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622 - Nirvana Is Where You Are

Sep 09, 2019, 53 min read

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Alan Watts

Alan Watts

[NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.]

“The Bodhisattva returns into the world, that means he has discovered that you don’t have to go anywhere to find Nirvana. Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.”

“But the main thing [about death] is the attitude that death is as positive as birth and should be a matter for rejoicing because death is the symbol of the liberation.”

“The ordinary world and the Nirvana world they are the same worlds. But what makes the difference is the point of view.”

“Everything you know is remembered.”

“Always surround death with joyous rites because this is an opportunity for the greatest of all experiences when you can finally let go because you know there’s nothing else to do.”

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And before we begin, I’d like to thank a few of our fellow saunters who have made donations to the salon outside of Patreon,

00:00:36 ►

which is the main source of funds that I use to keep these podcasts coming your way.

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Now, over the past few months, however, the salon has received donations from Rodrigo N., Ian W., Samuel G, Tyler O, and Doran P. On top of that, we also received

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a very generous donation from Thomas R, whose band, The Imperfectionists, have yet another cool

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CD out, and whose band camp page I’ve linked to in the program notes, which you’ll find at

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psychedelicsalon.com. So thank you to the Improfessionists, our direct

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donors, and to all of my monthly supporters on Patreon, to whom I’ve just sent an email with a

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link for tonight’s live salon, where some of the speakers from this year’s Palenque Norte lectures

00:01:17 ►

at Burning Man are going to be joining us. However, right now I’d like to get on with today’s podcast,

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and I’m pleased to say that our featured speaker is Alan Watts.

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It’s been a while since I’ve played a talk of his, and, well, I’ve missed hearing his wit and wisdom,

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particularly when he talks about death, because he does so in such a gentle way.

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I have to admit, however, that I wish I’d heard this talk before giving my own version of a deathbed scene,

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the one that I gave in podcast number 599 about the psychedelic hospice movement.

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Of course, since my idea was to have everybody there take MDMA,

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and Watts’ idea was for them to drink champagne,

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well, I should warn you that you really shouldn’t mix these two versions. One of the best ways that I

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know of about how to ruin an MDMA trip is to drink alcohol during it. Trust me, I’ve tested this more

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than once, and combining alcohol with psychedelics is, well, it’s basically a waste of the psychedelics.

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Enough said. Geez, I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean to start this podcast off by preaching, particularly since I’m preaching to the choir.

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I guess the fact that I was thinking about Alan Watts as having been an Episcopal priest turned Buddhist scholar,

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well, maybe some old childhood memories from Catholic school snapped me back into a preaching mode.

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I’m sorry about that.

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Anyway, as we get into the relaxed flow of this

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Alan Watts lecture, from time to time you may want to remind yourself that the objective at

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which this talk is aiming is to better understand the central notion of Mahayana Buddhism.

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And now, here’s Alan Watts.

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watch in Buddhism change is emphasized first to unsettle people who think that they can achieve permanence by hanging on to life and it seems that the

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preacher is wagging his finger at them and saying you know like the scotch

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preacher one day saying to sunday congregation

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preaching on the text the vanity of vanities all is vanity and what about the rich food you put

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into your mouths it is vanity and the fine arraignment you put on your box it is vanity

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and all you’re playing around going to golf instead of coming to the Kirke of the Sabbath

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is vanity and you be spending all your lives devoted to vanity

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and the last day will come the day of your death and because you’ve devoted

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your life to vanity you go down to the burning fiery brimstone pits of hell

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and there you look up and say unto the Lord

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O Lord I didn’t know it.

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O Lord, I would not have devoted my life to vanity if I had known it.

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O Lord.

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And the Lord, he’ll look down,

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and he’ll say unto you, out of his infinite mercy,

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Well, you know it now.

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so all the preachers together

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don’t cling to this thing

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so then as a result of that

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and now I’m going to speak in strictly Buddhist terms

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the follower

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of the way of Buddha

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seeks deliverance from attachment to the world of change.

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He seeks nirvana, the state beyond change,

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which the Buddha called

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the unborn, the unoriginated, the uncreated, and the unformed.

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But then you see what he finds out is that in seeking a state beyond

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change, seeking nirvana as something away

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from samsara, which is the name for the

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wheel, he is still seeking something permanent and so there are in as

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Buddhism went on they thought about this a great deal and this very point was the

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point of division between the two great schools of Buddhism, which in the south were Theravada,

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the doctrine of the Thera, the elders, sometimes known disrespectfully as the Hinayana.

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means a vehicle, a conveyance, a diligence, or a ferry boat.

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This is a yana.

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And I live on a ferry boat because that’s my job.

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Then there is the other school of Buddhism called the Mahayana Maha means great

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Hina little

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the great vehicle and the little vehicle

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now what is this

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the Mahayanas say,

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your little vehicle

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just gets a few people

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who are very, very tough ascetics

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and takes them across the other shore

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to nirvana.

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But the great vehicle

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shows people that nirvana is not different from ordinary life.

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So that when you have reached nirvana,

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if you think, now I have attained it,

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now I have succeeded,

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now I have caught the secret of the universe,

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and I am at peace,

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you have only a false peace.

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You have become a stone Buddha. You have become a stone Buddha.

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You have a new illusion of the changeless.

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So, it is said that such a person

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is a Pratyeka Buddha.

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That means private Buddha.

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I’ve got it all for myself and in contrast with this

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kind of practical Buddha who gains nirvana and stays there the Mahayana

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used the word Bodhisattva

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sattva means essential principle bodhi awakening a person whose essential being is awakened the word used to mean junior Buddha someone on the way to becoming a

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Buddha but in the course of time it came to mean someone who had attained Buddhahood,

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who had reached nirvana, but who returns into everyday life to deliver all other beings.

