Alan Watts, our regular Sunday morning presentation of taped lectures by the late Alan Watts. This morning we're continuing with the fourth part of a seminar entitled Reflecting the Mirror. Before we get underway, a reminder that a complete catalog of taped lectures by the late Alan Watts is available from MEA, Box 303, Sausalito. That's MEA, Box 303, Sausalito. Now, Alan Watts with part four of the seminar entitled Reflecting the Mirror. This morning, the really very surprising principle that very creative activity or results may be achieved through the realization that the human situation is one that you can't do anything about. You cannot change or improve yourself, and you cannot by direct action improve the world.

[01:10]

And if you attempt to do either, you will make a mess of it. Because you will put yourself into a state of conflict and tension as a result of which you become off-center and put yourself in a position, as it were, from which you are unable to act. You cannot act upon the world from the center of ego because it's not a real center. When a child is brought up, a child is told by its parents and its teachers and its brothers and sisters many completely self-contradictory things. Every child is defined as a separate individual and a free agent, and is told that it is responsible for what it does, and that if it does good things it will be rewarded, and if it does bad things it will be punished. We accept this without the slightest examination, without realizing that the entire proposition

[02:16]

is loaded with contradiction. Because the child is in a position, with regard to society, where it cannot but be impressed by what it is told. And therefore a child is forced to believe that it is a free agent. It believes that it is a free agent, responsible for what it does, because it has no alternative. And if that isn't a mix-up I don't know what is. So there is no possibility whatsoever of being a free agent on those terms. One can only act freely from reality, not from illusion. There is such a thing as free action, as when we say of the movements of a dancer, that there is a wonderful freedom to the movement. And what freedom means is, there are various aspects to it, but one of the things that

[03:22]

it means is that the movement is not carried out in self-conflict. When a person is described as dancing in an unfree way, what we associate with that isn't it is stiffness, a kind of rigidity of motion, a kind of stammering movement of the limbs. And that is because the person is very self-conscious and is so exercised about dancing well that the same phenomenon is set up in the organism that would be set up if the surgeon was so anxious about his patient that his hand trembles in the operation. It's completely self-defeating. So the only possible basis for free action is when you act at one with nature, at one

[04:29]

with the universe. Then you have its freedom. But when you act against that, you don't really have any freedom at all. You have only the capacity to create trouble, to act as an enemy of nature. So then, this apparently paradoxical thing stands right at the beginning. That you must look upon the world and upon yourself, that is to say your own mind-body organism, as something which you can't do anything about. It's the way it is. And you will normally interpret that, if you are a westerner, as being fatalistic. But it isn't fatalistic at all, because the idea of fatalism involves the subsidiary notion that you are something which fate can push around. This point that I'm making is quite different from that.

[05:33]

There is, in other words, no separate you, other than a merely abstract ego, which fate can influence at all. Fate doesn't influence anything, because everything is fate. There are no subjects of fate. And this is the important thing to discover. So that you stop taking yourself as an eccentric center of the universe. You say, well, there's this big thing going on, and maybe its center is somewhere called God. But I am my own center out here somewhere, and I've got to either conform with it or change it. But that's not true, because your center is the same as the center of everything. And you can only find that out as soon as you give up the illusion, the fantasy, the hallucination that you are a separate center, eccentric to the whole thing.

[06:37]

You're concentric to the whole thing. And so therefore, the way of talking about this, initially, in order to change a person's feeling about it, is at first a debunking. Is at first saying, there's nothing you can do. Give up. And that's interpreted as being defeatist. Saying, well, what's the good? If we're just like leaves on the wind, which have no choice except to dance along with it. What's the point? Well, I'm going to say to you, wouldn't it be fun to be a leaf on the wind, or dancing down the street? Always when I see leaves on the wind dancing down the street in the autumn, I think they remind me of children who've just been let out of school. But you will find, you see, that as soon as you give it all up, and know there's nothing

[07:44]

for it. See? Nothing. You can't do anything about it. Nothing about you. Nothing about the world. The minute that happens, two things occur. Number one, you get centered again. It's just as if there was a gravity at work, whereby you let go, and you go, and that's just like when you fit a lid into a vessel, and it's on the edge, but you push it over, and it drops. It's clunk. It's in. See? It fits. Then you suddenly find you are in the position of power. And so you're, as it were, you're centered. And from being centered, you can move, because you're connected with what's going on. And the other thing is this, that you have stopped dissipating all the energy you were using to fight yourself, or to protect yourself.

[08:46]

You stop dissipating it, and therefore, you're surprised to find that you have a sudden access of new energy. Now this is very paradoxical, or apparently so, because we say, but how can you be free? How can you amount to anything? If you're going to say there's nothing you can do about it. But it works the other way around. And I want to try and show you why, for still another reason why that works, why it happens that way. I put up over there, you know, for a little gadget designed for you to see infinity. And the trouble is, that although when I light a candle between those two mirrors, you can see them going on and on for quite a long way, eventually the light fades, and

[09:51]

you can't see beyond, because the energy won't reach that far. And you'll find every time you set up any kind of experiment, it's the same sort of thing as trying to get perpetual motion in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Every time you set up that kind of experiment, you're going to run into a limit. There is the limit to which you can control any situation. There is the limit to which you can have knowledge of yourself. There is a limit in which you encounter in exploring the physical world, simply because the act of exploring the physical world changes it, and what you wanted to find out was how it is before you changed it. That kind of situation is going on all the time, and therefore it means that what is really important in this universe, the thing that we're all saying we would like to get

[10:55]

our hands on, is the one thing you can't get your hands on. Remember I put it in this form, I say to myself, well you ought to be different, because you're quite a mess. So I can find all sorts of people to give me therapy, voila. But what it always comes down to is this, that the me that's a mess is the one who's supposed to put me straight, and it can't do anything except make a further mess. So, if I try with a messy me to put my mess straight, all I do is I become like everybody else who circles in and out of the doors of all the different therapists and churches

[11:57]

and religions and whatnot, and they go on and on and on, unless by chance one day they suddenly get that funny, haven't we been here before feeling, and realize that they've been fooling themselves. And at last face it, that you know, you are the way you are, things are the way they are, and you don't accept it, you have no alternative but to accept it, there's nothing else to do. So you give up, and surprise, you suddenly find you have strength. So the thing is then, there's that one thing, you see, that we're all after, that we want to get control of, and that's the central energy. So, we put the mirror opposite the mirror, so that we can see what reflection is, and

[13:09]

let it talk back to us. And when we do that, we get the same phenomenon that you get with an old-fashioned telephone, you know, the kind that had a receiver you could lift off the column, and you were talking away, and the operator came on saying, and he couldn't stand this operator, he said let her talk to herself. And you put the earphone to the mouthpiece, the earpiece to the mouthpiece, see, and what happens? It sets up oscillation, see, and the minute, you see, you try to know the knower, to control the controller, to put your finger on what is the center of you, that's what happens. And that doesn't get you anywhere. Because you see, what this means, this whole block on understanding what the center of

[14:10]

it all is, is a problem that when you try to do that, you generate a vicious circle of some kind. And you think you're trapped and there's no way out, and you've set yourself the final impossible task, but you've got to solve it. Because, after all, the main problem in the world today is man, and we say, well, we can control this and control that, but alas, we don't seem to be able to control ourselves. And the answer is, no, you can't. But what does that mean that you can't? What does it mean that you can't really get down to the basis of what matter is? What energy is? The reason that you can't do it is that it's you.

