explaining that we were studying that type of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy called Yogacarya or Yogacara in Sanskrit, which has a view of the world as being consciousness only, the Jnapti Mathra. And the main thing that I had to explain was that we are dealing here with a view of consciousness and with a view of what is the meaning of mind or the words that we translate as mind, which is not like ours. I tried to show that whereas when a

[01:03]

Westerner uses the word mind or spirit or soul or whatever, he has in the back of his mind an image of something impalpable, something tenuous, something light and generally ghostly. When you use the word in Sanskrit for mind, you don't have the same kind of image. That one of the great symbols that has been used in Buddhist philosophy for the mind is the diamond, which is the chosen intention because it's A, the hardest thing you can find and B, the most transparent. And so this word citta in Sanskrit, meaning the mind, is not meant and isn't in their basic thinking anything filmy, but is, as we would say, the most substantial thing you can get.

[02:04]

When Zen masters try and demonstrate to their students what the mind is, they hit them on the head to get a sense of reality, you know, of being thoroughly all there. So you can understand then, I think for this reason, why a philosophical view of mind only makes a little bit more sense in that cultural context than it does in ours. Because in our context, when anybody says, well, all the world is nothing but mind, and we suspect him immediately of being a Christian scientist or some kind of phony metaphysician, because such a person seems to be saying,

[03:19]

by believing in this kind of doctrine, I am more ethereal than you are. It's a kind of game is played. I'm more ethereal than you. Well now, I want to describe this afternoon the Vijnaptimatra or Yogacara view of the human mind and its senses, conceived really in the form of a tree. You know that when you look in the aeroplane, at river courses in the deserts,

[04:27]

they have the same pattern as trees. Only trees are supposed to start from the root and go to the branches, whereas river courses start from the branches and go to the root, or which way is up. After all, a tree underneath has roots, that we know that from the seed where a tree starts, it pulses down and up, and so that all tentacles, little things on the ends, come later. But with a river, obviously the little tentacles, the water courses, come first and then eventually flow into the stream. Think again, because turn the thing over in your mind and you will see that the tree and the river are the same, because the tree absorbs from all

[05:44]

those little tentacles and branches, sunlight, moisture, and energy, and they flow into the center. It, in other words, provides a water course through which life moves in this way, at the same time as the tree does this. Now exactly the same thing is true of the river. The river must be considered, not simply as a flow of water in a certain direction, but as a pattern of land. And the pattern of land, being the way it is, arranges the water the way it comes. So that a river is not something that simply begins at the end, that is to say at the sources. It begins in the whole land pattern which arranges itself in this way so that the water

[06:48]

behaves as it does. I use this image advisedly because the view of this particular school of Buddhism, of the nature of the mind and its relation to the sensual world, is the same sort of thing. It's a pattern wherein the sense organs, five senses, eye, ear, nose, mouth, and touch, that's how they number it. All these sense organs are called in Sanskrit an ayatana. And the word ayatana means a gate. Now of course through any gate you can go in and you can go out. But the

[07:49]

first idea in this particular system is that the mind is going out through the sense gates. And finding beyond every ayatana what is called a kshetra, k-s-e-t-r-a, meaning a field. Each sense having its appropriate field. So that you have the idea basically of a projection of the world through five gates. So if you, I really ought to have a blackboard or something but I think you can get this. You have the kshetra, the sense field, and there are five sense fields. You have the ayatana, which is the gate, that means the sense organ, the eye, ear, etc. And then

[08:51]

behind that you have corresponding to each of the five senses, evignana, or consciousness. Now, behind all these five senses they put a sixth called mano-vignana, m-a-n-o-v-i-j-n-a-n-a. Mano-vignana meaning the mind consciousness. And this is the unifying sense, which makes sense of the senses, if you see what I mean. In other words, how do we know that when I see yellow in the flower and touch the petal that these things are united? When I hear the wind and feel the pressure

[09:58]

of air on my fingers holding them up like this, how do I put those together? Why isn't this, all this world, a completely disconnected chaotic impact of boom-bang-boom? Because of mano-vignana, the unifying sense. Because the basic point is that all our senses are really diversifications of a single sense, which you could call a certain kind of touch. So that your eyes are such an extremely sensitive form of touch that they touch light. Your ears, a little less sensitive, touch subtle vibrations in the air. Your nose touches gas and particles

