Philosophy of Nature Part 1

00:00
00:00
Audio loading...

Welcome! You can log in or create an account to save favorites, edit keywords, transcripts, and more.

This talk will not appear in the main Search results:
Unlisted
Serial: 
SF-03035B
Description: 

#19

Photos: 
Auto-Generated Transcript

a premium funding as though he will the sentence or something robot for the isn't
material but our culture is a land devoted to the planet formation of material into dunk has rapidly a bubble god thou done job
and thereby the very very important lesson for a wealthy nation and for rich people and we are all a lot be read by the standards the director of the world
it's very important for that people to learn and see what happened to material
in the hands of people who love it
and so you might say that in japan and in china but in japan and a recruiter way the underlying philosophy of life is a spiritual materialism
there is not the divorce between fell and body between spirit and matter between
derrida a nature or god and maker with very the web
and therefore
there is not the same kind of contempt for material thing
we regard matter of something that gets in our way something limitations are to be abolished as bad as possible
and therefore we have bulldozers than every kind of technical device for knocking it out of the way
and we like to do that much obliteration of time and space of possible we talk about killing time
i'm getting now about the possible
that of causes you notice in tokyo and of you're noticing here the mirror it gets to you
by time
by the abolition of distance the moderates the same boat from with restarted
and so this is one of the great difficulties what is going to happen to the city in this country when it becomes the same place as california
in the same way in other words you could take a streetcar from one end of town to another and it's the same town so who can take a jet plane from one city to another and everybody's doing not just the privileged view than they're gonna be the same town
so to preserve the whole world from indefinite love and evaluation
pardon me that the view from saddam gallagher
we have to learn in the united states how to enjoy material
and to be true materialise instead of exploited of material
and so this is the main reason for going into the philosophy of the far east and how it relates to everyday life to architecture the garden
and to the higher our for painting tea ceremony music
sculpture ritual and so on
well now basic to all this is the philosophy of nature
and the japanese philosophy of nature
is probably found it historically in the chinese philosophy of nature
and that's what i want to go into to start with
do let the cat out of the bag right at the beginning
the assumptions underlying far eastern culture and this is true of far west as india also
is that the whole cosmos the whole universe is one been
it is not a collection
are many different beings who somehow floated together like a lot of flock from them get home from the anvil face and ended up and go the universe
they looked up
the world as one eternal activity
and that's the only real self if you have
you are the works only what we call you as a distinct organism is simply
a manifestation of the whole thing just as the ocean when it wave since the whole ocean waving when it waves in the hollows and when it wanes that says you i'm here easy so each one of us is a wave of all the risk of the whole work
and they don't you see this is an in this culture not something that is just a theory
not just an idea like you would have i have my ideas you have your ideas another was a you're a christian scientist i'm a baptist or something like that know or i'm a republican and you're a democrat and nine the butcher and you're a communist seminar that isn't that
it's a feeling
and so the great
the great man of this culture not everybody but the great man the great masters whatever sphere that in are fundamentally have this feeling
that what you are is the
thing that always was
is and will be
only it's playing the game called
mr takano or with the lean
the mukhopadhyay
that's a special game and plan just like those the fish game the graph game the bamboo game the pine tree game that all ways of getting put to pretty pretty do you see everything doing a dance only is doing it according to the nature of the dots that it would fundamentally all these dances for the human fish
bird cloud sky dancer dance etc they are all one fundamental dance or dancer
only in chinese you don't distinguish the subject from the verb i mean you don't distinguish the now from the verb and the same way that we do unarmed can become a verb a verb can become an arm
but that's the business and so a civilized cultured above all an enlightened person in the sculpture is one who knows
that his so-called separate personality his ego
is an illusion
illusion doesn't mean a bad thing it just means a play from the latin word literary we get the english illusion luder remains to play
so the sanskrit word maya
meaning illusion also means magic skill odd
and this sounds good conception comes through china
to japan with the transmission of buddhism
and so the world as a maya or sometimes it's called in sanskrit lila i were built lila is play
so all individual manifestations are games dances
symphonies musical form being put on by the whole show and everyone is basically the whole show about the fundamental feeling now
but nature nature as the word is used in the far east doesn't mean quite the same as the word nature in the west
in chinese nature the world we translate nature zero or in japanese season
is made up of two characters that first one means of itself
and the second one means so
what is so of itself
now this is a rather difficult word
to translate well into english
we might say automatic
but automatic suggest something mechanical
when a chinese coolies close to see the tram car for the first time he says no pushing a pulley go like man
bhadra
is this mechanical idea of the automatic won't properly translate
this word the run in chinese she's an in japanese
of itself so what happens i was we say what comes naturally