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This is the popular idea of a bodhisattva a savior

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and so in the popular buddhism

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of tibet and china and japan

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people worship the bodhisattvas

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the great bodhisattvas as saviors

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say the hermaphroditic kuan yin

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people love kuan Yin.

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Because she, he, she, she, he, could be a Buddha,

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but has come back into the world to save all beings.

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The Japanese call he, she, Kannon.

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And they have in Kyoto an image of Kannon with

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1,000 arms radiating like a great Oreo all round this great golden figure and

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these 1,000 arms are 1,000 different ways of rescuing beings from ignorance

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rescuing beings from ignorance.

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Kanon is a funny thing.

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I remember one night when I suddenly realized that kanon was incarnate in the whole city of Kyoto.

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That this whole city was kanon.

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That the police department, the taxi drivers the fire

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department the mayor and corporation the shopkeepers in so far as this whole city

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was a collaborate effort to sustain human life however bumbling however

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inefficient however corrupt it was still a manifestation of common with its thousand arms all working independently and yet one

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so they revere those bodhisattvas as the saviors who’ve come back into the world to deliver

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all beings but there is a more esoteric interpretation of this the bodhisattva returns into the world that means he has

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discovered that you don’t have to go anywhere to find nirvana nirvana is

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where you are provided you don’t object to it change

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and everything is changed

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nothing can be held on to

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to the degree that you go with a stream

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you see

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you are still

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you’re flowing with it

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but to the degree you resist the stream

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then you notice

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that the current is rushing past you

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and fighting with you

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so swim with it.

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Go with it.

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And you’re there.

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You’re at rest.

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And this is, of course, particularly true when it comes to those moments

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when life really seems to be going to take us away.

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And the stream of change is going to swallow us completely the moment of death and we think oh this is it this is the end and

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so at death we withdraw say no no no no not that not not not yet please but actually the whole problem is

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that it really is no other problem for human beings than to go over that waterfall when it comes just as you go over any other waterfall

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just as you go on from day to day

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just as you go to sleep at night

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be absolutely willing to die

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now, I’m not preaching

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I’m not saying you ought to be willing to die

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and that you should muscle up your courage and somehow put on a good front when the terrible thing comes.

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That’s not the idea at all. The point is that you can only die well if you understand this system of waves.

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you understand this system of waves if you understand that your disappearance as the form in which you think you are you your disappearance as this

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particular organism is simply seasonal, that you are just as much the dark space beyond death

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as you are the light interval called life.

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These are just two sides of you.

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Because you

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is the total wave.

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See, you can’t have half a wave.

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Nobody ever saw waves which just had crests.

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No troughs.

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So you can’t have half a human being who is born but doesn’t die half a thing that would be only half a thing

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but the propagation of vibrations and life is vibration it simply goes on and on but its cycles are long cycles and short cycles space you see is not just

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nothing if I could magnify my hand to an enormous degree so that you could see all the molecules in it. I don’t know

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how far apart they would be, but it seems to me there would be something like

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tennis balls in a very, very large space. And you would look when I move my hand

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like this and say, for God God’s sake look at all those tennis

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balls they’re all going together crazy and the no strings tying them together

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neck we’re no but the space going with them and space is a function of or it’s

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an inseparable aspect of whatever solids are in the space.

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That is the clue probably to what we mean by gravity.

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We don’t know yet.

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So in the same way when those marvelous sandpipers come around here, the little ones,

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while they’re in the air flying they have one mind they move all

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together when they are light on the mud they become individuals and they go

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picking around for worms or something but one click of the fingers and all

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those things are then zipped into the air they don’t seem to have a leader

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because they don’t follow when they turn they all turn together and go off in

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another direction amazing but

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they’re like the molecules in my hand

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so then you see here’s the principle

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when you don’t resist change I mean over resist I don’t mean being flabby when you don’t resist change you see that the changing world

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which disappears like smoke is no different from the nirvana world

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nirvana as i said means breathe out

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let go of the breath so in the same way don’t resist change it’s all the same principle

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of the breath so in the same way don’t resist change it’s all the same principle so the Bodhisattva saves all beings not by preaching sermons to them

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but by showing them that they are delivered they are liberated by the very fact of not being able to stop changing you can’t hang on

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to yourself you don’t have to try not to hang on to yourself it can’t be done and

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that is salvation memento mor, be mindful of death.

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Gurdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize

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is that you and all you,

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every person you see,

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will soon be dead.

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It sounds so gloomy to us

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because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting

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death.

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I love the story of a conversation at an English country house at a dinner party where the

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hostess started up the question of death

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and asked the various guests what they thought was going to happen to them when

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they die and some thought about reincarnation and others thought about

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various kinds of different planes of being and others thought they were going

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to be annihilated but all none of the

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guests had answered except sir roderick who was a kind of a military type but a very devout

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pillar of the church of england he was the church warden chief of the vestry in the local

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country parish and the lady said sir Roderick

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you haven’t said a word what do you think is going to happen to you when you

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die oh is that I am perfectly certain that I shall go to heaven and enjoy

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everlasting bliss but I wish you wouldn’t indulge in such a depressing that’s true isn’t it

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death

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in the western world

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is a real problem

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we hush it up

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we pretend it hasn’t happened

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our morticians who are very smart commercial operators, know exactly what’s expected of them.

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And they make death just awful by pretending it doesn’t happen.

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just awful by pretending it doesn’t happen. See what happens.

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You go to a hospital and you’re at the end.

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You’ve got terminal cancer.

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And all your friends come around and they wear false smiles and they say, cheer up,

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you’ll be all right.

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All right. In a few days from now, you’ll be back home,

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and we’ll go out for a picnic again.

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The doctors have their bedside man.

