At the end of today's talk we'll give you an address to write to for more information about Alan Watts' talks. Now here's part one from the seminar, Taoism with Alan Watts. The subject of this seminar is going to be Taoism as contained in the teachings of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi, who lived approximately 400 years or more before Christ, separated probably by 100 years from each other, and as is often repeated, Lao Tzu started out by explaining that the Tao which can be explained is not the eternal Tao, and then went on

[01:06]

to write a book about it, also saying, those who say do not know, those who know do not say, because there's nothing to be explained, you must remember that the word explain means to lay out in a plane, that is to put it on a flat sheet of paper, all mathematics is done on a flat sheet of paper until very recent times, but it makes a great deal of difference because this world isn't flat, if you draw a circle on a flat sheet of paper it has an inside and an outside which are different, on the other hand if you draw a circle around a donut the inside and the outside are the same, so what we are first of all saying is

[02:11]

that the Tao, whatever that is, cannot be explained in that sense, so it's important first of all to experience it so we know what we're talking about, and in order to go into Taoism at all we must begin by being in the frame of mind which can understand it, you cannot force yourself into this frame of mind any more than you can smooth disturbed water with your hands, but let's say that our starting point is that we forget what we know, or

[03:16]

we forget everything we know, that we suspend judgement about practically everything, returning to what we were when we were babies, when we have not yet learned the names or language, and although we have extremely sensitive bodies, very alive senses, we have no means of making an intellectual or verbal commentary on what is going on, now can you consider that as your state, just plain ignorant, but still very much alive, and in this state you just feel what is,

[04:22]

without calling it anything at all, you know nothing at all about anything called an external world in relation to an internal world, you don't know who you are, you haven't even got the idea of the word you or I, it's before all that, nobody has taught you self-control, so you don't know the difference between the noise of a car outside and the wandering thought that enters your mind, they're both something that happens, you don't identify the presence of the thought which might be just an image of a passing cloud in your mind's eye, and the passing automobile, they happen,

[05:28]

your breath happens, light all around you happens, your response to it by blinking happens, so you simply are really unable to do anything, there's nothing that you're supposed to do, nobody's told you anything to do, you're unable completely to do anything, but be aware of the buzz, the visual buzz, the audible buzz, the tangible buzz, the smellable buzz, all buzz, it's going on, watch it, don't ask who's watching it, you've no information about that yet, that it

[06:33]

requires a watcher for something to be watched, for somebody's idea, you don't know that, Lao Tzu says the scholar learns something every day, the man of Tao unlearns something every day, until he gets back to non-doing, and that's what we're in at the moment, just simply without comment, without an idea in your head, be aware, what else can you do? Don't try to be aware, you are, you'll find of course that you can't

[07:33]

stop the commentary going on in your head, but at least you can regard it as interior noise, listen to your chattering thoughts, as you listen to the singing of a kettle, we don't know what it is we're aware of, especially when you take it all together, and there's this sense of something going on, I won't even say that, this, you see, this, well I said it was

[08:34]

going on, that's an idea, it's a form of words, obviously I wouldn't know if anything was going on unless I could say something else wasn't, I'm in motion by contrast with rest, so while I am aware of motion, I'm also aware of rest, so maybe what's at rest isn't going on and what's motion is going on, so I won't use that concept because I've got to exclude both, and if I say well here it is, that excludes what isn't, like space, and if I say this, it excludes that, I'm the new profiler, but you can feel what I'm talking about, can't you? That's what's called Tao in Chinese, that's where we begin. Tao means basically way, and so course, the course of nature.

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Of which Lao Tzu says, which means, the way of functioning of the Tao, is of itself so, that is to say, is spontaneous. Watch again what's going on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing a happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at things, there is no difference between what you do on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. It's all the same process.

[10:59]

Just as your thoughts happen, the car happens outside, the clouds, the stars. When a westerner hears that, he thinks our fatalism or determinism. That's because he still preserves in the back of his mind two illusions. One is that what is happening is happening to him, and therefore he is the victim of circumstances. But when you are in primal ignorance, there is no you different from what's happening, and therefore it's not happening to you. It's just happening. So is you. You know, what you call you, what you later call you, is part of the happening. You're part of the universe, although the universe, strictly speaking, has no parts. We only call certain features of the universe parts of it, but you can't disconnect them from the rest without causing them to be not only non-existent, but never to have existed.

