Key Learning Points from the book
‘THIS IS IT’
By ALAN WATTS
Spiritual shouldn’t be separated from material nor the wonderful from the ordinary. We need, above all, to disentangle ourselves from the habit of speech and thought which set this two apart making it impossible for us to see that THIS – the immediate, everyday and present experience – is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
It seems to me that the deepest spiritual experience can arise only in moments of a selfishness so complete that it transcends itself by the ‘way down and out’. It is a sort of first step to accept one’s own selfishness without the deception of trying to wish it were otherwise, for a man who is not all of one piece is perpetually paralyzed by trying to go in two directions at once.
Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realization that everything is as wrong as it can be suddenly flips into the realization that everything is as right as it can be. Or better, everything is as IT as it can be.
Zen and the problem of control
Self-consciousness is one of the characteristics of an adult human being.
In our typical dualistic mode of thinking, self-consciousness immediately assumes an entity which is aware of a ‘separate’ object of awareness. This dualistic mode of thinking extends itself into the aspect of self-control. We divide ourselves into two parts and tend to believe that one part of ours is supposed to or can control the other part of ours.
This takes us into an interesting situation. When the controlling part of ours fails to control the controlled part, who then will upgrade the capacity of the controlled part ? It will require some other controller and this way ad infinitum. Thus the dualistic model of control doesn’t work. This way one is caught in a paradox and gets involved in a double bind. A double bind is a situation when one is required to do something but at the same time cannot or must not do it.
This dilemma therefore can only be resolved in the unitary way of thinking as is evident in the word self-control i.e.the self-controlling-itself. With the dualistic frame of mind, this may look to us as an impossibility like eyes looking directly at their own selves or a finger pointing at itself.
When can such self-controlling-itself happen ? This can happen only when the ‘two’ cease to exist. As long as there is one part of us ‘resisting’ another part of us, we tend to exist as ‘two’. All resistance is based on the tacit hypothesis that one part of ours can control the so-called ‘another’ part of ours. In such a case, we land up in the predicament described in the above paragraph which is typical of any dualistic mode of operation.
This teaches us two important lessons :
1. Importance of ‘acceptance’
This further leads to the fact that acceptance alone can convert ‘two’ to ‘one’ and rid us of the predicament as mentioned above.What is acceptance? It is nothing but relinquishing our sense of control. Acceptance alone i.e.relinquishing our sense of control alone can lead us to true self-control.
A moralist however cannot look at it this way. He gets absolutely confused when he is told that the way to go above one’s negative tendencies is by giving in to them for the time being.
2. We are not purely ‘determined beings’
Another fall-out of this paradox of self-control is that a person when he fails to control himself tends to infer that if he cant control himself , he must be a determined ‘machine’. But this is another contradiction. Because if he is able to ‘see’ that he is a ‘machine’, he cant be a ‘machine’. He has then the power of self-observation and to that extent the power of self-control.
The human predicament seems to be a trap whichever way we look at it – if to deny one’s self-consciousness is to assert it, and if to assert it, as seems inevitable is to be caught in a paradox and be involved in a ‘double bind’.
An old Taoist saying says that ‘ When a wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.’
An adept in zen is likened to a ball in a mountain stream which is to say that he cannot be blocked, stopped or embarassed in any situation. He never wobbles or dithers in his mind though he may pause in overt action to think a problem out, the stream of his own consciousness always moves straight ahead without being caught in the vicious circles of anxiety or indecisive doubt, wherein thought whirls wildly around without issue. He is not precipitate or hurried in action, but simply continous.
This is what Zen means by being detached- not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom the feeling is not sticky or blocked and through whom the expressions of the world pass like reflections of a bird flying over water. Such a man is totally self-assured, sure of himself without the slightest trace of aggression.
There is a difference between the self-forgetfulness of a Zen adept and that of a layman. A person who is self-forgetful or un-selfconscious by being absorbed in his daily affairs finds that he is carried away by affairs and that he is responding to it not from spontaneity but from socially conditioned habit.
When you let your mind alone, as in meditation, you realize that at the next moment, it likes to interfere with itself. At this point, you can realize that it is thought which is trying to drive away thought. That there is no separate thinker who ‘has’ or tries to control thought. Anyways, you let thought interfere with itself. Very soon there will be a flow of thought- one thought after another- without interference.
You have to break free of the paralyzing belief that you are one thing and that your mind or thoughts and sensations another.
Instinct, Intelligence and Anxiety
Limitations of ‘intelligence’
The gains of intelligence to a common man are offset by the chronic anxiety – which seems to increase to the extent to which our life is subjected to intelligent organization.
One problem with intelligence is the constant anxiety that while taking an important decision, some or the other data may have been overlooked because the range of data is really very huge.
The second fall-out of intelligence is the heightened sense of feeling that we are an independent source of action cut off from nature which in turn brings into us fear of and hostility towards nature.
The third problem is that intelligence reviews facts and information in series though it may have all happened at one time. This as well as making predictions about the future tend to give the intelligent man a vivid awareness of time.