it's in that sense of our word nature to be natural
to act in accordance with one's nature not to strive things not to force things that they they use the word natural
so when your hair grows
it grows without you're telling it to
and you don't have to force it to grow
so in the same way when the color of your eyes whether it's blue or brown or whatever the eyes color themselves and you don't tell them how to do it when your bones grow is that way they do it all of themselves and so in the same way i remember a zen master wants to
it was beautiful man
he used to teach a new york his name of mr sasaki
and one evening he was sitting in his golden robes but a very formal thrown like chair with a fan and his hand though he actually he had one of those a fly whisks made of a white horses tail and he was looking very very dignified incense burning on the table in front of him the other a little desk with one of the scriptures
on it that he was explaining
and he said
or nature has no purpose
papa sightedness most fundamental principle r buddhism papa's vastness
ah when you drop fat you don't say i nine o'clock i dropped five it just happened
a is kind of audience is expecting got a jerky
the exits the number a
recently
what happens of itself
now so then it's fundamental to this idea of nature
that the world has no boss
in this is very important especially if you're going to understand shinto
because we translate coming or chin
as god
but it's not got in that sense god in in much of the west of meaning of the word means the controller
the boss of the world and the model
that we use for nature
ah ten tends to be
the model of the carpenter or the potter or the king
that just as the carpenter takes would and makes a table out of it
or as the partner takes you not play and with the intelligence of his hands he evokes a foreman
or as the king is the law giver who from above tells people what order they shall move in and how they should behave
it is ingrained into the western mountain to think that the universe is
they behavior which is responding to somebody in charge and who understands it all when i was a little boy and i used to ask my mother many questions sometimes she gets fed up with me and say my dear there are some things in this life that we're not meant to know
and so i said well what about it will we ever know well she said yes when you die and you go to help me god will make it all clear and i used to think that maybe on wet afternoons in heaven we'd all sit around god's throne and say our heavenly father or why i believe green and he would say because
as of the chlorophyll and we would say oh
now
well
that's i that idea you see our the the world as an artifact
could trump a child and our culture to say to its mother or how was i made
and it seems very natural so when it's explained that god may do the child naturally goes on and says what will make god
but i don't think of chinese child would ask that question at all
i was i made
because the chinese mind does not look at the world of nature as something manufactured
but rather growth
the character for coming into being in chinese is based on a and a symbol of a growing plan
now going and making a two different things
when you make something
you assemble parts or you take a piece of wood and you carve it working gradually from the outside inwards cutting away until you've got the shape you want
but when you want something grow it isn't going like that
if you see for example a fast motion movie of a rose growing
you will see that the process goes from the inside to the outside
it is as it was something expanding from the center and the so far from being an addition of parts
it all goes together all lose all over itself at once and the same is true when you're watching the formation of crystals or even if you're watching a photographic plate being developed suddenly all over the area of the place over the field shall we call it like a magnetic field it all arises
how about idea of the world as growing and as not obey any laws
because there is a chinese philosophy no difference between
the dow
that is the word t i o in japanese though
there is no difference between the way
the power of nature
and the things in nature
he doesn't you see when ah
i stir up wind with his fan
it isn't simply that the wind obey the fam
there wouldn't be a fan in my hand and less were wind around
alyssa were air no fan
so the air brings the fan into being as much as the fan brings the air and be
so they don't think in this way of obeying all the time masters and slaves lord and servant
nature is louder who wrote the supposed to written about a dream the fundamental book how the taoist philosophy
he lived probably a little before three hundred b c although tradition makes him a contemporary of confucius who lived closer to six hundred
but he says in his book the great dow flows everywhere to the left into the right
it loves and nourishes all things but does not lauded over them
and when merits are attained it makes no claim to them
so
they've got the corollary of that
is that if this is the way nature is run not by government but by as it were letting everything follow its course
then the skill for man
all women are the skillful ruler of the sage
interferes as little as possible
with the costs of things
of course you can't help interfering
every time you look at something you changes
your existence is in a way and interference but if you
think of yourself as something separate from the rest of the world then you will think of interference or not interference but if you know that you are not separate from that you are just as much in and of nature as the wind or the clouds than who interfere with her
but in general the notion is
that life is no skillfully lived
when one sales about rather than rowing it
now you see it's more intelligent to sail into row
with oz i have to drag i used my muscles in my efforts to drag myself along the water but with a sale i let the wind of the work for me
more skillful still when i learned attack and that the wind blow me against the direction of the wind
now that's the whole philosophy of the dow is called a chinese will way
none way striving and japanese millie