[12:16]

So, when you have this happening, the other illusion that a westernized larval has is that it's determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why, obviously not. Because if you're really naive, you'll see that the past is the result of what's happening now. It goes backwards into the past. Like a weight goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing, finally, go away and away and away. And it's all starting now. What we call the future is nothing. The great void. And everything comes out of the great void. That's the way a naive person, and as I explained if any of you were at my lecture last night, if you shut your eyes and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there's a background of silence and all sounds are coming out of it.

[13:47]

They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, listen, just listen. You see, the bell came out of nothing, floated off, [...] and then stopped being a sonic echo and became a memory, which is another kind of echo. A weight. It's very simple. It all begins now. And therefore it's spontaneous. It isn't determined. That's a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious. That's another philosophical notion. As we distinguish between what is orderly and what is random. Of course, we don't really know what randomness is. If you talk to a mathematician about randomness, he'll make you feel quite weird. If you take a Los Angeles phone book and take the last number on the right-hand side of each column and make a series out of it, there are too many patterns of recurrence for them to be considered random.

[15:13]

But anyway, what is so of itself? Sui generis in Latin. That means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord. It's the real meaning of virgin birth. Sui generis. And that's the world. That is the doubt. That makes us feel scared. Because we say, well, if all this is happening spontaneously, who's in charge? I'm not in charge. That's pretty obvious. But I hope there's God or somebody looking after all this. But why should there be someone looking after it? Because then there's a new worry that you may not have thought of. Like who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker's busy taking care? So who guards the guards? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God?

[16:19]

Which, say, God doesn't need looking after. Oh, well then, what is this? Tao. Because Tao is a certain kind of order. And this kind of order is not quite what we call order. When we arrange everything geometrically in boxes or in rows, that's a very crude kind of order. But when you look at a plant, it's perfectly obvious that this bamboo plant has order. We recognize at once that that is not a mess. But it is not symmetrical, and it is not geometrical looking.

[17:21]

It looks like a Chinese drawing. Because the Chinese appreciated this kind of order so much that they put it into their painting. Non-symmetrical order. In the Chinese language, this is called Li. And the character for Li means originally the markings in jade. Also means the grain in wood and the fiber in muscle. We could say, too, that clouds have Li. Marble has Li. The human body has Li. And we all recognize it. And the artist copies it, whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, or an abstract painter, or a non-objective painter. They all are crying for Li. And the interesting thing is that although we all know what it is, there's no way of defining it.

[18:28]

But because Dao is the course, we can also call Li the water course. Because the patterns of Li are patterns of flowing water. And we see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, in sculpture, in the grain in wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles. All these things are patterned according to the basic principles. That is the Dao, the Dao's principle of flow. There is a book called Sensitive Chaos by Theodore Schwenk with many, many photographs and studies of flow patterns. And there, in the patterns of flowing water, you will see all kinds of motifs from Chinese art, immediately recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle, the yang-yin, like this.

[19:40]

See? So, Li means, then, the order of flow. The wonderful dancing pattern of liquid. Because Laozi likens Dao to water. The great Dao, he says, flows everywhere, to the left and to the right. Like water, I'm interpreting that, it loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. Because, he says elsewhere, water always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor. Because we are always trying to play games of one-upmanship and be on top of each other. Laozi explains that the top position is the most insecure. Everybody wants to get to the top of the tree. But then, if they do, the tree will collapse.

[20:43]

That's the fallacy of American democracy. You, too, might be president. The answer is, no one but a maniac would want to be president. Who wants to be put in charge of a runaway truck? So, Laozi says that the basic position is the most powerful. And this we can see at once in Judo or in Aikido, which are wrestling arts or self-defensive arts, where you always get underneath the opponent. And so he falls over you, if he attacks you. The moment he moves to be aggressive, you go either lower than he is,

[21:45]

or in a smaller circle than he's moving. And you have spin, if you know Aikido. You're always spinning. And you know how something rapidly spinning exercises centrifugal force. So, if somebody comes into your field of centrifugal force, he gets flung out. But by his own bound. It's very curious. So, therefore, the watercourse way is the way of Tao. Now, that seems to wipe Anglo-Saxon Protestants and to Irish Catholics lazy, spineless, passive. And I'm always being asked when I talk about things, if people did what you suggest, wouldn't they become terribly passive?