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You see, a doctor is absolutely helpless with a terminal case

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because he’s a doctor is, by social definition, a healer.

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And he’s not allowed to help you die.

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He’s out of role.

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Even though, I mean, he may sneak behind the rules and do it but but he’s bad

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definitely he’s got a healing you so you’re going to keep you indefinitely on

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the end of tubes and all kinds of things while there’s a certain grave demeanor

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to all this and all the nurses are so pleasant and so totally distant because

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they know this is death and they may be frank with you that’s

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why they feel distant it’s not that they’re not concerned it’s not that

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they’re heartless people but that they just don’t know how to be frank like

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lots of people when they meet a drunk they don’t know what to do with a drunk

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because he’s not behaving right so when you’re dying you’re not behaving right not behaving right so

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when you’re dying you’re not behaving right you’re supposed to live see so we don’t know what to do with a dying person

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we don’t get around that person and say listen now listen man listen i’ve got

00:21:36 ►

the news for you you’re going to die and this is going to be great

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And this is going to be great.

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Look, no more responsibilities.

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Don’t have to pay those bills anymore.

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Don’t have to worry about anything.

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You’re going to just die.

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And let’s go out with a bang.

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Let’s have a party, see?

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We’ll put some morphine in you you so she won’t hurt too much

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but we’re going to prop you up in bed and we’re going to bring all our friends around and we’re going to have champagne and you’re going to die at the end of it see

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and it’s going to be just marvelous it’s like being born see when we had birth problems see

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all women used to think that birth had to be

00:22:25 ►

painful it was good for them there’s one of the things you had to suffer because

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you’ve been you’d been screwing around with people and therefore you have a

00:22:33 ►

child and it’s got a hurt and then the doctors got together and they scratched

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their heads and the man called granted it Reed said no birth doesn’t hurt it’s

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natural you do all we’ve got to do is to talk

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these women into the idea that it doesn’t hurt that all these so-called

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pains are just tensions and that birth is great it’s not a disease it’s not

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really something you ought to go to hospital for because you associate

00:22:58 ►

hospitals with diseases and sickness birth isn’t sickness all right now let’s

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do some new thinking what

00:23:05 ►

about death is death sickness or is it a healthy natural event like being born

00:23:10 ►

because it is so I mean a little change in social attitude about this will

00:23:16 ►

fortify everybody else I mean I’m if I’m alone and all my relatives are pretending

00:23:24 ►

to me it’s going to be hard for me

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I’ve got to challenge the whole bunch of them and get my dander up and say

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listen damn you I don’t want all this thing around here

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you’ve got to take a different attitude about my death

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well that’s hard but if everybody helps me

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and we do we’re all one body

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they all come around and say congratulations you’re going to die

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liberation liberation now you see because just before you know I mean look

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I know very well a skillful priest handling a person dying can do this for

00:23:58 ►

them but he has to talk very very very straight and he has to talk very, very, very straight. And he has to say, listen, these doctors, don’t you pay any attention to them.

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They’re trying to amuse you and deceive you. You’re going to die.

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This isn’t terrible.

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But it’s just going to be the end of you as a system of memories.

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And so you’ve got a great chance right now before it happens

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to let go of everything because you know it’s going to go and it is going to help

00:24:31 ►

you it’s going to help you let go of everything so if you have any

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possessions left give them away give everything away and if you have anything

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to say that is you felt that you ought to say before you die and that you’re kind of hanging on to and it’s bothering you, say it.

00:24:50 ►

I mean, I don’t mean necessarily a last confession, but say it said that Adlai Stevenson shortly before he died said that he’d been making a monkey of himself because he didn’t agree with the government’s policy about something or other.

00:25:02 ►

You know, he had to get that off his chest because he had a little thought in the back of his mind that things were catching up with him you see so the moment comes

00:25:09 ►

when this thing called death has to be taken completely not as some ghastly accident

00:25:18 ►

something that uh all the friends are going to stay away because you’re awful i mean sometimes

00:25:24 ►

people when they die,

00:25:25 ►

are in a very unpleasant physical condition.

00:25:27 ►

They don’t smell good, they don’t look good, and so on.

00:25:30 ►

But an enormous amount can be done with scientific methods

00:25:34 ►

to make things reasonably tidy

00:25:38 ►

from a purely sensory point of view.

00:25:43 ►

But the main thing is the attitude that death is

00:25:48 ►

as positive as birth and should be a matter for rejoicing because death is

00:25:58 ►

the symbol of the liberation there is a wonderful saying that Ananda Kumaraswamy used to quote I

00:26:06 ►

pray that death will not come and find me still uninhalate in other words that

00:26:14 ►

man dies happy if there is no one to die not what’s if the ego has disappeared

00:26:20 ►

before death caught up with it but you see the knowledge of death

00:26:26 ►

helps the ego to disappear because it tells you you can’t hang on so what we

00:26:35 ►

need if we’re going to have a good religion around that’s one of the places

00:26:41 ►

where it can start having I don’t know, nowadays I suppose they’d call it the institution for creative dying.

00:26:54 ►

But something like that.

00:26:57 ►

And you can have one department where you can have champagne cocktail party to die with

00:27:06 ►

another department where you can have glorious religious rituals and priests

00:27:10 ►

and things like that another department where you can have psychedelic drugs

00:27:14 ►

another department where you can have special kinds of music anything you know

00:27:21 ►

all these arrangements will be provided for in a hospital for delightful dying.