[11:10]

in gas and gives you smell. Your tongue still, you see the dimension of sensitiveness is going down. Your tongue savors the taste of things. And finally, your skin is touch. And the curious thing about the surface of the skin is that at different parts of the skin, we have very different kinds of sensitivity. There are parts of the body, for example, on which you can place two fingers. And a person has difficulty in knowing whether there are two fingers or just one. One's hands are extremely sensitive. The back and so on is less so. In the kind

[12:13]

of intelligence in counting, in numbering, the number of stimuli going into it. So you have in this then a whole spectrum of sensation. So that you can say in a way that all the senses are particular forms of touching. Through which life comes on with different kinds of vibrations. Now we say, you see, I'm using language which says life comes on. In other words, it comes through the senses. Here are these gates, eyes, ears, nose, etc. And something outside comes in like this. But in the Yogachara school, they think of it the other way around. That from these gates, life is going out. And that you are shooting,

[13:24]

as it were, the world through the gates of your senses onto the screen, shall we say, of what you call the outside world in the same way exactly as you do with a movie projector. Now you see, these are two points of view. One, that the objective world is really out there and that we are just the receivers of it. And the other point of view is that we are the creators of it. And we've done it so skillfully that we think it's really out there. Now do you see that in these two views, you've got exactly my original picture that I gave you of the river and the tree. The river seems to go one way and create a tree-like structure, whereas the tree seems to go the other way from the base up and create a river-like

[14:30]

structure. And the same is true here. When you look, in other words, at the relationship of yourself to the world from one point of view, it all seems that you are purely responsive to, subject to, forces that impinge on you from outside. You receive all this. See, I was talking of the illusion of oneself this morning of being just a passive entity, a kind of reflector, a kind of camera film on which things impinge. So this particular

[15:45]

way of looking at things, that I simply record what is really going on and that I am efficient, good, intelligent to the extent that I record it faithfully and react. Look at the word react. Respond to all these messages from somewhere outside. See? Now the opposite point of view is that I actually create everything that seems to be outside. In other words, from a perfectly hard-boiled scientific neurological point of view, my nervous system

[17:10]

actually evokes the external world by translating. Let's call it, what would you say? X, the particles, the whatever there is out there, quanta. We have to use some kind of terminology for something we don't know, you see? The whole idea of physics, the physical description of the world in Western science is completely abstract. It's just algebra. That some sort of algebra out there gets translated by our nervous system into light, into weight, into color, into pleasure or pain, hard, soft, sharp, smooth, and so on. So that if it were

[18:25]

not for our little nervous tree here, you know, that grows out of the spinal column and blossoms out in the brain and has all these little edges that go tick, tick, tick. If it were not for this thing, you see, there wouldn't be any light in the sun. There wouldn't be any sound in the air. There wouldn't be any hardness of the wood or softness of the petals of a flower. It is the tree of the nervous system growing out like this, you see, that brings all this into existence. Although, and balanced now with the opposite point of view, this tree, with all its little tentacles running out from my nervous system,

[19:32]

is something in the external world just as much as these flowers are. From all our points of view, the flowers are out there. From my point of view, you're all out there and you belong in the external world, but from your point of view, I'm out there and belong in your external world. So these trees have a game going between them. In other words, they all go, shh, [...] shh. Then they connect with other things going, shh, [...] like this, you see. And so there is a kind of pattern of interconnection. And all of them can be described or thought about as receiving messages from outside, but all of them can equally be thought of as projecting the messages from inside. And you, in order to understand it correctly, you have to keep

[20:37]

both points of view in mind. Either one or the other, by itself, will be incorrect. So what this view in Mahayana does, it stresses the point that it's only your mind that evokes the world. And the reason for this is that it's part of what is called upaya in Sanskrit. That means skillful means, especially in reference to pedagogy, the art of teaching. To correct a false view by the opposed view. That is to say, for example, that the Buddha taught that existence is impermanent, in order to counteract the view that there is something

