we to proceed from here?
Watts
First of all, if you try to cultivate it and find out that you can’t—you can’t stop the internal turbulence in your mind, what is called in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra the chitta vritti. He defines yoga—which means union or integration of yourself with the universe—he says, yogas chitta vritti nirodha. That means yoga is the cessation of babble in the mind. Now, you can’t stop it no matter what you do. But if you realize that you can’t stop it, you get the message—which is that “you” don’t exist. That’s why you can’t stop it: that your ego is nothing more than a concept. It’s an abstraction, like the equator. And nobody will trip over the equator. So your ego is your concept of yourself. And so that concept cannot stop the babble in the mind. Now, as soon as you realize that, the babble stops of itself—as when you simply listen to pure sound. See, that’s essentially the method of yoga. It’s called mantra.
Host
Krishnamurti, of course, wouldn’t identify it.
Watts
Yes, but he always starts out every talk by saying it is extremely important to listen. Will you please listen? And he’s trying to say: listen to the sound of my voice rather than any instructions I have to give you. Please participate in the real world. Listen, listen, listen. And you will discover (if you truly listen) that the sound and the listener are the same process. There isn’t a dichotomy of I listening on the one hand and the sound being listened to on the other.
See, Krishnamurti has a terrible time explaining what he means. He’s worked at it for years and years and years, and published volumes of talks and so on. And I know what he’s talking about. And I’m trying to say the same thing in a slightly different style. I think Krishnamurti is too serious. He doesn’t allow laughter at his lectures. But I love him. I think he’s a great man. I always allow laughter at my lectures. We get into an uproar because—there’s a great Zen master in this country by the name of Jōshū Sasaki, and he recommends for a method of meditation that every morning you stand up, put your hands on your hips with the wrists upwards, and roar with laughter for five minutes. And imagine if Mr. Nixon did that! Imagine if the Queen of England or Mr. Heath did that, or Mr. [???], or the Emperor of Japan, or Mao Zedong! And then when you think about that you will laugh all over again.
Host
So maybe you can’t talk directly about silence. You have to do things like laugh.
Watts
Right. Yes. You have to get into nonverbal experience because the real world is nonverbal.
Host
But do you still maintain that there’s some value in traditional religious forms and practices? I mean, Krishnamurti throws them all out. But I sense with you some sort of nostalgia or what? Some sort of feeling.
Watts
Yes, I wouldn’t throw them out. I would understand them in a slightly different way, though, from the way in which they are generally understood. In other words, when I go to church, I don’t expect by attending mass that I will get some advantage from the power of God, that he would do something special for me like get me an increase in salary. I don’t even listen to the prayers. I listen to the sound of the priest’s voice. That’s why the Roman Catholic Church made a serious mistake in having the mass set in the vernacular. They should have kept it in Latin. I was brought up in England (as has been indicated), and we boys were subjected to the most amazing religion of lecturing God. “Almighty and most merciful God, King of kings and Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth. Most heartily we beseech thee from thy throne to behold our most gracious, sovereign King George the King.”
Host
That’s good, you’re beautiful!
Watts
“And all the royal family, endure them plentiously with heavenly gifts, health and wealth, long to live.” When all this is the language of court flattering. Because God was idolized, conceived in the image of a cosmic monarch.
Host
Why is it that you went into the church at a certain point in your life for five years?
Watts
As an absolutely knowing subversive. Although it worked, in a way, but I couldn’t sustain the role of a clergyman in those days. Today it’s different, but in those days I was much too much of a Bohemian to wear the Roman collar and the black suit and come on like I was holier than thou. It just didn’t work.
Host
The Zen idea of nothing special, you mentioned that Suzuki sometimes would sign his letters “No Special Person.”
Watts
Buji-nen.
Host
It seems to be the finest antidote to the holier than thou.
Watts
Oh yes.
Host
Do you feel that way about yourself? Do you feel that you’re nothing special?
Watts
Oh, I do it in a slightly different way than Suzuki.
Host
I thought so.
Watts
Everybody knows—it’s a matter of public knowledge—that I’m a rascal: that I drink too much, that I sleep with too many women, that I—even people go so far as to say that I’m trying to commit suicide. Because Americans are terribly serious. They don’t understand certain things (that are understood in Europe and Asia) about the joyous life. They’re always wanting that everything you do is supposed to be “good for you.” Now, life is bad for you. Jung pointed out—he was joking—he said: life is a disease with a very bad prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death. And, you know, everybody, mental health, everybody is after you for your best interests. And I’m sick of being pursued for my best interests.
Host
Since there’s no “you” anyway to have these issues.
Watts
Oh, sure. Right. But everybody’s concerned. Everybody is worried about one’s health, one’s mortality. Because, you see, the fallacy is this. That you must understand if you’re going to survive elegantly, you must not feel a compulsion to survive. Confucius put it very well: “A man who understands the Tao”—that is the course of nature—“in the morning can die with content in the evening.” And so when anyone has a compulsion to survive—we say, “Well, I’ve got to go on living because I’m responsible. I have all these children to support.” But thereby, by taking that attitude, I teach my children the same attitude. And they go on compulsively surviving for their children. And everybody lives life as a drag. So if we would realize that we really don’t have to go on living, there is actually no reason why we should continue. We’re not under orders.
Host
Have you already gone away, so to speak? I mean, presumably, if there’s no individual ego and one sees it clearly, one has died.
Watts
Well, if you ask me, have I gone away? You see, that’s a somewhat paradoxical question. Because then I would be claiming credit for being an egoistic non-ego.
Host
It’s hard to—
Watts
Yes, it’s our language, because we’ve got a language constructed in such a way that it’s a perpetual trap and you can’t say these things.
Host
But presumably you can carry on a full articulated life without thinking that it’s a you.
Watts
Yes. No, of course you can. And it’s much more fun than the other kind of life. And…
Host
It’s like sitting in on a course, not for credit.
Watts
That’s right. That’s a very good comparison! Yes.
Host
I feel very often I’m not taking life for credit.
Watts
That’s right. That’s a very good comparison, yes.
Host
What about this California dreaming that you do? I mean, in your book, California takes on almost mythic proportions in a way. Big Sur, and the people, and the fact that somehow you find that, in that geographical location, you’ve found something right for you; a kind of a final place.
Watts
Yes, because it’s an extremely dangerous place to live as a result of the combination of the San Andreas Fault and Governor Reagan. But it’s the most beautiful place in that it is the American version of the Riviera. I couldn’t make my living if I lived in Mentone or Es, because I can’t make a living at my profession in any country except the United States. And therefore California is the nearest thing to that southwestern sunlight landscape that I always sought from boyhood. And…
Host
I’m from California myself and I feel a kind of nostalgia, but I wonder whether it’s just nostalgia sometimes, or whether there’s something, a kind of a holy land going on there somehow.
Watts
Oh, there is. It’s one of the most stimulating spiritual and intellectual climates that there is.
Host
I’d say equaled only by New York City.
Watts
Yes. I mean, here, naturally, there is also a tremendous gathering of fascinating people.
Host
But there, nature seems to be in more—
Watts
Nature is more benign. New York City has a rather tough climate, that’s why. Also, it’s too industrialized.
Host
I want to ask you a couple of things that people might just want to ask because it’s topmost in their minds. And in your book you said your final feeling about LSD, roughly speaking, is that when you get the message, you hang up the phone. Is that about—
Watts
Yes, I mean, I would say that from my own personal point of view, if all the LSD in the world were to vanish tomorrow, I wouldn’t regret it. Because I think I’ve learned everything from that kind of experience that it has to teach.
Host
Do you think that a whole generation of people now have done the learning for society? Do you suppose that certain people can completely bypass the LSD experience, building on the experience of others? Or do you think it’s good for everyone to get lost in the woods?
Watts
That’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t really know the answer to that. LSD was a valuable catalyst in showing people that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, to quote Hamlet. Dangerous, and all the more dangerous when suppressed, and when one couldn’t be sure that the LSD you were getting was the real thing.
Host
Prohibition is absolutely no good.
Watts
No. I can’t understand American prohibitionism, because it corrupts the police by asking them to be armed clergymen.
Host
But it seems to me that, as opposed to the early sixties and fifties, there are a lot of people in society today who are deeply into their consciousness, say through meditative techniques of one kind or another. And there’s also a fashion tending in that direction. In other words, people are aware of it. It’s not an outrageous thing.
Watts
Don’t put it down by calling it a fashion.
Host
No, I wouldn’t. In fact, could I ask you: do you think there is some sort of new age of spirit dawning? Or do you think…?
Watts
Whether it’s a new age—that may be too pompous a phrase to use, but there most decidedly is a colossal (I would call it) spiritual awakening occurring in this country. It’s as alive as all get out.
Host
Is it—do you think it’s indigenous? I mean, really indigenous? Or is it sustained by people coming from the East and Japan?