[15:12]

That's the one thing, the real you, whatever that is, is the one thing you will never be able to know. And you won't be able to control it, because, don't you see, that if there were a system which were completely transparent to itself, in which, in other words, the impulse that goes, that starts, is always completely under control, it wouldn't happen. It could never get off the ground, because it would be too self-conscious. See, that's why self-consciousness in any performance is always inhibiting and discouraging to a person. I, in order to talk at all, I have to be free to say the most outrageous things.

[16:20]

I don't necessarily do so, but I don't mind if I do, because I'm not watching myself while I'm talking. But in other words, if a system is always checking itself, it will stop itself, it won't be able to budge. So a system will work, there will, in other words, there will be life, so long as an energy source does not over-regulate itself. See? So then, the problem of self-knowledge, what it's telling you, that you cannot really know you, that you cannot really control you, because you are you, and you're more than you think you are, because that unknown you is the same as the unknown everything,

[17:26]

it's the root and ground of being, and that you never get at. You can say, with the Zen poem, it is like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself, it is like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself. And so, we might say that this thing, then, will not operate, unless it has faith in itself. In other words, to the degree that you try to check it and control it, you will be balled up. However, to the degree that you trust it to go ahead, it will work. But that's it trusting itself. It's no longer, in other words, the energy of the world doesn't behave like a little dog that's chasing its own tail, unavailingly going round and round in order to grab it. It gets out of that vicious circle, and can operate in every way, simply by knowing that

[18:39]

you don't know. So in the Upanishads it said, if you think that you know Brahman, you are yet in need of further instruction. Those who do not know Brahman, they truly know. Those who know, do not know. Again, it's the same old paradox. But when, you see, you get to say, I don't know, I don't control it, I'm not in charge of me. As Vada sometimes says, my neighbor here on the boat, there are only two things in which I cannot be trusted, words and deeds. But, you see, this is the foundation and beginning of a moral and beautiful human life.

[19:55]

Rather than the notion of holding a whip or a club over yourself. Because that way, that way of trying to become moral and beautiful, you can only become a fake. And then eventually people will discover your feet of clay, and indulge in the fun of writing scurrilous biographies of people celebrated for their virtue. So that's why I emphasize the necessity of admitting one's irreducible rascality to begin with. That, it's the Turkish proverb, he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed. They may fall out of love, but they won't fall out of bed.

[20:58]

You have to begin at the low point, you see. Because, if you want to move an enormous pole, or lift up a rolled carpet, you have to get it below its center of gravity. That's the way you begin to move in on something. You have to get to the center. And so to get to the center of you, well you can't get there because you are there. Only you can't know it, you see. Now lots of people, when they think that they're going to have a great spiritual experience, they're going to have satori, they're going to be enlightened, they're going to see the mystic vision. They think of it in terms, they're going to see it as something you can look at. That you will actually, as it were, see God. But it doesn't work that way. And the mystics are very particular about this, they say, if you do see something, the

[22:11]

great white light, or the vision, you won't have seen God, you'll only have seen an angel. Because God is the blind spot in the world. The one thing nobody can see, not even God. Because there would be no point, you know, if I say God, you must understand me in not a sort of a literal way. But the one thing is that just as there is no need for a knife to cut itself, there is no need for a flame to, as it were, burn itself, there is no need for water to make itself wet. So there is no need for God to know God. There's no need for God to control God. Because actually there isn't anything else.

[23:17]

Why should there be any need for it to be controlled? It can do anything it likes. And because there's nothing else, nobody's going to get hurt. Now, there may be the impression that somebody gets hurt, but not really, it's just God crept up behind himself and said, boo, jumped, and... So, then, this is the curious factor when people say, well, you must have faith in God. And make a project of this. Do I have enough faith? And they worry about it and so on and so forth. You mustn't understand faith in that way at all. Faith is not belief. Faith is not something you have to struggle to do, say, with faith healing, as if you

[24:25]

could somehow make a psychic effort, you know, screw yourself up into a state of faith. You can't do it. And the real thing is, you see, there is no alternative except to have faith. Because you are always, as a center of conscious attention, you're always in charge of something you don't understand. In the charge of something you don't understand. The center, the real you. So, when you are enlightened and you say you have the mystic vision, it isn't a state of seeing the center as if it were out there and you could look at it. It's on the contrary, knowing that you are the center.