he is japanese the pronouncing the chinese way move is chinese will move as distinct from ooey gooey means to use effort to go against the grain to force things molly not to go against the grain to go with the grain
and so you will see around you in every direction the examples are bully
of the intelligent handling
of nature
so as to go with it rather than against it
for example the famous art of judo is entirely based on this
when you are attacked
don't simply oppose the force used against you
but go in the same direction as it's going
and lead it to its own downfall
so it is said in the winter does a tough pine tree which has a branch like this muscles and the snow piles upon piles up and this unyielding branch venture the has this huge weight of snow and it cracked
browse the willow tree has a springy supple branch and a little snow comes on it and the brown does goes down on the snow falls off and what's the branch goes up again
so loud the said
man at his birth in sample and tender
but in death he is rigid hard plants when they are young or soft and supple but in death they are brittle and hard so suppleness and tenderness are the characteristics of life and rigidity and hardness the characteristics of death
he made many references to water said of all things in the world nothing is more soft and water
and yet it wears away the hardest rocks
furthermore water is humble it always seeks the low level which men of haw
but yet
water finally overcomes everything
so when you watch water take the line of least resistance you watch for example water poured out on the ground and then you see it as it were ejecting fingers from itself
and some of those fingers stop that one finger goes on it's found the lowest level
now you say oh but that's not the water the water them than anything is just the contours of the lamb
and because of the contours of the land the water goes where the land makes it go
think again
does the sailing boat go whether when makes it go
i never forget once i am
the sent out in the countryside and the piece of thistledown flew out of the blue came right down near me and i put out a finger and i caught it by one of its little the tendrils and it behave just like catching a daddy long legs you know when you catch one by one leg and nationalist struggle to get away with this thing behaviors like that and i thought well was
as the windowing doing that it's only a to look as if it was doing it than i thought again when it
it is the wind yes but it's also that this has the intelligence to grow itself so as to use the when
you see that
that is intelligence that little structure of thistledown is a form of intelligence just as surely as the construction of a house is a manifestation of intelligence
but it uses the wind so in the same way the water
uses the confirmations of the ground
what isn't just dead stuff is not just being pushed around
nothing has been pushed around
in the chinese view of nature
because you see
this is my next point first point i've been saying is what they mean by nature
that it is something that happens of itself that it has no boss
the second point is that it does not in the sense that it doesn't have a boss somebody giving orders and somebody obeying orders that leads further to an entirely different conception of cause and effect
cause and effect is based on giving orders
when you say something made this happen
it had to have because of what happened before
chinese doesn't think like that
now
his idea of causality is called
oh idiot i say the concept which does duty for our idea of causality
he's called mutual arising
let's take the relationship between the back on the front of anything
is the back the cause of the front or is the front because of the back what a silly question put them
it's object if things don't have france then they can't have back
the prompts front and back always go together
that is to say they come into being together
and so in just the same way as the front and back arise together lead of this the basic sort of chinese taoist philosophy sees everything in the world
coming together
and this is called the philosophy of mutual interpenetration
japanese g g movie
this is a will go into this in great detail when we get the nawab of nara is the center of qigong buddhism and though this is the particular philosophy which developed the the okay but still it goes way back into the history of the chinese idea of nature now look with
a very simply
let us suppose you would never seen a cat
and one day you are looking through a very narrow slit in the fence
and a cat walks by
first you see the cat's head
then there's a rather nondescript fuzzy interval and a tale follows
and you say marvelous
then the cat round and walked back you see the head and then after a little interval for tale this incredible the cat turns around and walked back again and you'll see first the head and then the tail and who say this begins to look like the regularity
there must be some order in this phenomenon because whenever i see the thing which i've labeled head i later see the thing i've labeled fail so therefore where there is an event which i call head and it's invariably followed by another event that i called tail obviously head is the cause of israel and the is the affair
it
now we think that way about everything about of course if you suddenly widened up the crack in the fence so that you saw that the head and tail are all one cat
and that the head i went a cat is brawn it's born with the head and tail it isn't that there is a head and then later retail
so in exactly the same way the events that we seem to call separate events
are really or one event
only we chop it into pieces for describe it like we say the head of the cat and the tail of the cat although it's all one cat
and so when we have chopped into pieces then we suddenly forget we did that and try to explain how they fit together and we invent a mythical causality to explain how they do
that a we the reason we chopped the world into bits is simply that for purposes of intellectual convenience
for example
if our world
is through and through wiggly