Watts
It’s both. It’s a result of global intercommunication. We are in a situation now where, by means of technological transportation and by telephonic and television and electronic communication, we’ve got one world. We can’t help it. And therefore all the cultures of the world are merging. And this stimulates every culture.
Host
You mentioned—again, quoting you roughly—you feel that psychotherapy is largely a bore, except for most Jungians. You would accept them. Do you think that spiritual life in the largest sense will begin to replace psychotherapy?
Watts
Well, the psychotherapists themselves are undergoing a great deal of evolution. We have, for example, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, where the most extraordinary interesting material is being published. And I know all sorts of people in the field of psychotherapy who are no longer—what shall I call it?—who are no longer preoccupied with what I’ve always felt to be a very shallow view of the good life. Of, you know: are you in touch with reality when reality is considered as the world seen on a bleak Monday morning? Where reality is a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium. You know, that kind of thing where they ask you to test your sanity: what are nine and seven?
Host
I don’t know.
Watts
Well, for heaven’s sakes, but that’s it. Or: are you in a fit condition to drive a car? That’s become a test of sanity, you see. And it’s terrible.
Host
Do you think that perhaps, like universities—which evolve and become turned on—that psychotherapy can do the same thing and there could be a—
Watts
Oh, yes.
Host
So there’s a place for both of them in the society.
Watts
Oh yes, there is. Yes, there is. Let me not—again, I want to repeat this—not put the university as an institution down, because marvelous things are now happening in our universities. I am astonished at the response I can get from universities in the terms of enormous audiences for lectures on the Chinese theory of nature. You know, some very far out subject of that kind.
Host
So it sounds like the structures of society are hanging in there. They’re going to persist. And perhaps they’re okay and growing.
Watts
Yes, but what we’ve got going wrong is: we’ve got a kind of bifurcation. You take your classified telephone directory and open up churches and have a ruler in your hand, and you will find that far the longest space is occupied by authoritarian Bible-banging churches. And these people are barbarians who take the written word of the Bible literally, because they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend on.
Host
Do you think the same kind of barbarianism of the spirit is represented in our government? Or do you think—
Watts
Well, the government, you see, realizes that there are a very large number of people like that. And therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up. They always need papa.
Host
What’s the possibility, or what’s going to be the outcome of these two different trends in the society? Do you think that—
Watts
Well, the trouble is that the boys who always need papa are violent. They have the guns. And they’re the types of people who like to be soldiers, policemen, tough guys. And therefore, they have a great deal of power. Although, I must say, recently I had a long talk with the general of the army, who was a Virginian gentleman who was extremely intelligent. And I was quite shocked to find out how wise he was. I mean, I’ve even been invited by the Air Force to lecture at the great Air Force Academy.
Host
I mean, there’s a Buddha nature in a general?
Watts
Oh, yes. I’ve lectured at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and also at the Air Force Weapons Research Institute in Albuquerque. And some of those officers are brilliant men. But somehow, something’s wrong with their strategy. They don’t know where they want to go.
Host
I have to say this is WBAI in New York. And maybe that’s a good time to ask: considering the listenership of BAI and their own political standpoint, would you be accused of being a counter-revolutionary?
Watts
I’m apolitical, actually, although I’m tremendously interested in certain specific political problems. I can’t buy any party or ideology. I’m not sure whether the right wing or the left wing is a greater threat to my freedom.
Host
Can a person practice non-ego and silence and still be engaged in political life?
Watts
Oh yes, definitely. In other words, you can’t be effectively engaged in political life unless you do practice mental silence. Gary Snyder puts it very well. He says you can’t work well for ecological causes unless you realize in the first place that it’s not necessary to do anything about it. But if you realize that in the first place—that in other words, the universe is automatically harmonious—if you understand that, that gives you tremendous energy to do all sorts of things.
Host
Gary got highest praise in your book. You said that you wished you could claim him as your spiritual successor.
Watts
As my disciple. Yeah, right.
Host
Nonetheless, he seems to be immersed in a more traditional Zen, a more traditional practice than you. Is that true?
Watts
Not entirely, no. He is, he’s done all that, but he takes it with a light heart. He doesn’t come on stuffy about it.
Host
He didn’t take it for credit.
Watts
No, he didn’t take it for credit. Exactly.
Host
In your book, and in general, it seems that you have a kind of non-interest in the occult and the psychic phenomena. Is that a Zen background that makes you that way?
