audio catalog. At the end of today's talk, I'll give you an address to write to for more information about Alan Watts' talks. Now here's part one from the seminar, Dowdson with Alan Watts. The subject of this seminar is going to be Dowdson 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

[01:03]

And they might not 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. It must remember that the word explain means to lay out in a plane. That is to put it on a flap 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 your doughnut, the inside and the outside are the same. So what we are first of all saying is that the Tao, whatever that is, cannot be explained in that sense.

[02:18]

So it's important, first of all, to experience it so we know what we're talking about. In order to go into Taoism at all, we must begin by being in the strength of mind, which can understand it. You cannot force yourself into the strength of mind any more than you can smooth and stir up water with your hands. But let's say that our starting point is that we forget what we know or think we know. That we suspend judgment about practically everything.

[03:26]

Returning to what we willingly debated 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. I'll tell you, consider that as your state. Just plain ignorant. But still very much alive. And in this state you just feel what it is. Without calling it anything at all.

[04:30]

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. They 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 ultimate being, they happen. Your breath happens.

[05:33]

Light all around you happens. Your response to it by breaking happens. So you simply are clearly 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 body. The visual buzz, the audible buzz, the tangible buzz, the flammable buzz, all the buzz. It's there now, doesn't it? Watch it. Don't ask who's watching it. There's no information about that yet, that it requires a watcher for something to be watched. That's somebody's idea.

[06:37]

We don't know that. And Lao Tzu says, the scholar learns something every day, but now 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? Try to be aware. You are. You will find, of course, that you can't stop the commentary going on in your head, but at least you can regard it as interior noise.

[07:42]

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. kind of this sense of something going on. I don't even say that, this. This. Well, I said it was going on. That's an idea. The form of work. Obviously, I wouldn't know if anything was going on unless I could say something else wasn't.

[08:49]

I'm in motion, but I can't show up through the rest. So while I am aware of motion, I'm also aware of the 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 go through both. And I say, well, here it is. That excludes what isn't. That's faith. And I say this to exclude that. I'm the Duke of Silence. But you can feel what I'm talking about, don'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, of which Lao Tzu says which means that means the way of functioning of the Tao, is of itself so.

[10:15]

That is to say, is pertaining. Watch again what's going on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing it happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at ignorance, 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. Just as your thoughts happen, the car happens outside, the clouds, the stars. When a westerner hears that,

[11:21]

He thinks of 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. is just happening. So with you, you know, what you call you, what you regularly call you, is part of the happening. You're part of the universe, although the universe, strictly speaking, has no power. The only cause that we think of is that the universe is part of that, but you can't disconnect them from the rest without causing them to be non-existent, but never to have existed. So when you have this happening, the other illusion that a westernized novel has is that it's declaring the difference that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past.

[12:37]

But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Caused defect? Why, obviously not. Because if you're already naive, you can 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 of 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 a great boy. That's the way a naive person, and as I explained it to any of you at my lecture last night, if you shut your eyes and concentrate reality only with your ears, you will find there's a background of violence and all sounds are coming out.

[13:47]

They stop out of silence. If you close your eyes, listen, just listen. You see the bell came out at nine, turned it off, [...] and then stopped being a sonic echo and became a memory. which is another trajectory of wake. It's philosophical. It all begins now. And therefore, it's spontaneous. This is 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.

[14:50]

If you talk to an mathematician about randomness, he'll make you feel quite weird. If you take the 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. But anyway, Why is the word itself sui generis in Latin? That means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord. The real being would urge it to do it. Sui generis. And that's the word. That is the doubt. That makes us feel scared. Perhaps. Because we say, well, all this is happening spontaneously. Who's in charge? I'm not in charge. That's pretty obvious. And I hope there's God or something looking after all this.

[15:55]

But why shouldn't there be someone looking after it? Because then there's a new way that you may not have thought of. Now, who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker's doing the taking care? Who guards the guard? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God? Much said, God doesn't need looking after. Oh, well, then, God is good. God. 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.

[16:59]

But when you look at a chunk, it's perfectly obvious that this dangled part has order. We recognize at once that that is not a mass. But it is not symmetrical. And it is not geometrical, though. It looks like a Chinese drawing. Because the Chinese appreciated this kind of order so much that they put it into their paintings. Non-symmetrical order. In the Chinese language, this is called yin. And the character for yin means originally the markings in J also means the grain in wood and the fiber in muscle. We could say, too, that clouds have lean. Marble has lean.

[18:02]

The human body has lean. And we all recognize it. And the artist copies it, whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, or an abstract painter. of a non-objective paper. They all are trying to lead. And the interesting thing is that although we all know what it is, there's no way of denying it. But because Tao is the course, we can also call lead the water course. Because the patterns of ye are patterns of flowing water. And we see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, in sculpture, in the green wood, which is the flow of sand, in marble, in bones, in knuckles. All these things are patterned according to the basic principles.

[19:09]

That is the Tao, the Tao principle of flow. There is a book called Tentative 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. And we could be recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle, the Yang-Yun, like this. See? So, Dili means then the order of flow. The wonderful dancing pattern of liquid. Because Lhasa likens Dao to water. The great Dao, he says, flows everywhere, to the left and to the right. Like water, I've been calculating that, it loves and nourishes all things.

[20:15]

but does not lord it open. 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. Now, Lutzer explains that the top collision is the most insecure. Everybody wants to get to the top of the tree, but then if they do, the tree will collapse. at the top of the 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, Lao Tzu 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-defense arts, where you always get underneath the opponent.