00:27:31 ►

But that’s the thing,

00:27:33 ►

to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

00:27:36 ►

I was talking a great deal yesterday afternoon

00:27:39 ►

about the Buddhist attitude to change,

00:27:44 ►

to death, to the transience of the world

00:27:47 ►

and we’re showing that preachers

00:27:52 ►

of all kinds stir people up

00:27:56 ►

in the beginning by alarming them about change

00:28:00 ►

that’s like somebody

00:28:03 ►

you know actually raising an alarm just in the same way as if i want to

00:28:07 ►

pay you a visit i ring the doorbell and then we can come in and i don’t need to raise an alarm

00:28:13 ►

anymore so uh in the same way it sounds terrible you see that everything is going to die and pass away and here you are thinking that happiness sanity

00:28:29 ►

and security consist in clinging on to things which can’t be clung to and

00:28:34 ►

in any case there isn’t anybody to cling to them the whole thing is the weaving of smoke

00:28:51 ►

So, that’s the initial standpoint, but as soon as you really discover this and you stop clinging to change, then everything is quite different.

00:28:59 ►

It becomes amazing. and not only do all your senses become more wide awake not only do you feel almost that

00:29:15 ►

you’re walking on air but you see finally that there is no duality no difference between the ordinary world and the Nirvana world

00:29:33 ►

they’re the same world but what makes the difference is the point of view and of course if you keep identifying yourself with some sort of stable entity

00:29:49 ►

that sits and watches the world go by you don’t acknowledge your Union your

00:29:58 ►

inseparability from everything else that there is you go by with all the rest of

00:30:04 ►

the things but if you insist

00:30:05 ►

on trying to take a permanent stand on trying to be a permanent witness of the

00:30:10 ►

flux then it grates against you and you feel very uncomfortable but it is a

00:30:31 ►

But it is a fundamental feeling in most of us that we are such witnesses. We feel that behind the stream of our thoughts, of our feelings and our experiences, there

00:30:38 ►

is something which is the thinker, the feeler, and the experiencer. Not recognizing that that is itself a thought,

00:30:49 ►

feeling, or experience, and it belongs within and not outside the changing panorama of experience.

00:31:12 ►

a cue signal. In other words, when you telephone and your telephone conversation is being tape recorded, it’s the law that there shall be a beep every so many seconds. And that beep cues you in

00:31:20 ►

to the fact that this conversation is recorded so in a very similar way in our

00:31:26 ►

everyday experience there’s a beep which tells us this is a continuous experience

00:31:33 ►

which is mine beep in the same way for, it is a cue signal when a composer arranges some music and he keeps in it a recurrent theme, but he makes many variations on it.

00:31:56 ►

Or, more subtle still, he keeps within it a consistent style.

00:32:02 ►

So you know that it’s Mozart all the all the way along because that sounds like mozart

00:32:08 ►

but there isn’t as it were a constant noise going all the way through to tell you it’s continuous

00:32:17 ►

although in hindu music they do have something called the drone there is behind all the drums

00:32:27 ►

and every kind of singing

00:32:28 ►

something that goes

00:32:30 ►

and it always sounds the note

00:32:38 ►

which is the tonic of the scale being used

00:32:41 ►

but in Hindu music that drone

00:32:44 ►

represents the eternal self the

00:32:48 ►

Brahman behind all the changing forms of nature but that’s only a symbol and to

00:32:59 ►

find out what is eternal you can’t make an image of it you can’t hold on to it and so it’s psychologically

00:33:11 ►

more conducive to liberation

00:33:16 ►

to remember that the thinker or the feeler, or the experiencer, and the experiences are all together. They’re all one.

00:33:33 ►

But if out of anxiety you try to stabilize, keep permanent, the separate observer, you are in for conflict.

00:33:52 ►

Of course, the separate observer, the thinker of the thoughts, is an abstraction which we create out of memory.

00:34:04 ►

is an abstraction which we create out of memory.

00:34:10 ►

We think of the self, the ego rather,

00:34:13 ►

as a repository of memories.

00:34:17 ►

A kind of safety deposit box or record or filing cabinet place

00:34:21 ►

where all our experiences are stored.

00:34:27 ►

Now, that’s not a very good idea.

00:34:31 ►

It’s more that memory is a dynamic system,

00:34:36 ►

not a storage system.

00:34:40 ►

It’s a repetition of rhythms.

00:34:46 ►

And these rhythms are all part and parcel

00:34:49 ►

of the ongoing flow of present experience.

00:34:58 ►

In other words, first of all,

00:35:00 ►

how do you distinguish between something known now and a memory?

00:35:07 ►

First of all, how do you distinguish between something known now and a memory? Actually, you don’t know anything at all until you remember it.

00:35:12 ►

Because if something happens that is purely instantaneous,

00:35:16 ►

if a light flashes, or to be more accurate, if there is a flash lasting only one millionth of a second you probably

00:35:27 ►

wouldn’t really experience it because it wouldn’t give you enough time to

00:35:33 ►

remember it we say in customary speech well it has to make an impression so in a way all present knowledge is memory because you look at

00:35:48 ►

something and for a while the rods and cones in your retina respond to that and

00:35:56 ►

they go they do their stuff jiggle jiggle jiggle it’s all vibration and so

00:36:01 ►

as as you look at things they set up a series of echoes in your brain.

00:36:08 ►

And these echoes keep reverberating because the brain is very complicated.

00:36:14 ►

First of all, everything you know is remembered.

00:36:19 ►

But there is a way in which we distinguish between seeing somebody here now

00:36:26 ►

and the memory of having seen somebody else who is not here now,

00:36:31 ►

but whom you did see in the past, and you know perfectly well,

00:36:34 ►

when you remember that other person’s face, it’s not an experience of the person being here.

00:36:41 ►

How is this?

00:36:42 ►

how is this?

00:36:44 ►

because memory signals

00:36:46 ►

have a different cue attached to them

00:36:48 ►

than present time signals

00:36:50 ►

they come

00:36:53 ►

on a different kind of vibration

00:36:56 ►

sometimes however

00:36:58 ►

the wiring gets mixed up

00:37:01 ►

and present experiences

00:37:03 ►

come to us with a memory cue attached to them.