[22:46]

Well, from a superficial point of view, I would suggest that a certain amount of passivity would be an excellent corrective for our kind of culture. Because we are always creating trouble by doing good to other people. You know, we wage wars for people's benefit. And educate the poor for their benefit, so that they desire more things which they can't get. I mean, that sounds rather callous. But our rich people are not happy. Whereas the poor people of Haiti are. To judge by the way they laugh. And we think we're sorry, really, not for the poor, but for ourselves.

[23:53]

Guilty. So, a certain amount of doing nothing and stopping rushing around would cool everything. But also it must be remembered that passivity is the root of action. Where do you suppose you're going to get energy from, just by being energetic? No, you can't get energy that way. That is exhausting yourself. To have energy, you must sleep. But also, much more important than sleep, is what I showed you at the beginning. Passivity of mind. Mental silence. You can't, as I tried to explain, be passive as an exercise that's good for you. You can only get to that point by realizing there's nothing else you can do.

[24:56]

So for God's sake, don't cultivate passivity as a form of progress. That's like playing, because it's good for your work. You never get to play. So, now, passivity then is the root of energy, in the same way that nothing is the root of something. Nothing implies something, just as something implies nothing. You can't understand one idea without the other one. There's a positive and negative force of electricity. So, you endow, you are allowing, in a matter of fact you're not, because there's no you either to allow or disallow. You just have to get used to that. What happens is nothing to do with your say-so. Except that if you do have a say-so, that's part of what's happening.

[26:01]

But it is irrelevant. It's like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, it doesn't work. But you can try. Nothing's stopping you. But it just doesn't have any effect except wearing you out. So in the same way, if you try and force the issues, it wears you out. And when you force the lock, you usually bend the key. So you jiggle, gently, until you find the right opening. So in the same way, anybody who knows how to conduct business, always jiggles the key to find the right moment to turn the lock. And then it all happens as if it were natural, and none of it will force. That's the judo way of going about it. So therefore, the watercourse will give you the sense that your life is a flowing.

[27:06]

The flowing is equally you and what is not you, or called not you. It's the process that's happening. And when you understand that, you'll stop asking questions about it. You will see that all asking of questions about it is, shall I say, tautological. You get explanations which don't explain. All explanations of what's happening call for further explanations. Because big explanations have little explanations upon their backs to bite them. And little explanations have lesser explanations, and so on and so on. This is the analytic process that produces the atomic universe, the electronic universe, the protonic universe, and so on and so on. And if you go the other direction, you'll find the solar system in a galaxy.

[28:14]

The galaxy in a system of galaxies, and then goodness knows what. Because obviously the universe, as it seeks to know itself, must run away from itself. As your eyes revolve when you turn to look at them. You are the universe. You are apertures through which it is aware of itself. Holes in the wall, as it were. And so as you look, now you see it, now you don't. It's very simple. So you'll find, therefore, that the big question, what is it? What am I supposed to do? What is human destiny? Why are we here? These questions will slowly disappear, and that itself will be the answer. The answer will be this, is why.

[29:18]

And this is what is going on that cannot be described, the Tao. The Tao is simultaneously departing and arriving. Always. That's the meaning of the eternal Tao. All right. Well then. To go with the water course is called by Lao Tzu, wu wei. Wu means not. Wei has a complex of meanings, which can be action, striving, straining, doing,

[30:20]

or best, forcing. Not forcing is wu wei. So he says, Tao, wu wei, Tao does nothing, but nothing is left undone. In other words, Tao accomplishes all things without forcing them. And so, therefore, when you master, that's the wrong word, because it has the idea of superiority. When you come to wu wei, by, as it were, coming down, you are working on the same principle as the Tao. And so this is likened poetically to the difference between a willow and a pine when it snows. The pine is a rigid tree,

[31:22]

and the snow and ice piles up on the branches until they crack. The willow is a springy tree, and when the weight of the snow is on the branch, the branch drops, and the snow falls off, and the branch comes up again. That's wu wei. Zhuangzi tells a lovely tale that a sage was wandering along the bank of a river near an enormous cataract, and suddenly, way up beyond the cataract, he saw an old man roll off the bank into the cataract. He thought this too bad. He must be old and ill, and is making an end of himself. But a few minutes later, the old man jumped out of the stream, way down beyond the cataract, and went running along the bank. So the sage and his disciples went scooting after him and said, this is the most amazing thing we ever saw. How did you survive? Well, he said, there's no special way. I just went in with a swirl and came out with a whirl.