Watts
Somewhat, yes. Zen people are not interested in that.
Host
What about the idea that various Hindu practices take the consciousness into a higher chakras, whereas Zen practice keeps it in the hara, and that might account to some extent for the difference? Because Indian spirituality is really very far out in comparison to Zen.
Watts
Well, yes and no. Some of the people I know who are well into Hindu practice,—Baba Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert), Bhagavan Das, Swami Satchidananda,—I find extremely companionable.
Host
And they don’t seem to be too concerned with the psychic sphere.
Watts
No, they don’t spook you with miracles and all that kind of thing.
Host
So maybe being down to earth, then, is a characteristic of any sort of spiritual person?
Watts
Yes, because you realize that what we call earth is not away from it. Tat tvam asi: “you’re it.” Right now. Earth is it. And I find these people, the contemporary bunch of what I would call bhakti yogins, very enjoyable. But the only thing I’m critical of is their attitude about celibacy. They don’t all have it. Because I think a person who goes for celibacy by not exercising his sexual functions tends to become cruel, and that we need to exercise those functions, just as we need vitamins and exercise and breathing and all that kind of thing.
Host
But sometimes exercising the sexual functions doesn’t guarantee that one will be compassionate.
Watts
No, it doesn’t guarantee anything. But I do think that if you don’t do it, you tend to become uptight.
Host
Is that a generality? Would you make certain exceptions? For instance, you mentioned a humorous episode having tea with Swami Prabhavananda in California. I mean, obviously he’s not cruel. Maybe there are other effects that have occurred through lifelong celibacy.
Watts
I don’t want to speak of Swami Prabhavananda personally. But—
Host
No, no. But cases like that. Thomas Merton or someone like this. They have been celibate.
Watts
There are people. I have several friends who don’t really seem to have any strong sexuality, just like some people aren’t really interested in food. These are very rare people. But I only object when they try to impose their ideas on everybody else.
Host
And if someone is interested in food, why restrain it and torture it? I see that. Suppose you were to say that—I consider this sort of the two foci of your position (if it could be a call to position)—that there is no ego, therefore everything is attained. The attitude is now.
Watts
Yes.
Host
Now, can someone hear that instantly and be enlightened?
Watts
Sometimes, yes. For most people, you see, it needs some explanation. What we call the ego is a combination of two factors. On the one hand, it’s your opinion of yourself, your image of yourself, your idea of yourself, which has been brainwashed into you since you were a baby. This corresponds, on the other hand, to a certain sensation. And this sensation is one of chronic muscular strain, which we were taught when in the beginning mama said, “Darling, try to go to sleep.” Or the teacher said, “Pay attention! Take a careful look at this.” “Now listen carefully.” And one does a muscular tension in order to achieve a neurological result. And this tension is useless. It’s like when you’re taking off on a jet plane, and you think you’ve gone too far down the runway, and the damn thing ought to be up in the air—you start pulling at your seatbelt.
Now, there’s a chronic strain in everybody’s muscles. It may be sometimes located between the eyes, sometimes in the heart center, sometimes in the solar plexus, and sometimes in the rectum. And it’s holding together. Now, I say, “Pull yourself together!” Now, that is a completely useless muscular effort to attain a neurological result. But that is chronic, and it becomes associated with the image of yourself, and therefore corresponds to what you mean by “I.”
Whereas, in fact, “I” is like “eye:” it’s an aperture through which the universe is examining itself. And it is always basically unconscious of itself, for the same reason that you can’t bite your own teeth or kiss your own lips. Just as the edge of a sword doesn’t cut the edge of a sword, the universe doesn’t need to know itself—that is to say, make itself an object. Because when you make anything an object, it becomes objectionable. This is a very curious aspect of modern history. The nineteenth-century, eighteenth-century mythology (which we call scientific naturalism) made a great point of taking an objective attitude to everything. And finally, taking an objective attitude to the human mind, as in B. F. Skinner. See? The mind is an object, and thus there is no subject left. Well, then everything becomes objectionable, and we invent the hydrogen bomb to blow it all up. Suicide is the end of a purely objective world.
Host
So do you feel it now, that silence? Or can you admit to it?
Watts
Oh, yes. It’s a constant undercurrent.
Host
Can one have seen this, or felt the silence, and then still have the babble go on?
Watts
Yes.
Host
So one doesn’t have to have a total silence to have—
Watts
No, no. If you can’t meditate in a boiler factory, you can’t meditate.