and you'll notice that very much how these people although they have marvelous cemetery and use of space in the construction of houses they love whitman's
and the garden you see is is if any fundamental rudely
they appreciate wiggly rocks
and when i remember so much as a child wondering why chinese houses or had wiggly roost where they were curved
and why the people of my wiggly than our people look
cause the world and wingman
now what are you gonna do with a wiggly world
i gotta you gotta straighten it out a and so we notice
well that but that's the that's the the initial solution is to try and straighten it out
and so are people of gaza very wiggly indeed only because we all appear together we look regular you know we have two eyes one knows what mouth careers and on and so we look we have regulars that will make sense but if somebody had never seen a person before
for than it was just extraordinary
amazing wiggly phenomenon but we are the world is wiggly now one of the wigglers things in the world as the fish
but somebody wants found out they could use a net and catch a fish
then they thought out a much better idea than that they could catch the world with a net
a wiggly world for what happens hang up a net in front of the world and look through it
what else
you can count the wiggles by saying this wiggle goes so many holes across so many holes down so many holes across so many to the left seven to the ride so many up so many down and what do you have you have the genesis of the calculus
and your net as it were breaks up the world into countable bits as we now say in information theory we have so many bits of information to process
and same way a bit as a bite you go to eat chicken you can't swallow the whole chicken at months through about to take it in bytes but you don't get a cut up fry out of the egg
so in the same way the real universe
has no bits
it's all one thing it's not a lot of things
but in order to digested with your mind would think so one thing at a time you got to make a calculus and you gotta chop the universe into bits
so as to think about it and talk about it
you can see this whole found at once
but if you want to talk about it will have to talk about it bit by bit
describe it go into the details what details
well
so with the world
now if you don't realize that's what you've done that you bit it the world and on greek about it doesn't really bit it at all you don't realize that then you have troubles because then you've got to explain how the bits go together
how they connect with each other they you event all sorts of ghosts called cause and effect
and influences the were influence you know how to our instruments you as if i was something different from you
so influences and ghosts and spooks all these things come into being if we forget that we made the initial steps are breaking the unity into pieces in order to discuss it
so then
stepping back again
we have these very very basic principles them the world
as nature what happens of itself
is looked upon as a living organism
and it doesn't have a boss
because things are not behaving in response to something that pushes them around they are just behaving
and it's all one big behavior
only if you want to look at it from certain points of view you can see it as if something else we're making some thing happened
but you do that only because you divide the thing up
so now you say final question is that nature chaotic
is a no law around here
there is not one single chinese word that means the law of nature as we use it
the only word in chinese that means law as we use it is a word sir
and this word
he's a character
which represents a cauldron with a knife beside it
and this goes back to the fact that in very ancient times when a certain emperor made laws for the people he had the laws etched on the sacrificial cauldrons so that when the people brought the sacrifices they would read what was written on the columns
and so this led zep
bob the sages who would have a taoist feeling at the time when the central said you shouldn't have done that because the moment the people know what the law is they develop a litigious spirit
and they'll say well now did you mean this besides they did you mean that precisely and we'll find a way of wrangling it
so they said that the nature of nature dow is woodstock which means lawless but in that sense of law
not to say that nature is lawless is not to sell
that it's chaotic
and the chinese word here for the order of nature is called in japanese three chinese lee
three
to curious word it originally meant
the markings in jade
all the fiber in muscle
now when you look at jade you see it as as wonderful muddled markings in it
and you know somehow and you can't explain why those muslims are not chaotic
when you look at the patterns of crowds for the patterns of foam on the water
isn't it astounding they never never make an aesthetic mistake
look at away the stars that arranged by they're not arrange that is like they seem to be scattered through the sky like spray
but would you ever criticize the stars for being in poor taste
when you look at amounted range
it's perfect
but somehow this
spontaneous
wiggly arrangement of nature is quite different from anything that we would call a miss
look at an ashtray
full of cigarette butts and screwed up it's a paper look at some modern painting
where people have gone out of their way to create expensive messes
z they're different
and this is the whole joke that we can't put our finger on what the differences although we've jolly well know it
we can't define it if we could define it
in other words if we could define aesthetic beauty
it would cease to be interesting
in other words if we could have a method which would automatically produced great artist anybody could go to school and become a great artist their work would be the most boring kind of kitsch
but just because you don't know how it's done
that gives it an excitement
and so it is with this there is no formula that is to say notes or no rule according to which all this happens
and yet it's not a mess
so this idea of brie you can translate the word read as organic pattern
and this re is
the web that they used for the order of nature instead of our idea of law
where the things are obeying something if they are not obeying a governor in the sense of god they are obeying principles like a streetcar do know that limerick there was a young man
who said damn
right i'm off
for it certainly seems that i am a creature that moves by determinant indeterminate grooves i'm not even a bus i'm a tram
so that idea of the iron rails
along which the course of life goes is absent here
and that is why basically this accounts for chinese and japanese humanism
and i hear this is very important as a basic humanism to this culture
the people in this culture chinese and japanese don't feel guilty
have they feel ashamed the is of something shame because they have transgressed social requirements
but they are incapable of a sense of sin
they don't feel in other words that you are guilty because you exist
and you are oh your existence to the lord god
and you were a mistake anyway
you know
they don't feel that they have social shame but not metaphysical guild
and that leads to a great relaxation
and you can sense it if you're sensitive just walking around the streets he realized that these people have not been tarred with that terrible
monotheistic brush
which gives them the sense of guilt
so they work on the supposition that human nature like all nature is basically good
ah basically but it's good as funny good it's consists in it's good bad
it consists in the passions as much as the virtues
in chinese there's a word run
i don't know how to balance and japanese i write it backwards
have you pronounce that in japanese
didn't
this means human heartedness
humaneness not in the sense of being humane in the sense of being kind necessarily but of being human
so i say oh he's a great human being means that is a kind of person who is not a stuffed shirt who is able to come off it who is can talk with you on a man to man basis
who recognizes a lot with you that he's a rascal to
and so people men manner for example of when they each affectionately call a friend of hi your past and how you're getting on this is a term of endearment
because they know that he shares with them but i call the element of irreducible ross gala day
that we all have
so then if a person has this attitude he's never going to be an overweening goody goody confucius said goody goodies other themes of virtue
because you see if i am right you are wrong and we get into a fight
but i'm out to is a crusader against the wrong and i'm going to obliteration
or i'm going to demand your unconditional surrender but if i say no i'm not right and you're not wrong but i happen to want to carry up your women
you know i love is getting about the most beautiful girls i'm going to fight you bottom when have either that i'm going to be very careful not to kill the girls
in modern war we don't care the only people will save it in the air force
her way up there
hello or else they've got subterranean caves there is no women and children be them they can be frizzell
hiroshima bomb but we consider a plane and be safe
so this is inhumane because
we are fighting ideologically instead of for practical things like food and possessions and being greedy so that's why the confusion would say he trusts human passions more than he trusts human virtues righteousness goodness principles and all that high
pollutant abstractions let's get down to her that's come off
so then this is why the kind of man in whom the kind of nature that kind of human nature in which trust your foot because you see look
if you were like the christians and jews not so much the jews but most of the christians who don't trust human nature say it's fallen it's evil it's perverse
that puts you in a very funny position
because if you say human nature is not to be trusted you can't even trust the fact that you don't trust it
see where you land out
you land out in a hopeless mess
now it's true human nature is not always trustworthy but you must proceed on the gamble that is trustworthy most of the time
or even fifty one percent of the time
because if you don't want your alternative you have to have a police state
everybody has to be watched and control and then who's gonna watch the police
and so you end up with this way in china just before two hundred and fifty bc there was a short lived dynasty called the ching dynasty that lasted fifteen years
and the man decided to the emperor of that that he would rule everybody everything would be completely control and there's dynasty would laugh for a thousand years
and it was a mess
so the han dynasty which lasted from two hundred and fifty bc to two hundred and fifty aed came into being and the first thing they did was to abolish all laws except about to
below elementary of violence you mustn't go around killing people and things by bad or robbing that all the complexity of law
and this han dynasty marked the height of chinese civilization
great great sophistication and please
china's golden age
i may be oversimplifying it because one all historians do
but this this was a marvellous thing using but is based on that whole idea of the humanism of the far east that although human beings are scallywag
there are no more so than cats and dogs from the birds
and you must trust human nature because if you can you are up the spout
now
it's i've talked for long enough
you've been listening to a lecture by the lay down and watch entitled that philosophy of nature
if you'd like to get a catalogue of all the available alan watts lectures you can send a stamped self-addressed envelope to m e a box three or three sausalito california that's emmy a box three o three sausalito california twenty five minutes after eight this is cassie and in san francisco

the

the
the

t

hey
the

the

team

go
t
the
team

the

team
the team completed

when i was little boy
the vegetable the devil com on the
the boy said
the ball
cosplay
sunday one
obama
me
she rocked me back obama
the them and and intervene
as brought me man
the devil would commonly
i say that
top
from a consummate may
the number that
she knows she can the
the that go back
see actor
the
the zebra
if i was because
the congress comedy
when i say now
of and coaches
from the president
yeah
the
colourpop
she rocked back
maybe
and
yeah

a