00:37:07 ►

And then we have what is called a déjà vu experience.

00:37:10 ►

We are quite sure we’ve experienced this thing before.

00:37:15 ►

But the problem that we don’t see, don’t ordinarily recognize, is that although memory is a series

00:37:24 ►

of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them

00:37:27 ►

so that we don’t confuse them with present experience,

00:37:31 ►

they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience.

00:37:36 ►

They are all part of this constantly flowing life process

00:37:40 ►

and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process watching it go by you’re

00:37:48 ►

all involved in it now accepting that you see going with that although at first it sounds

00:37:58 ►

like the Nell of doom is if you don’t touch it anymore splendid that’s why I said the death

00:38:08 ►

should be occasioned for a great celebration that people should say happy

00:38:13 ►

death to you and always surround death with joyous rights because this is the

00:38:22 ►

opportunity for the greatest of all experiences,

00:38:26 ►

when you can finally let go because you know there’s nothing else to do.

00:38:30 ►

There was a kamikaze pilot

00:38:33 ►

who escaped

00:38:35 ►

because his plane

00:38:38 ►

that he was flying at an American aircraft carrier

00:38:42 ►

went wrong.

00:38:44 ►

And he landed in the water instead of hitting the plane.

00:38:47 ►

So he survived.

00:38:49 ►

But he said afterwards that he had the most extraordinary state of exaltation.

00:38:54 ►

It wasn’t a kind of patriotic ecstasy.

00:38:58 ►

But the very thought that in a moment he would cease to exist,

00:39:03 ►

that he would just be gone

00:39:05 ►

for some mysterious reason that he couldn’t understand

00:39:08 ►

made him feel

00:39:09 ►

absolutely like a god

00:39:11 ►

well then

00:39:14 ►

in

00:39:15 ►

Buddhist philosophy

00:39:17 ►

this

00:39:19 ►

a sort of annihilation

00:39:22 ►

of oneself

00:39:23 ►

this acceptance of change

00:39:27 ►

is the doctrine of the world as the void

00:39:32 ►

this doctrine did not emerge

00:39:38 ►

very clearly

00:39:39 ►

very prominently in Buddhism

00:39:42 ►

until quite a while after G Gotama the Buddha had lived.

00:39:47 ►

We begin to find this, though, becoming prominent about the year 100 BC.

00:39:57 ►

And by 200 AD, it had reached its peak.

00:40:03 ►

And it was developed by the Mahayana Buddhists

00:40:09 ►

and it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature

00:40:14 ►

which goes by this complex name,

00:40:17 ►

prajnaparamita.

00:40:21 ►

Now prajna means wisdom. Paramita, for crossing over, for going beyond.

00:40:30 ►

There is a small prajna paramita sutra, a big prajna paramita sutra, and then there’s a little short summary of the whole thing called the hridaya, or Heart Sutra.

00:40:46 ►

And that is recited by Buddhists

00:40:49 ►

all over northern Asia,

00:40:52 ►

Tibet, China, and Japan.

00:40:54 ►

And it contains the saying,

00:40:58 ►

that which is void is precisely the world of form,

00:41:02 ►

that which is form is precisely the void.

00:41:06 ►

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and so on.

00:41:09 ►

And it elaborates on this theme.

00:41:11 ►

It’s very short, but it’s always chanted at important Buddhist ceremonies.

00:41:18 ►

And so it is supposed by scholars of all kinds who have a missionary background that the

00:41:27 ►

Buddhists are nihilists that they teach that the world is really nothing there

00:41:34 ►

isn’t anything and that there seems to be something is purely an illusion but

00:41:39 ►

of course this philosophy is much more subtle than that. The main person who was responsible for developing

00:41:48 ►

and maturing this philosophy was Nagarjuna, and he lived about 200 AD. One of the most

00:41:59 ►

astonishing minds that the human race has ever produced. And the name of Nagarjuna’s school of thought is Madhyamika, which means really the doctrine of the middle way. sunyavada from the basic word sunya

00:42:26 ►

or sometimes

00:42:27 ►

sunya has

00:42:28 ►

ta

00:42:29 ►

added on the end

00:42:30 ►

and that ta

00:42:32 ►

means

00:42:33 ►

ness

00:42:33 ►

emptiness

00:42:34 ►

well then

00:42:37 ►

emptiness

00:42:39 ►

means

00:42:40 ►

essentially

00:42:41 ►

transience

00:42:42 ►

that’s the first thing it means

00:42:44 ►

nothing to grasp

00:42:45 ►

nothing permanent

00:42:47 ►

nothing to hold on to

00:42:48 ►

but it means this

00:42:50 ►

with special reference to

00:42:53 ►

ideas of reality

00:42:56 ►

ideas of God

00:42:59 ►

ideas of the self

00:43:01 ►

the Brahman

00:43:03 ►

anything you like.

00:43:07 ►

What it means is that reality escapes all concepts.

00:43:16 ►

If you say there is a God, that’s a concept.

00:43:21 ►

If you say there is no God, that’s a concept.

00:43:20 ►

That’s a concept.

00:43:24 ►

If you say there is no God, that’s a concept.

00:43:38 ►

And Nagarjuna is saying that always your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve.

00:43:42 ►

Or wrap it up in a parcel. So he invented a method of teaching Buddhism,

00:43:49 ►

which was an extension of the dialectic method that the Buddha himself first used.

00:43:55 ►

And this became the great way of studying,

00:44:00 ►

especially at the University of Nalanda,

00:44:04 ►

which has been re-established in modern times, but of course it was destroyed by the Muslims when they invaded India.

00:44:11 ►

The University of Nalanda, where the dialectic method of enlightenment was taught.