Host
What if the boiler factory is inside your skull?
Watts
Even so. It’s like space behind the stars. You can’t have any stars without space. And so there is always in the background of whatever goes on in my head—let’s suppose I’m absolutely scared stiff, that I’ve got cancer, or the great Siberian itch: nevertheless, far, far in the back of my mind, there is an incredible serenity of eternal silence. But it isn’t nothing. It isn’t negative in the ordinary way in which Western people think of it. We don’t understand in the West that you can’t have something without nothing. Nothing is tremendously important. It’s the mother. It’s the womb of the universe. And it’s space. It’s (as St. Thomas Aquinas put it) the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant.
Host
Did that serene space you’re in touch with, did you achieve that serenity through anything that you’ve done in your life?
Watts
One doesn’t achieve it, you see. That is sort of asking the wrong question. There’s a famous story about an American visiting England who wanted to find the village of Upper Tottenham. And he asked a yokel, “What’s the way to Upper Tottenham? Do you know where it is?” And he scratched his head and said, “Well sir, I know where it is. But if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” And so, in the same way, one doesn’t quite speak of achieving it, because you have to understand first that there is no separate “you” to achieve it.
Host
So it doesn’t matter what one does.
Watts
What one does is mostly empty motions. When you understand that, however—look, this is the point that people need to understand: when you understand that, you can act creatively because you act with the whole energy of the universe behind you.
Host
How do you respond when someone says to you: well, you say that there is this total serene space which underlines everything, but that’s merely intellectual knowledge. People are saying that all the time.
Watts
But it isn’t intellectual knowledge. I mean, you can’t put it into words. Intellectual knowledge is what you can put into words. This is a feeling. One might almost say a concrete sensation.
Host
Why is it talked of as insight, then, in the Prajñāpāramitā, if it’s a feeling?
Watts
Because it is—well, “insight” is an English word. Prajñā means “intuitive wisdom,” “the fundamental sense of life.” Now, we can’t talk about it because it’s ineffable—that means (in Greek) what cannot be spoken, in the same way as mysticism comes from the Greek verb múō, mu, which is the finger on the lips, or as we say, “mum’s the word.” There’s something that can’t be told. And that’s what’s important.
Host
Mu.
Watts
Mu.
All about our wayward cobbled lanes, enclosed by roofed walls with cupboard gates, giving entrance to courtyards and gardens, and interspersed with small shops and restaurants. It was April, and under such a gate we took refuge from a sudden shower. The gate opened a few inches, and out came a hand proffering an umbrella. And as soon as we took it, the hand was withdrawn and the gate closed. The umbrella was a kasa made of oiled paper, a wide circle spread out like a small roof supported on a cone of thin bamboo, almost as cozy as carrying your own house with you in a quiet, heavy rain. Gutters were bubbling, and water was spilling from bronze, dragon-mouthed gargoyles at roof corners. Everywhere the soft clattering of wooden sandals like small benches with legs on the soles to keep you feet above water. Courtyards with glistening evergreen bushes and floating branches of bright green maple. The smell of Japanese cooking, soy sauce, and hot sake mixed with damp earth and the faintest suggestion—pleasant in that small dosage—of the benjo (or toilet) which, because of the diet, smells quite different from ours.
The difficulty is that our waking and attentive consciousness scans the world myopically—one thing, one bit, one fragment after another—so that our impressions of life are strung out in a thin scrawny thread, lining up small beads of information. Whereas nature itself is a stupendously complex pattern where everything is happening altogether everywhere at once. What we know of it is only what we can laboriously line up and review along the thread of this watchfulness. Better not to interfere with myself, it could set off an earthquake. Perhaps there is an entirely different way of being responsible and compassionate.
The first step is to make tea for wakefulness. And for this there is nothing better than matcha, the finely powdered green tea used for ceremonial tea drinking. A small amount is put in the bottom of a roughly glazed bowl, covered with hot water, and whirled into a jade green froth with a bamboo whisk. Although it tastes vaguely of Guinness stout, it smells of straw matting and freshly-planed wood. And then I begin to rub ink easily back and forth on a black stone cut like a small swimming pool with a short deep end and a long shallow end, and filled with water. It takes fifteen minutes or more, during which there is nothing in my consciousness except the increasingly oily texture of the liquid. The mountain forest smell of the incense and the continuing sound of soft rain on the roof. Wide awake, but with hardly a thought in my head, I stroke and roll the brush in the black liquid, and then with a certain unhurried suddenness write ten Chinese characters on a long scroll of absorbent paper. They say: “In the midst of the rain, seeing the sun. From the depths of the fire, spooning clear water.”