[32:25]

I made myself like the water, so there was no conflict between myself and water. So, in the same way, when a baby is in an automobile accident, you find often that the baby is uninjured, because the baby didn't go rigid to protect itself. So likewise, when you learn to fall in judo, you learn to curl up limply, and yet make your arms very heavy, so that they flop with an immense thud on the floor. And that making heavy is again like water. And this absorbs the shock. So, it isn't. You see, you must realize that the watercraft is not complete limpidness, because water has weight, and therefore strength. And that really all energy, the secret of Wu Wei, is that all energy is gravity. We, as a planet,

[33:27]

would, if we encountered some obstacle in space, there would be an enormous release of energy. The obstacle would feel that it was being hit by some colossal force. But the planet is falling around the sun. And the sun is falling around something else. The whole universe is falling. But since there's nowhere for it to drop, it's sort of not falling at anything. It's just falling around itself. Sometimes there are collisions. But everything's got so much space that they're very rare. Maybe the ones that didn't have space have been eliminated, and became all the dust that's in the sky. But all energy is gravity. That's the secret of Judo. And it's really the secret, ultimately, of the puzzle of the relationship of gravity to energy. It's the real secret of E equals mc squared.

[34:28]

Energy is mass times the square of the velocity of light. So... Energy, the soul, comes from gravity. And so we don't have a situation which is purely limp. So... Therefore, Wu-Wei is intelligent course of action. Because intelligence itself is the laziest way of understanding of dealing with a situation. It is not so much necessity as laziness,

[35:30]

which is the mother of invention. How could we do it in a simpler way is always the question of a good technologist. Initially, the technologist thinks out very complicated ways. But as time goes on, all his apparatus gets smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter. And the best machines have no moving parts. As one approaches the partless machine, one approaches something like a magic stone, a transistor, a crystal, which contains an enormous amount of information without having to move. And this increase in simplification is intelligence. So the very, very intelligent things would be the most difficult to understand. Because we would not see the explanation of their parts,

[36:32]

of the structures, the forms contained within. So it is remarkable, isn't it, that from the very simple cells, which look almost completely transparent, all the complexities of living organisms can proceed. So now, if you want, you see, to find an intelligent solution to a problem, the work is done with your brain. You have all the necessary intelligence inside this bone. Only most people never use their brains, they use their minds instead. And think that they use their minds

[37:34]

like they use their muscles. But you constrain your head and work very hard with it as if it were a muscle to achieve a result. But that doesn't work that way. When you want to find out the answer to something, what you do is you contemplate it. You visualize your problem, your question, as well as you can, and then simply look at it. Because you don't try to find a solution, because any solution that comes in that way is likely to be wrong. But when you have watched it for a while, the solution comes of itself. And that is the way to use your brain. It works for you in the same way as your stomach digests your food, without your having to supervise it consciously. But all our attempts to supervise everything consciously have led to things that aren't too good for our stomachs,

[38:36]

and so forth. You know how it goes. So... The reason for that is quite simple. That conscious attention employing words cannot think of very much. We ignore almost everything while we are thinking. We think along a single track. But the world isn't going on along a single track. The world is everything altogether everywhere. And you just can't take that into consideration. There is a time which your brain can. Because the brain is capable of handling innumerable variables at once. Whereas your conscious attention is not. Or rather, more strictly speaking, verbal symbols are not capable of handling any more than a one very, very crudely simple track.

[39:37]

That's why we have to trust our brain. Because you see, we are much more intelligent than our understanding of ourselves. When a neurologist admits that he's only begun to scratch the surface of understanding the nervous system, he is actually saying that his own nervous system is smarter than he is. It's outwitted him so far. And that's remarkable, isn't it? So you see, what you are is necessarily more than anything you can understand. For the simple reason that an organism which completely understands itself would be comparable

[40:44]

to lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps or kissing your own lips. So there's always this element of the nothing or unknown in any process of consciousness or knowledge. And if that irritates you, remember you are really addressing yourself to a stupid problem. Because fire doesn't need to burn itself any more than a light needs to shine on itself. So if you like to ask, what am I? Although it sounds like a sensible question, doesn't it? You can send $9 to MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94965.

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Remember to specify you want Part 1 from the seminar Taoism and the address again MEA Box 303, Sausalito, CA 94965.

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