00:44:19 ►

The dialectic method is perfectly simple.

00:44:22 ►

The dialectic method is perfectly simple.

00:44:30 ►

It can be done with an individual student and a teacher, or with a group of students and a teacher.

00:44:38 ►

And you would be amazed how effective it is when it involves precious little more than discussion.

00:44:53 ►

Some of you, no doubt, have attended tea groups, blab labs, in which people are there, and they don’t know quite discussion of the group, say,

00:45:05 ►

and then the group kind of goes into the question of why he’s trying to dominate it,

00:45:11 ►

and so on and so forth.

00:45:12 ►

Well, these were the original Blab Labs.

00:45:17 ►

And they have been repeated in modern times with the most startling effects.

00:45:22 ►

That is to say,

00:45:29 ►

most startling effects that is to say the teacher gradually elicits from his participant students what are their basic premises of life what is your

00:45:37 ►

metaphysic in the sense I’m not using metaphysic in a kind of a spiritual

00:45:43 ►

sense but what are your basic assumptions?

00:45:47 ►

What real ideas do you operate on as to what is right and what is wrong,

00:45:51 ►

what is the good life and what is not?

00:45:56 ►

What arguments are you going to argue strongest?

00:46:01 ►

Where do you take your stand?

00:46:03 ►

The teacher soon finds this out for each individual

00:46:06 ►

concerned and then he demolishes it he absolutely takes away that person’s

00:46:14 ►

compass and so they start getting very frightened and say to the teacher all

00:46:22 ►

right I see now of course I can’t depend on this,

00:46:26 ►

but what should I depend on?

00:46:28 ►

And unfortunately, the teacher doesn’t offer any alternative suggestions,

00:46:33 ►

but simply goes on to examine the question,

00:46:35 ►

why do you think you have to have something to depend on?

00:46:41 ►

Now, this is kept up over quite a period,

00:46:48 ►

and the only thing that keeps the students from going insane is the presence of a teacher

00:46:50 ►

who seems to be perfectly happy

00:46:53 ►

but is not proposing any ideas

00:46:56 ►

he’s only demolishing them

00:46:58 ►

so we get finally, not quite finally

00:47:03 ►

to the void, the shunya.

00:47:08 ►

And what then?

00:47:13 ►

When you get to the void, there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief.

00:47:22 ►

That’s n Nirvana. Phew! As I gave a proper English translation of Nirvana.

00:47:32 ►

Ah! Great. So they are liberated, and yet they can’t quite say why or what it is that they found out so they call it the void

00:47:49 ►

but Nagarjuna went on to say you mustn’t cling to the void you have to void the void and so the void of non-void

00:48:06 ►

is the great

00:48:09 ►

state as it were

00:48:12 ►

of Nagarjuna’s Buddhism

00:48:14 ►

but you must remember

00:48:18 ►

that all that has been voided

00:48:21 ►

all that has been denied

00:48:23 ►

are those concepts in which one has

00:48:30 ►

hitherto attempted to pin down what is real.

00:48:35 ►

In Zen Buddhist texts they say, you cannot nail a peg into the sky.

00:48:51 ►

into the sky and so to be a man of the sky a man of the void is also called a man not depending on anything and when you’re not hung on anything you are the

00:48:58 ►

only thing that isn’t hung on anything which is the universe which doesn’t hang you see where would it hang

00:49:08 ►

it has no no place to fall on even though it may be dropping there will

00:49:16 ►

never be the crash of it landing on concrete floor somewhere but the reason for that is that it won’t crash below because it doesn’t hang above and so there

00:49:30 ►

is a poem in Chinese which speaks of such a person as having above not a tile to cover the head below

00:49:38 ►

not an inch of ground on which to stand and you see this which to people like us who are accustomed to

00:49:49 ►

rich imageries of the divine the loving Father in heaven who has laid down the

00:49:57 ►

eternal laws a word of God incarnate O wisdom from above O truth unchanged, unchanging

00:50:07 ►

O light of life and love

00:50:10 ►

the wisdom which from the hallowed page

00:50:13 ►

a lantern for our footsteps

00:50:15 ►

shines out from age to age

00:50:17 ►

see, so that’s very nice

00:50:19 ►

we feel we know where we are

00:50:22 ►

and that it’s all been written down,

00:50:26 ►

and that in heaven the Lord God is resplendent with glory,

00:50:29 ►

with all the colors of the rainbow,

00:50:31 ►

with all the saints and angels around and everything like that.

00:50:35 ►

So we feel that it’s positive,

00:50:38 ►

that we’ve got a real rip-roaring gutsy religion

00:50:42 ►

full of color and so on.

00:50:47 ►

But it doesn’t work that way roaring gutsy religion were full of color and so on but it doesn’t work that way

00:50:59 ►

the more clear your image of God the less it is, because you’re clinging to it.

00:51:10 ►

The more it’s an idol.

00:51:14 ►

But voiding it completely isn’t going to turn it into what you think of as void.

00:51:23 ►

What would you think of as void?

00:51:31 ►

what you think of as void what would you think of as void being lost in a fog so that it’s white all around and you can’t see in any direction being in the

00:51:36 ►

darkness or the color of your head is perceived by your eyes that’s probably

00:51:42 ►

the best illustration that we would think of as the void.

00:51:48 ►

Because it isn’t black and it isn’t white,

00:51:49 ►

it isn’t anything.

00:51:54 ►

But that’s still not the void.

00:52:00 ►

Take the lesson from the head.

00:52:03 ►

How does your head look to your eyes?

00:52:08 ►

Well, I tell you,

00:52:10 ►

it looks like what you see out in front of you.

00:52:14 ►

Because all that you see out in front of you

00:52:16 ►

is how you feel inside your head.

00:52:21 ►

So it’s the same with this.