Zen meditation is a trickily simple affair, for it consists only in watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts and your breathing, without comment. After a while, thinking (or talking to yourself) drops away and you find that there is no “yourself” other than everything which is going on, both inside and outside the skin. Your consciousness, your breathing and your feelings are all the same process as the wind, the trees growing, the insects buzzing, the water flowing, and the distant prattle of the city. The trick which cannot be forced is to be in this state of consciousness all the time, even when you are filling out tax forms or being angry. As the Zen poem says: “The bamboo shadows sweep the stairs but raise no dust.”
The big realization for which all systems strive is not a future attainment, but a present fact: that this now-moment is eternity and that one must see it now or never. For right now, our problematic ego cannot be found. When Buddhists look very deeply into themselves, they ask: but who is looking? They come up with an answer which has been hard to understand, essentially because of a language problem. For the Japanese word, ku, translating the Sanskrit śūnya, has the sense of sky, space, or emptiness, but when it is used for the root of one’s own consciousness it means also the finally mysterious and inconceivable, not so much emptiness or darkness.
Ku is therefore clarity—as of vision or hearing—and nothing is so mysterious as clarity, for exactly what is clarity itself? Could it be well-defined form? Crystal clear form? Then, as the Heart Sutra says, “ku is sikhi,” transparence is form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can’t form the slightest idea of it is that it’s yourself.
Oh, but not the self you thought you were. We should not risk untying our conceptual moorings unless we are prepared to weather considerable confusion and anxiety. But once the critical point of the flip is passed and the identity of form and void is clear, one’s consciousness of form is in the clear. That’s to say, when grounded on nothingness, one’s zest for life is astonishing.
“Any book will do for studying Zen,” says the Rōshi Morimoto. You can use the dictionary, or Alice in Wonderland, even the Bible. There’s no real point in going to all the trouble to translate our old Chinese texts about Zen—not if you’re serious about understanding Zen. The sound of rain needs no translation. In this universe everything flows backwards from the present and vanishes like the wake of a ship. The present comes out of nothing and you cannot hear any self that is listening. This can be done with all the senses, but most easily with the ears. Simply listen, then, to the rain. And when you have really heard the sound of rain, you can hear and see and feel everything else in the same way, needing no translation.
Host
Alan, in the instant, what is it that needs no translation?
[Chanting]
Taisan
Avalokiteśvara bodhisattva, doing deep prajñāpāramitā, clearly saw emptiness of all the five conditions. Thus redeeming misfortune and pain. All Śāriputra. Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Feeling, thought, is divination.
[Choir, flute music]
Host
This is Purushottama, and this has been In the Spirit. We offer our gratitude again to Alan Watts for coming to the studio this morning to give us a glimpse of his life of spiritual experiment. And we thank Pantheon Books for Alan’s autobiography In My Own Way. We offer our deepest gassho to Taisan, now Edo Shi, spiritual leader of the New York Zendo, for his chanting of the Heart Sutra.
Those of you who wish to experience, if only for one evening, the very pure and intense atmosphere of Japanese Zen should visit the New York Zendo any Thursday evening. The Zendo opens at 6:15. The telephone number of the New York Zendo is 628–9652. That’s the Zendo at 628–9652. We also thank the members of Arica Institute, students of the Chilean spiritual master Asgharicazo, who is now living in the city, for the tastes of their utterly spontaneous musical expression, which is available on LP record. The telephone of the Arica Institute is 489–7430.
Another marvelous opportunity for Buddhist meditation in the city is offered by Dharmadhatu, the center of Trungpa Rinpoche, the brilliant Tibetan meditation master. The group meets Thursdays and Tuesdays at 7 p.m. at 12 East 18th Street. The telephone number for the New York Dharmadhatu is 989–4792. That’s 989–4792. And two disciples of Trungpa Rinpoche will be coming on this program next week.
Finally, we want to recommend most highly the meditation seminar to be conducted by the Sufi master, Pir Vilayat Khan. This man is sweet, articulate, open, and deep. His seminars cover a wide range of meditative possibilities and are fruitful for both beginners and advanced people of all spiritual paths.
Watts
In these lists of marvelous institutions and people, I would also like to add the marvels of an extraordinary place in the city called the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, which is on West 46th Street near Times Square. Go in there and absorb the atmosphere. It’s absolutely incredible.