[21:44]

permanent. But the teacher does not, he only does this out of expediency, he does not finally want to leave you the impression that his philosophy is that all existence is impermanent. He merely uses the idea of impermanence to correct your notion that things ought to be permanent. So this is in line with what I explained about the dialectical nature of Buddhism. That you do not, in the doctrines, you don't get the final teaching, the final view. You only get a discussion, which is going to lead you to the final view if you go through with the discussion. So in the same way, here we have it. In opposition to the notion that the external world is something that exists out there and is very real, and that I just get the message through my senses, the opposing view is presented. That what

[22:50]

is out there is what you create through your senses. It's all in your mind. You see, when you say to somebody, oh, the trouble with you is just nerves. We say, oh, that means nothing's really the matter with you at all. You're just nervous. And don't think a thing about it, you see. Look how ambivalent we are about this, because I'm going to give you the same story as the tree going one way and the tree going the other, or the river going the other, in our attitude to nerves. We say to someone, oh, it's just nerves. That means it couldn't matter less. In other words, it's all in your mind, forget it. But let

[23:58]

us suppose that somebody gets involved in a serious accident. In fact, that he goes out and kills somebody, and the court decides that there was something wrong with his mind. This exonerates him from responsibility. Just nerves. See, a person whose nerves are wrong is not culpable. He was fundamentally different, not responsible for what he did. So that, whereas in one moment we say, oh, it's just your nerves, it's just a matter of mind, from another moment we're saying, but of course that is fundamental. Whether you're responsible or not depends on whether your mind is working. Because the mind is causative. It is the responsible

[25:07]

thing, and therefore whether it's working or not is fundamentally the important thing to think about, and whether, you know, you're operating as an individual. The point then being is that our relationship to the external world is completely two-wayed. This is the whole thing that this method of thinking is getting at, with the sense gates. If I just complete the story on the sense gates, you have then five senses, their gates, outside them their fields, kshetra is the field, ayatana the gate, inside the gate the vijnana, the consciousness that corresponds to each sense, at the root, mano vijnana, the unifying sense, the sense in

[26:14]

other words that makes sense of the senses, and which of which they are all differentiations. Then under mano vijnana you get the stem of the tree called manas, which word means the mind, and is associated of course with man, man. Manas really means fundamentally the human order of things, and as I have said to you before, every being in the universe thinks it's human. That is to say even beetles think that we are people, because after all when you are a beetle it feels familiar to be a beetle and to have wings and six legs, and you look around at other creatures who like this, you say well they're orderly, proper people, and everything else is weird or a threat

[27:20]

or good to eat, and that's not people. So what we mean by people means our kind, seen from our point of view. So obviously all creatures whatsoever from their different points of view realize that they're in the middle of the universe, just like we feel we are, and they can explain away the fact that human beings seem to be more successful in certain enterprises, the only thing being that human beings don't realize how unsuccessful they are in enterprises which other creatures really get away with. So the manas means then the mind, the man, the principle of centrality, because it is after all the stem, see? This is the stem from which these other things come out, and so by virtue of being the stem in this system that we're talking about, it is, it creates the whole system of stems in the living world. Look here, you know, the flower here

[28:39]

has a stem, and the petals come out from it like that. All physical existence whatsoever is somehow linked in this pattern. A central core giving out diversity, see? You throw a bottle at a wall, you know, it's bottle has got ink in it or something, and it smashes, and suddenly there's a center from which is spread tentacles. So the flower, the tree, the octopus, the star, everything is, see? Tentacles going out. Now, think backwards, look at the world the other way.

[29:49]

As a consolidation of vagueness, which begins at the tips of the tentacles, going in. I put in my book, The Joyous Cosmology, a photograph of coral, where the photograph appears to be full of stars, but actually these stars are the empty spaces in a coral formation. So the reality, so-called, is the substance around the shapes, and the shapes are just the hollows. Now it's the same way here, that everything that we feel to be there can be looked upon as a hollow in reality. And that the enclosing space is what is actually there. You can always figure it the opposite way. Now, so then, if you don't know this, if you aren't awake to the idea that you can figure it both ways, you start taking sides.

[31:05]

And you turn the game of the universe into a fight. Ah, great, it's good to get involved in that sort of thing where you are so far out that you have forgotten that two sides go together and you're going to treat this like a fight. The only thing is that after a while this becomes impossible. It becomes impossible because it's simply against the nature of reality. You cannot have up without down, and so you cannot be perpetually one up on things. It's great to try to be, but it's an absolute bore to have to try to do so for too long. So eventually one comes to see that won't work. Now why won't it work?