[25:27]

And, therefore, as it were, instead of looking in, you're looking out from the center. And there is no way of even thinking about what the center is, see? See? So you find that it's like, almost, a light coming from behind you. And the light that you see is reflected on all that you're looking at. But because it comes from you, you don't look straight into the light. And, therefore, as you go through the history of mystical experience, you will find levels of experience. On the lower levels, people will talk about ESP and angels and all that sort of thing. On the next level, they will talk about the great light they saw.

[26:32]

On the highest level, they will talk about nothing that they saw. As when Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra, when I attained complete unsurpassed awakening, I attained nothing whatsoever. Sure, because the whole idea of attainment was false. Because you have it already. You don't need to attain a thing. Because you are Buddhas all around here, right where you sit. And it's so funny, people don't know it. I remember once talking to a very lovely lady, most wise, mature person. And she was looking at me with her lovely eyes and saying, but you know, I understand it theoretically, but I haven't really realized it yet. And I looked at her and I had the funniest feeling. It was as if the supreme goddess on her lotus throne were looking at me and saying, you

[27:41]

know, I understand all these Hindu teachings and theory, but I haven't really realized it yet. I looked at those eyes, I could see right down into the mystery of being, you know. There it was, saying, what, me? Very strange. So one sees this all the way around, people who think they're off center, who think they are not it. And that's why gurus play games with people. Because they have an enormous amount of fun with this. And the guru is a person who knows that he's there, but he doesn't claim to know what it is. That's why when Bodhidharma was asked by the Emperor Wu of Liang, who are you who stands

[28:44]

before me, Bodhidharma said, I don't know. You don't know. But you know that you're, what's going on? What's going on? The whole scheme, that's what you are. But what it is, you can't get outside it to look at it, and you don't need to. So then, when someone comes to a guru with this long story about this, that, and the other thing, that his problems, doesn't realize, so on, the guru always gives him a funny look. Because he gets the feeling that I had with talking to this woman. And people think, oh my, he's got that funny look on his face because he sees right through me. He sees all my secret sins, he sees all my inadequacies, but he's not even interested

[29:45]

in that. What's making him laugh is to see the godhead telling him that he's lost. That's a real joke. That really is something. And, uh, so then he thinks, well how am I going to get this fellow out of this mix? How will, uh, I be a mirror to him? And show him. Because I can't just tell him, you know you have no problem at all. Because that will deflate his ego. See, it's a big thing to have a problem. And uh, especially if you think you can solve it, my, won't you be great when you've solved

[30:49]

your problem? So the guru just lets the person think that he sees through and through and knows all their vices. But that, you see, once you get into this, it makes you very self-conscious. Shall we say it bugs you? And that's the art of, of, of gurumanship, is to make people feel very awkward. To set them against themselves so that, uh, everything they do is under inspection. See? And uh, ooh, you can't move without thinking, what did he think of that? What do you approve of this? And so you find that when all people are going through their various yogas, disciplines or

[31:53]

whatever it is, whatever, they're always talking about their teacher, what their teacher thinks of this and how much progress they're making and that and the other thing, you see. And this is absolutely intentional, this is part of the guru's mischief, is to get them into this state of being eek, oh, all thumbs, you know, until they reach a point where it becomes impossible. They realize the whole thing is a fraud which you perpetrated on yourself. There was a fellow called David Hunter, who, um, really marvelous teacher of drama, and uh, also a guru. And the best gurus don't teach anything spiritual. I know a wonderful guru who teaches photography. He's more of a psychotherapist than a guru, actually, because he's not really interested