Knowledge of future brings about emotional reactions to future events before they happen and therefore anxiety. Apparently this doesn’t trouble creatures who operate purely from instinct.
The extent of our info about the world is so detailed that it is not possible for a separate individual to master the same without the support of collaborators. Having collaborators is to yield to instinctual faith lest there is no end to the extent to which you can analyze your call of having a collaborator.
Intelligence, in one way is systematic doubt. Then how can intelligence trust its own self ?In short, intelligence cannot move far without the support of its polar opposite called instinctual faith.
Mutuality of opposites
The Eastern view of the world is unitary ( technically speaking ‘non-dualistic’) in which there is neither any merit nor any intelligence in having an absolutely over-whelming urgency to be right rather than wrong and to live rather than die. Eastern consciousness regards opposites as mutually inter-dependent rather than mutually exclusive.
It is Western consciousness, the ‘intelligence-based’ consciousness , which regards opposites as mutually exclusive rather than as mutually inter-dependent.
There are two escapes from the dilemma which intellect poses :
One is to stop being keenly intelligent and yield to obedience. This makes one emptily formal without any juice in their actions. This is called ‘sacrificing the pride of intellect’
The other escape is a romanticism of the instincts, a glorification of mere impulse ignoring the equally natural gift of will and reason.
Those who understand the Tao are, in one way, similar to the romanticist with the ‘anything goes’ attitude in that they understand that good and evil, pleasure and pain, life and death are mutually interdependent and that there is a balance of nature from which we can never actually deviate – however wrongly we may act from a limited point of view.
Yet the grasp of the Taoist of the mutuality of opposites is much more thorough than that of the romanticist with his exclusive value of precipitate and uncalculated action. The difficult and the subtle point which the romanticist misses and which , on the other hand, the rationalist cannot understand at all, is that if all action and existence is in accord with the undeviating Tao or way of nature, no special means or methods are required to bring this accord into being.
The romanticist demonstrates his ignorance of the Tao in the very act of trying to be spontaneous and of preferring the so-called natural and instinctual to the artificial and intelligent.
Apparent contradictions are not contradictions at all
1.Fate & Free will
When the earth collides into a meteor or a meteor collides into Earth, whichever we say depends on an arbitrary frame of reference and so both statements are true even though apparently contradictory. In the same way it is only apparently contradictory that whatever I do freely and intelligently is completely determined and vice versa.
It seems that absolutely everything both inside and outside me is happening by itself, yet at the same time that I myself am doing all of it. That my separate individuality is simply a function, something being done by everything which is not me, yet at the same time everything which is not me is a function of my separate individuality.
Ordinarily we can see the truth of these seemingly paradoxical feelings if we take them separately, if we look at one without looking simultaneously at other. This is why, for example, the arguments for free will and determinism are equally cogent, though apparently contradictory. We get into this problem because it is much easier for us to see opposites as mutually exclusive than as mutually inter-dependent.
Everything which happens is the Tao, or that all things are of one ‘suchness’ simply means that everything is in relation and thus that – considered simply by itself – no thing, no event has any reality. However this is a matter of feeling, a matter of clear sensation that as determined beings, we are free and as free beings we are determined.
I see light because of the sun. The sun is light because I see (after all, the sun comes into being because it falls within the spectrum of colors the eye can see or the spectrum of sensations the skin can feel). Both these seemingly contradictory statements are equally true.
2. See the total picture
The need is to see that the very world we are trying to control, our whole inner and outer environment is precisely that which gives us the power to control anything. We should try to look at things simultaneously instead of separately.
When we are busy trying to control or change our circumstances, we ignore and are unconscious of the dependence of our consciousness and energy upon the outer world. When on the other hand we are oppressed by circumstances and feel controlled by the outer world, we forget that our very own consciousness is bringing that world into being just about the way the sun is light because there are eyes to see it.
3. No little man inside
If my consciousness is something which I do not fully control, something given to me by my parents, who or what is the ‘I’ which ‘has’ this consciousness ? If this thing is looked at deeper, it will be found that there surely is no little man inside. If there is no such ‘me’ to own it, to receive it, or to put up with it, who on Earth is to be either the victim of fate or the master of nature ?
4. Reconciling the opposites
As soon as the consciousness which has felt to be the inner controller starts to examine itself, it finds out that it does not give itself the power of control. It is nature which gives it the power. Its push is nature’s pull. However, the nature itself wouldn’t be there but for the consciousness which means that nature’s push is its pull. There is no longer the slightest contradiction between feeling like a leaf on a stream and throwing one’s whole energy into responsible action, for the push is the pull.
5. Intelligence and instinct should both operate at once
Knowing this context in which we work is more important than the problem of what exactly needs to be done. The initial limitation of intelligence is that it over stresses the independence and separateness of things and of ourselves from them as things among things. It is the later task of intelligence to appreciate the inseparable relationships between the things yet divided.
In so doing, Intelligence sees its own limitation, sees that intelligence alone is not enough – that it cannot operate, cannot be intelligence, without an approach to the world through instinctual feeling with this feeling’s possibility of knowing relationship as you know when you drink it that water is cold.