00:52:24 ►

And so, for this reason, the great sixth patriarch, Hui Nung in China, said that it was a great mistake for those who were practicing to have no thoughts whatever in their minds.

00:52:47 ►

Not only no thoughts but no sense experiences. So they’d close their eyes,

00:52:52 ►

they’d plug up their ears and generally go in for sensory deprivation. Well

00:52:59 ►

sensory deprivation if you know how to handle it can be quite interesting.

00:53:06 ►

It’ll have the same sort of results as taking LSD or something like that.

00:53:13 ►

And there are special labs made nowadays where you can be sensorily deprived to an amazing

00:53:18 ►

degree.

00:53:20 ►

But if you’re a sort of a good yogi, this doesn’t bother you at all, sends some people crazy.

00:53:27 ►

But if you dig this world, you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene.

00:53:34 ►

Also, especially, if they get you into a condition of weightlessness.

00:53:40 ►

Skin divers going down below a certain number of feet

00:53:45 ►

I don’t know exactly how far it is

00:53:46 ►

but get a sense of weightlessness

00:53:48 ►

and at the same time this deprives them of every sense of responsibility

00:53:53 ►

they become alarmingly happy

00:53:56 ►

and they have been known to simply take off their masks

00:54:00 ►

and offer them to a fish

00:54:01 ►

and of course they then drown. So if you skin dive and you

00:54:08 ►

have to keep your eye on the time, you have to have a water watch or a friend who’s got

00:54:14 ►

a string attached to you if you go down that far, and at a certain specific time you know

00:54:18 ►

you have got to get back, however happy you feel and however much inclined to say survival survival what the hell’s the point of that

00:54:29 ►

and this is happening to the men who go out into space

00:54:33 ►

they will increasingly find that they have to have automatic controls to bring them back

00:54:42 ►

quite aside that they can’t change in any way

00:54:46 ►

from the spaceship.

00:54:49 ►

Now, isn’t that interesting?

00:54:52 ►

Can you become weightless here?

00:54:56 ►

I said a little while ago

00:54:57 ►

that the person who really accepts transience

00:55:00 ►

begins to feel weightless.

00:55:04 ►

When Suzuki was asked, what is it like to have experienced

00:55:07 ►

satori enlightenment he said it’s just like ordinary everyday experience but about two

00:55:12 ►

inches off the ground juangca the taoist said it is easy enough to stand still the difficulty

00:55:21 ►

is to walk without touching the ground why do you feel so heavy?

00:55:28 ►

it isn’t just a matter of gravitation and weight

00:55:31 ►

it is that you feel that you are carrying your body around

00:55:35 ►

so there is a koan in Zen Buddhism

00:55:39 ►

who is it that carries this corpse around?

00:55:49 ►

so when you feel it we common speech expresses this all the time life is a drag I feel I’m just dragging

00:55:55 ►

myself around my body is a burden to me to whom to? that’s the question you see?

00:56:06 ►

and when there is nobody left

00:56:08 ►

for whom the body can be a burden

00:56:09 ►

the body isn’t a burden

00:56:10 ►

but so long as you fight it

00:56:14 ►

it is

00:56:15 ►

so then when

00:56:21 ►

there is nobody

00:56:23 ►

left to resist the thing that we call change, which is simply another word for life,

00:56:35 ►

and when we dispel the illusion that we think our thoughts instead of being just a stream of thoughts,

00:56:47 ►

think our thoughts instead of being just a stream of thoughts and that we feel our feelings

00:56:55 ►

instead of being just feelings. It’s like saying, you know, to feel the feelings is

00:57:02 ►

a redundant expression. It’s like saying, actually I hear sounds. For there are no sounds which are not heard.

00:57:08 ►

Hearing is sound.

00:57:10 ►

Seeing is sight.

00:57:12 ►

You don’t see sights.

00:57:14 ►

Sightseeing is a ridiculous word.

00:57:17 ►

You could just say either sighting or seeing, one or the other, but sightseeing is nonsense.

00:57:23 ►

or seeing one or the other, but sightseeing is nonsense.

00:57:29 ►

So we keep doubling our words,

00:57:35 ►

and this doubling is comparable to oscillation.

00:57:41 ►

In an electrical system, where there’s too much feedback,

00:57:44 ►

where you remember in the old-fashioned telephone where the

00:57:45 ►

receiver was separate from this from the mouthpiece the transmitter if you wanted

00:57:52 ►

to annoy someone who was abusing you on the telephone you could make them listen

00:57:56 ►

to themselves by putting the receiver to the mouthpiece but it actually didn’t

00:58:00 ►

have that effect it set up oscillation. It started to howl.

00:58:05 ►

It could be very, very hard on the ears.

00:58:10 ►

The same way if you turn a television camera at the monitor,

00:58:15 ►

that is to say the television set in the studio,

00:58:18 ►

the whole thing will start to jiggle.

00:58:21 ►

The visual picture will be of oscillation.

00:58:24 ►

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da will be of oscillation like that and the same

00:58:29 ►

thing happens here when you get to think that you think your thoughts the you

00:58:40 ►

standing aside the thoughts has the same sort of consequence as seeing double

00:58:50 ►

and then you think can i observe the thinker thinking the thoughts

00:58:58 ►

or i am worried

00:59:09 ►

I am worried and I ought not to worry but because I can’t stop worrying I’m worried because I worry and you see where that could lead to it leads to

00:59:15 ►

exactly the same situation that happens in the, and that is what we call anxiety, trembling.

00:59:27 ►

But this discipline that we’re talking about of Nagarjuna’s

00:59:31 ►

abolishes anxiety,

00:59:37 ►

because you discover that no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen.

00:59:48 ►

of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen in other words from the first standpoint the worst is going to happen you’re all going

00:59:53 ►

to die and don’t just put it off in the back of your mind and say I’ll consider that later.

01:00:07 ►

It’s the most important thing to consider now.

01:00:11 ►

Because it enables you.

01:00:12 ►

It is the mercy of nature.

01:00:16 ►

Because it’s going to enable you to let go and not defend yourself all the time.

01:00:21 ►

Waste all the energies in self-defense.

01:00:25 ►

So, this doctrine of the void

01:00:29 ►

is really the basis of the whole Mahayana movement in Buddhism.

01:00:39 ►

It’s marvelous.

01:00:40 ►

The void, of course, is in Buddhist imagery symbolized by a mirror,

01:00:46 ►

because a mirror has no color, and yet reflects all colors.

01:00:53 ►

When this man I talked to you of, Huay Nang, said that you shouldn’t just try to cultivate a blank mind,

01:01:03 ►

what he said was this.

01:01:13 ►

to cultivate a blank mind what he said was this the void shunyata is like space now space contains everything the mountains the oceans the stars the good

01:01:21 ►

people and the bad people the plants, the animals, everything now the mind in us

01:01:29 ►

the true mind is like that

01:01:33 ►

you will find that

01:01:37 ►

when Buddhists use the word mind

01:01:40 ►

they have several words for mind

01:01:43 ►

but I’m not going into the technicality at the moment they mean space see space is your mind it’s very

01:01:56 ►

difficult for us to see that because we think we’re in space and look out at it. There are various kinds of space.

01:02:06 ►

There’s visual space, distance.

01:02:11 ►

There is audible space, silence.

01:02:16 ►

There is temporal space, as we say, between times.

01:02:21 ►

There is musical space,

01:02:24 ►

so-called distance between intervals or the intervals musical space, so-called distance

01:02:26 ►

between intervals, or

01:02:27 ►

the intervals between tones, rather.

01:02:31 ►

It’s quite a

01:02:32 ►

different kind of space than

01:02:33 ►

temporal or

01:02:35 ►

visual space.

01:02:37 ►

There’s tangible space.

01:02:41 ►

But all these spaces,

01:02:43 ►

you see, are the mind

01:02:45 ►

they are the dimensions of consciousness

01:02:51 ►

and so

01:02:54 ►

this great space

01:02:56 ►

which every one of us apprehends

01:02:59 ►

from a slightly different point of view

01:03:00 ►

in which the universe moves

01:03:02 ►

this is the mind so it’s represented by a mirror because

01:03:14 ►

although the mirror has no color it is for that reason able to receive all the different colors. Meister Eckhart said, in order to see color, my eye

01:03:27 ►

has to be free from color. So in the same way, in order not only to see, but also to

01:03:39 ►

hear, to think, to feel, you have to have an empty head.

01:03:50 ►

And the reason why you are not aware of your brain cells,

01:03:56 ►

unless you’re only aware of your brain cells if you get a tumor or something in the brain,

01:03:58 ►

when it gets sick.

01:04:02 ►

But in the ordinary way, you’re totally unconscious of your brain cells.

01:04:03 ►

They’re void. and for that reason

01:04:06 ►

you see everything else so that’s the central principle of the Mahayana and it

01:04:22 ►

works in such a way you see that it releases people from the notion that

01:04:28 ►

Buddhism is clinging to the void this was very important when Buddhism went

01:04:35 ►

into China the Chinese really dug this because Chinese are a very practical people. And when they found these Hindu Buddhist monks

01:04:49 ►

trying to empty their minds and to sit perfectly still

01:04:52 ►

and not to engage in any family activities,

01:04:56 ►

they were celibates,

01:04:58 ►

Chinese thought they were crazy.

01:05:01 ►

Why do that?

01:05:04 ►

And so the Chinese reformed Buddhism and they allowed Buddhist priests to marry.

01:05:12 ►

And in fact what they especially enjoyed was a sutra that came from India in which a layman,

01:05:20 ►

who was a wealthy merchant called Vimalakirti, out-argued all the other disciples of Buddha.

01:05:29 ►

And of course you know,

01:05:30 ►

these are these dialectic arguments

01:05:32 ►

that are very, very intense things.

01:05:34 ►

If you win the argument,

01:05:36 ►

everybody else has to be your disciple.

01:05:41 ►

So Vimalakirti, the layman,

01:05:44 ►

won the debate

01:05:45 ►

even with Manjushri

01:05:47 ►

who is the Bodhisattva of supreme wisdom

01:05:50 ►

they all had you see a contest

01:05:55 ►

to define the void

01:05:56 ►

and all of them

01:05:59 ►

gave their definitions

01:06:00 ►

finally Manjushri gave his

01:06:03 ►

and Vimalakirti was asked then for his definition

01:06:06 ►

and he said nothing. And so he won the whole argument. The thunder of silence.

01:06:17 ►

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a

01:06:23 ►

time. I have a feeling that you joined in the laughter when Watts told the story about the church warden

01:06:30 ►

who thought that talking about eternal bliss was depressing.

01:06:34 ►

And while I did smile to myself when he said that, it was for a different reason.

01:06:39 ►

I think that I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my top 10 all-time over-the-top psychedelic experiences,

01:06:45 ►

I entered a state that I can only describe as pure bliss.

01:06:49 ►

But what happened after a while still amazes me.

01:06:53 ►

You see, as the experience went on, I began to realize that pure bliss can get really boring.

01:07:00 ►

I don’t know how long I was totally blissed out, but it must have been at least 15 minutes.

01:07:06 ►

And I have to admit, I was very happy when I began finally coming back down,

01:07:10 ►

and the bliss began to dissolve.

01:07:13 ►

So be careful about what you wish for. You might get it.

01:07:17 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:07:21 ►

Be well, my friends. you

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