[32:56]

in the spiritual dimension, but he is a wonderful therapist, but he teaches photography. And uh, many, many of the best people, you see, therefore don't actually operate on the level of overt spirituality, on various other, other ways. It's like there was an old lady in Japan, lived in Kyoto, her name was Miss Denton, and she taught at Doshisha University, which was a Baptist school. And they used to say to her, uh, people, well, are you a missionary? Oh no, she said, I'm not a missionary, I just teach cooking. Well, it's the funny thing is, she's the only Christian who was ever buried in a Zen Buddhist cemetery. They appreciated that attitude, you see. I'm not a missionary, I just teach cooking. Well, so then, the guru, by doing this, gets everybody so mixed up, that they suddenly

[34:04]

realize, but all this isn't doing anything, it's getting nowhere. So it's the principle of homeopathy, similia similibus curantur, or a hair of the dog that bit you, or set a thief to catch a thief. By, in other words, exaggerating your complaint, you get healed from it. So by making you intensely self-conscious, with the idea that this is going to achieve some creative result, if you really go through with it, you get cured of it. And then, you may say, well, as Rinzai said to his teacher, there's not much in your Buddhism after all. You just played a big hoax on them.

[35:07]

But that's, that's what you were asking for. And let me restate the whole situation, you see. You say to some teacher, will you show me how to improve myself? Well, of course, part of his problem is, he can't improve you. He can't improve you any more than you can improve a horse, by all sorts of elaborate training. You know, Zhuangzi refers to the ruining of the nature of horses. And it was done by a man called Polo. And Polo is supposed to have been, by the Chinese, the first horse trainer. And so the game Polo is named after this man, Polo.

[36:14]

And he said, with all this training of horses and so on, he disrupted the nature of horses. He was interfering with them. So you will only stop doing that when you realize you can't do it. It isn't that you can try and half-succeed, and maybe the next time you'll be a little more successful. Every time you are doing this thing of attempting to make yourself over, to cure yourself by yourself, who is the one who is in need of the cure? See you're getting deeper and deeper into a mess. Now you can be extracted from the mess by an expert who knows what mess you're in. And he has a way of coaxing you into that mess so deeply that you can't stand it and you'll have to get out. So they use these koans, they use all sorts of techniques to exaggerate the existing problem.

[37:26]

You know the worst kind of spiritual disciplines are those in which there is somebody who is the teacher, director, who is constantly commenting on your behavior. You didn't think of this, did you? You didn't consider that. You were insensitive to that person's feelings, etc., etc., etc., etc. And you can go on and you can complain about every detail of a thing that a person does. And if there's nothing to complain about you invent something, which they are not aware of. So that the person is completely preoccupied with the mechanics of trying to change his behavior. What does that do, you see? It makes him very self-conscious. See if I walk on and somebody said, done. Now don't walk too fast, walk slowly and with dignity. And I consider that. They said, you're not aware of what you're doing with your hands. What am I supposed to do with my hands?

[38:31]

Well now you must always have your hands in a natural position. You see, when actors come on the stage, one of the difficulties is they don't know what to do with their hands. Lots of people feel, you know, eh, here they are, so they put their hands in their pockets and that is comfortable and they're out of sight. But that's too bad. I mean, if you've got these beautiful hands and you're going to act or dance or something, well you may as well use them. But the moment you go into motion with all of your body and the teacher looks and says, but you've neglected this, because the teacher can think up infinitely many parts of your body and what you're supposed to be doing with them. You can therefore always bug you. Pay attention. And you are trying to think of your feet and your hands and the angle your head's at and how your pelvis is and how this is and how that is and you're trying to think of all this at once. Well you can't keep track of all those details and therefore you can't dance. And you can only dance when in a certain way, from the standpoint of conscious attention,

[39:41]

that is counting things as things, you forget them. But that doesn't mean that you're just unconscious of it. You become conscious of the whole thing as a unity, as a flowing unity. Not as a lot of bits called feet, ankles, knees, etc. They don't exist. They're just concepts. You know, just like you don't get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. You don't get a human being composed of calves and toes and ears and hair and all that. Not composed at all. That's decomposition, not being composed. But those teachers will do that, quite deliberately. Because it bugs you, makes you self-conscious.