[21:33]

And so these people also agree. You can attack, see. The moment he moves to be aggressive, You go either lower than here, or in a smaller circle when she's moving. And you have spin, if you know how to do it. You're always spinning. And you know how somebody rapidly spinning exercises centrifugal force. So if somebody comes into your field with centrifugal force, he gets spun out. But by his own mind. Very curious. So therefore, The water-cut way is the way of Tao. Now, that seems to white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Javari Catholics lazy. And I'm always being asked when I talk about things, if people did what they used to do, 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 to 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 at Haiti are. Perjunct, by the way, they are. 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 something 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? By being energetic? No, you can't get energy that way. That is exhausting yourself. To have energy, you must, as to me, and 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, being passive as an exercise of good for you. You would 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 of the Talmud program. That's by playing because it's good for your work. You never get to play. So now, affinity 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. as the positive and negative force of electricity. So, you endow, you are allowing, the matriarch you're not, because there's no you either to allow or disallow. You just have to get used to that. What happens has 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 not trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It doesn't work. You wouldn't try. Nothing's stopping. It doesn't have any effect except wearing you out. So in the same way, to try and force the issues wears you out. And when you talk a lot, you usually bend the key. So you giggle gently until you find the right opening. So in the same way, anybody who knows how to conduct business always juggled the key, trying the right moment to turn the lock, and then it all happens as if it were natural, and none of it will course. That's the Judo way of going about it. So therefore, the water course will give you the sense that your life

[27:04]

is a flowing. 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 will stop asking questions about it. You will see that all asking questions about it is, shall I say, totally logical. You get explanations which don't explain. All explanations of what's happening call for further explanations. Because the explanations have little explanations upon their backs to bite them. Little explanations have lesser explanations. And further, I think, from that, is that the analytic process reproduces the atomic universe, the electronic universe, the protonic universe, and so on and so on. And if you go the other direction, you will find the solar system in a galaxy, the galaxy in a system of galaxies, and then goodness knows what.

[28:18]

Because obviously the universe, as it seeks to know itself, must run away from itself. As your eyes revolve when you come to look at them, you are the universe. You are attitudes through which it is aware of itself. holes in the wall that work. And so as you look, now you see it, now you don't. Very simple. So you'll find, therefore, that the big question, 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. And this is what is going on that cannot be described, the Tao.

[29:23]

The Tao is simultaneously departing and arriving. Always. That's the meaning of the eternal Tao, the eternal Tao. What then? To go with the water course is called by Laozi wu-wei. Wu means not. Wei has a complex of meanings, which can be action, striving, straining, doing, or best, forcing. Not forcing is wu-wei.

[30:25]

That's how he says, dao wu-wei, dao does nothing, but nothing is left undone. In other words, dao 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, as it were, coming down, you are working on the same principle as the Dao. And so this is likened poetically to the difference between a willow and a pine when it snows. The pine is a rigid tree, 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.

[31:35]

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. And he thought, that's too bad. He must be old, and be old, and is making an end of himself. A few minutes later, the old man jumped out of the stream way down beyond the cataract and left running on the bank. So the sage and his disciples came running after him and said, this is an amazing thing we ever solved. 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. 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 out that the baby is uninjured.

[32:38]

But the baby didn't go rigid to protect itself. So when you 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 doesn't. You see, you must realize that the water product is not contingentness, 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, would, if we encountered some obstacle in space, would be an enormous release of energy. The obstacle would feel that it was being hit by some colloquial force.

[33:40]

But the planet is pouring around the sun. And the sun is pouring around something else. The whole universe is pouring. But since there's nowhere for it to drop, it's not pouring at anything. It's just pouring around itself. Sometimes they're collisions. But everything's got so much space, but they're very rare. Maybe the plants that didn't have space had been eliminated. And there came all the dust from 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 v equals mc squared. Energy is mass comes to the square of the philosophy of light. So the energy still comes from gravity.

[34:50]

And so we don't have a situation which is purely So, therefore, Lu Wei is an intelligent course of action. Because intelligence itself is the laziest way of dealing with a situation. It is not so much necessity as laziness, 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 up very complicated ways. But as time goes on, all his apparatus gets smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter.

[35:53]

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 increasing centrifugation is intelligence. So the very, very intelligent thing would be philosophical to understand, because we would not see an explanation of their parts, of the structures, the forms contained within. So it is remarkable, isn't it, that Sean, with the very simple cells, which look almost completely transparent,

[36:57]

all the complexities of living organisms can proceed. So now if you want, you see, to find an imperative solution to a problem, then what 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 take that they use their minds like they use their muscles. But you can strain 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 concentrate it. 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 not going to be wrong but when you have watched it for a while the solution comes with itself and that is the way to use your brain it works for you in the same way as your stomach digests your food

[38:23]

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, and so forth. You know how it goes. The reason for that is quite simple. That conscious attention, employing words, cannot think of very much. We ignore almost everything while we're 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 isn't time. But your brain can. Because the brain is capable of handling innumerable variables at once. Or as your conscious attention is not.

[39:27]

Or rather, more strictly speaking, verbal signals are not capable of handling any more than one very, very crudely simple fact. 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 has only begun to crack the surface of understanding the nervous system, he is actually saying that his own nervous system is smarter than he is. It's up with him so far. And that's remarkable, isn't it? So you see, what you are is necessarily more important than anything you can understand for the simple reason that an organism which completely understands itself would be comfortable committing yourself to fly your own bootstraps or getting your own lips.

[40:52]

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, for light to ask, what am I? Although it sounds like a sensible question, it isn't. In the seminar entitled, Taoism, the Water Course Way, you've been listening to Alan Watson with part one from that seminar. If you'd like a cassette of the complete Part 1, actually there's a little more that wasn't included in today's broadcast, you can send $9 to NEA Box 303, Sausalito 984965.

[42:09]

Remember to specify you want Part 1 from the seminar, Taoism, and the address again at NEA Box 303, Sausalito, California, 984965.

[42:20]

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