[32:08]

Well, the answer is that that's not the kind of system you're living in. Now this goes very deep. It isn't only that the river and the tree run in two directions. It isn't just that the world creates you and you create the world. It's that when you go down to your absolutely fundamental sense of existing, here conscious, sensitive, that, you see, this is intensely real and vital to you only because it has the possibility of not being there at all.

[33:25]

It is, in other words, the constant possibility of death that gives the juicy vibrancy to life. And these things play each other. This is the same two-way system. Only, of course, naturally, you have to take the side of life and say, oh, that's what I want. Yeah, that's more of that. And not that death thing. No, please, no, not that. But you couldn't have the one without the other. They define each other. And the reason they define each other is that they are the two aspects, the two sides of what you are. Only, we have a thing against knowingness. So as to make it work, see? So as to make a kind of interplay or contest go on between the two.

[34:42]

Therefore, to see through the contest between the two is what the Buddhists call nirvana, which means if you want to, you can stop worrying about the game. Nirvana means, in other words, to check out. Say, oh, for heaven's sake, what was I all this time upset about? Sickness, death, evil, and so on. I suddenly realized that everything I was afraid of was the opposite side, that is to say, the complementary side of who I am. So stop worrying. If, for example, I suffer and die, what happens? I go through a very energetic experience of pain and resisting pain and all this thing goes, urgh! And then it fails. Clunk. See?

[35:51]

But that builds up the energy, which actually creates a new existence. Your birth, your arrival as an itty-bitty baby in this world was the obverse of someone dying in exactly the same way as a star, as a thing inside has an obverse of something outside in terms of space. It's all flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop like this. Why has the population increased and there seems to be more coming in? And you will find it has full of little veins that are going out, or in the pattern of the fern, which I mentioned this morning, a fern is a stem, then stems coming off it, and then stems coming off then, and then each little stem has a sub-stem. That's why there's a population explosion.

[37:20]

This is the shape of life. The shape of a tree. This is the image I'm giving you, and the point is that the tree runs both ways. It runs from the stem out to all the ends of the tubes or passages, but at the same time, it is running from all the stems into the center. As the tree uses its leaves to absorb moisture, and as we use our nerve ends to absorb information from the external world. The whole thing is it runs both ways. So don't get hung up on committing yourself to one view or the other. You're both. You accept it as something that's out there, but at the same moment, you create it. You are a subject, and you're also an object.

[38:24]

You've just heard part two of a lecture by the late Alan Watts entitled, The World as Consciousness. For a catalog of all the available lectures of Alan Watts on tape, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to MEA, Box 303, Sausalito. That's MEA, Box 303, Sausalito. This is KSAN in San Francisco. Thank you.

[39:34]

Thank you. [...]

[41:29]

Thank you. [...] Won't you come home, Billy Bailey, please come home

[48:40]

I cried the whole night long I'll do the cooking, honey, pay the rent I know I done you wrong Do you remember that rainy evening You put me out With nothing but a fine tooth comb Ain't that a shame Bless your doggone name Billy, Billy, Billy Bailey Won't you please come home Won't you come home, Billy Bailey, please come home I know I done you wrong I'll do the cooking, honey, pay the rent

[49:46]

I know I done you wrong Do you remember that rainy evening You put me out With nothing but a fine tooth comb Ain't that a shame Bless your doggone name Billy, Billy, won't you please come home I'll do the cooking, honey, pay the rent I know I done you wrong I'll do the cooking, honey, pay the rent

[50:51]

I know I done you wrong I'll do the cooking, honey, pay the rent I know I done you wrong I'll do the cooking, honey, pay the rent I cried the whole night long I'll do the cooking, honey, and I'll pay the rent I know I done you wrong Do you remember that rainy evening You put me out With nothing but a fine tooth comb

[51:54]

Oh, I said, ain't that a shame Bless your doggone name Billy, Billy, get your black ass home Oh, ain't that a shame Bless your doggone name Billy, Billy, get your white ass home Oh, ain't that a shame Bless your doggone name Billy, Billy, both asses equal time Oh, ain't that a shame

[52:57]

Sing Yeah

[53:18]

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