[40:44]

And the more you get caught in the trap of self-consciousness, the more you will realize how stupid it is. But you cannot, seems to be one of the only ways of doing it, you just cannot talk people out of it. They insist. And you know, somebody then, I've told somebody this years and years ago, they go off some where and they spend a lot of time in some kind of yoga or whatever it is. They come back and say, you know, it's the funniest thing, you told me this years and years ago and at the time I just didn't hear you. But now it's obvious. I don't need to tell this to some of you here because I know a lot of you come here simply for entertainment, not because you're on a spiritual quest.

[41:49]

But if anybody here is on a spiritual quest, I assure you, that's the way it is. And until you understand that there really isn't anything to seek, that you are there and there's nothing you can do about it, and that you are going to have to take this apparently completely fatalistic and passive attitude to the situation, before you can have any strength at all. Now there is a little hang-up here, which I should warn you about. And gurus are very clever at this. When a person thinks he's doing the right thing, you see, that at last he's got with it and that he is accepting himself, see, and he's got this right idea that there's nothing you can do. Well he thinks that's a new thing I've got hold of, you see.

[42:55]

And the guru sees that at once. Now I belong to the society of people who have recognized that you can do nothing about it. And I put a button on, you see, that this is what I belong to. And the guru laughs at this like anything, because this cat doesn't realize that he always was a member of the society. You can't join it, you know, because you were never a non-member. So when you get to see, you know, that this, that even this admission that there's nothing you can do about it, is really unnecessary, it's legs on a snake, yielding the lily. There is no way of being anything else, see, that's the point. And so this thing, that the more I begin to talk about it, you see what happens, I begin

[43:59]

to approach the same limit that we approached when we're trying to understand what it is that understands. See and the more I begin to talk to you, see, I've taken you through various steps now, where we get down to the point, there's really nothing to do, because you were already there. And this doing nothing is not something special that you have to do. Now when we get into that kind of language, we are doing the same thing as when we are making the mirror face the mirror. And we're trying to get down to the final point, we find, I'm going to get tongue-tied, because I can't really say what it is. And that's the same thing as when you get finally gummed up and you can't stick the

[45:09]

point of your pin into the point of that pin, because they're both the same size. See, you thought you had something you could penetrate everything with, and you go in and you divide things up, you know, it's the ultimate scalpel and you're getting to understand how it all works together, till finally you get down like somebody in the mirror, and there is opposite you the scalpel. Well what's this thing that I'm using, you see, what's that all about? So let's get very finally on the edge of that thing and see if we can split it, but they're exactly the same width, and there's no further division possible, no further atomization, because you've come down to the atom, the atomos, that means what cannot be cut any further. So that's, you know, that's you baby, you're it. You've got down to the point now where you can't stick your finger into your finger,

[46:10]

you can't hear your ear, you can't see your eye. And so that's the point where you say, okay, there's nothing to do but trust it, to call faith in yourself. Not because, again, I say, I use the form of words, nothing to do but trust it, for the simple reason that putting it in another way would suggest that trusting yourself was some sort of a meritorious action, that you could say, now I'm trusting myself. And isn't that great? You're still not doing it then, you see. It's only when you're only doing it, when you discover there's nothing else you can do,

[47:16]

there's no other alternative. Then, you see, you've reached the limit. The point of, beyond which there is no passage. And you say, oh dear, this is as far as we can go. What a defeat to the inquiring mind. The trouble is, baby, you don't realize you got there. Of course, there's nowhere else to go. This morning we've heard part four of a seminar entitled Reflecting the Mirror.

[48:05]

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