22/1 – 28/1/24 – The Tao of Philosophy (Special Edition)

Welcome to Monday’s News on the March – The week that was in my digital world.

Fall Asleep to Alan Watts Tao of Philosophy
Audio presentation at Soul of Life

Alan Watts talks about meditation, silence, and other concepts of reality and life.

Unified Field

At 1:18:27: If I may start by insulting your intelligence with the most elementary lesson. The thing we should have learnt before 1,2,3 and A, B,C, but somehow was overlooked. Any experience we have through our senses whether of sound or of light or touch is a vibration. A vibration has two aspects. The one called ‘on’ and the one called ‘off’. Vibration seems to be propagated in waves and every wave system has crests and it has troughs. So life is a system of ‘now you see it and now you don’t’. These two examples always go together, for example sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. That simply is the way things are. Only you must remember the crest and trough of the wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests. Just as you don’t encounter in life, peoples’ fronts and no backs. Just as you don’t encounter a coin with a ‘head’ and no ‘tails’. Although the head and the tails, the front and the back, the positive and the negatives are different, they’re at the same time ‘one’. One has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things can be inseparable… The human species has a very odd mechanism that is to say that we have as a species specialised in a certain kind of awareness which we call conscious attention. By this we have the faculty of examining the details of life very closely…the price we pay for specialisation in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field…. In fact our physical world is a system of inseparable differences. Everything exists with everything else, but we try not to notice that. Because what we notice is what is noteworthy; numbers, words, images – what appears to us to be significant and the rest is ignored as insignificant. As a result of that we select from the total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction and this causes us to believe that we are separate beings, isolated by the boundary of the epidermis of the rest of the world..But what goes inside your skin is what goes on outside your skin. In the science of ecology one learns that a human being is part of a unified field of behaviour. If you describe the behaviour of any organism, you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behaviour of the environment and by that you know you are describing the behaviour of a unified field. You must be very careful indeed to not fall into old ‘Newtonian’ assumptions about the billiard ball nature of the Universe. The organism is not the puppet of the environment, being pushed around by it, nor on the other hand is the environment the puppet of the organism. The relationship between them is transactional.

At 1:30:34: The basis of it all is this: if we say, you must survive or I must survive..I’ve got to go on. Then your life is a drag and not a game…This is my basic metaphysical axiom – that existence.. the physical universe is playful…there is no necessity for a physical universe whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by the analogy of music. Because music as an art-form is essentially playful. We say you ‘play’ the piano – you don’t ‘work’ the piano. Music differs from say ‘travel’. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere and we as a compulsive and purposeful culture are busy getting everywhere faster and faster until we eliminate the distance between places. What happens as a result of that is the two ends of your journey become the same place; so you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey. Because the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate travel. In music, one doesn’t make the end of a composition – the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played faster and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts to hear just one crashing chord. That’s the end. Say when you are dancing, you don’t aim for a particular spot in the room where you should arrive. The whole point is the dancing is the dance…We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression…all the time the thing is coming; the success you are working for. Then when you wake up one day 40 years old, you say ‘My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there.’ And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt and there’s a let down because you feel it’s a hoax. And there was a hoax. They made you miss everything.. We have cheated ourselves all the way down the line. We thought of life by analogy of a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end. The thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, may be heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point all the way along. It was a musical and you were supposed to sing…In this way the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration. If you see that existence is musical in nature, that is to say it is not serious; it is the play of all kinds of patterns and different rhythms. Spontaneous by nature.

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand