Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
Alan Watts (Chillstep) Mix pt4 by QMA Music
Lyrics/Transcript:
Supposing that I say to you, each one of you is really the Great Self? The Brahma.
And you say, “Well, all I can say up until now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually, but I don’t really feel it. What must I do to feel it really?
My answer to you is this.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
You ask me this question because you don’t want to feel it really. You’re frightened of it.
Therefore what you’re going to do, is that you’re going to get a method of practice so that you can put it off, so that I can say, well I can be a long time on the way getting this thing.
And then maybe I’ll be worthy of it, after I have suffered enough.
See, because we are brought up in a social scheme whereby we have to deserve what we get. And the price one pays for all good things is suffering. But all of that is precisely postponement because one is afraid here and now to see it.
If you have the nerve, you know, real nerve, you would see it right away.
Only that would be—one would say, oh, you shouldn’t have nerve like that. That would be awful. That wouldn’t do at all, because after all I’m supposed to be poor little me. And I’m not really much of a muchness, and I’m playing the role of poor little me, and therefore in order to be something great, like a Buddha, or a Jivanmukta, one liberated in this life, I ought to suffer for it.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
So you can suffer for it.
There are all kinds of ways invented in order for you to do this. You can discipline yourself and you can gain control of your mind and you can do all sorts of extraordinary things, you can drink water through your rectum.
You can do the most fantastic things, but that’s just like being able to run the 100 yards in 9 seconds, or push a peanut up Mount Tamalpais with your nose, or any other kind of accomplishment you would like to engage in. It has absolutely nothing to do with the realization of your Self.
The realization of the Self, fundamentally depends on coming off it.
You know how when people put on some kind of you act, we say, “Oh…come off it.” So who can come off it, they laugh and finally realize that they were making fools of themselves. And then they laugh at themselves and they come off it. So in exactly the same way, the teacher, the Guru, is trying to make you come off it.
If he finds you can’t come off it, he’s going to put you through all these exercises so that the last time, when you have gotten enough disappointment, enough suffering, enough frustration, you’ll give it all up. You’ll realize you were there from the beginning and that there was nothing to realize.
But the guru is very clever, he says alright, if this is the way you have to go, this is the way you have to go—you asked for it. You came to me, I didn’t invite you, you see. You came to me and said I want to learn yoga.
Well he said, “yoga is union.” You’re tatvamasi. You are that.
You say, sorry I don’t understand that, I only get it intellectually, I can’t feel it.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
Oh…he says, you’re one of those…
So I see! I’ve got to satisfy you, the customer is always right! I got to give you all this work to do because you can’t see directly that this is so. But he’s looking at you in a funny way, you see. He’s always saying what are you doing, what’s your game?
Imagine a Father confessor and you feel terribly guilty that you’ve committed robberies and adulteries and fornications and all kinds of arson and injury to people and financial shenanigans and you go to this man and say I am a terrible sinner.
He says, *sigh* really?
I have murdered somebody.
He says, how many times?
You think, oh good Lord, this man doesn’t realize how awful I am. And you recite all these things, he’s perfectly calm and then you say to him you don’t seem to be very sharp.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
He says you haven’t confessed any serious sins.
What do you mean by some serious sins?
He said, well, what do you think?
Well I don’t know, I just feel wrong. I feel that something in the basis of me that tells me I’m not what I ought to be.
Could it be that I’m spiritually proud, that I’m egocentric.
No this is very usual, this is quite ordinary sin.
He says, but you are guilty of something. Really terrible.
Now what could that be?
He says, come one, come one…
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
Go deeper, what is the real sin? You think, what, me? I little me, could do something worse than murder, worse than spiritual pride? This little me?
I’m a reasonably well-intentioned person. What could that be?
He looks at you in a funny way.
He says you know. Kind of a Kafka-esque situation.
You’re accused of a crime that’s not specified and yet the accuser says you jolly well know what you’ve done, but you can’t mention it.
It’s like those laws that are on the books around the State of California and a lot of states where people are accused of the abominable crime against nature and nobody knows—it can’t be mentioned, it’s too dreadful to be talked about. This guy is doing the same thing, and it’s in a different dimension.
You’ve done it.
What did you do?
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
The real crime is that you won’t admit that you’re God.
That’s false…
So the guru challenges you, you see.
If you raise it… he doesn’t go out in the streets and says come on everybody, you ought to be converted. He sits under a tree and waits. And people start coming around and they offer him propositions.
He answers back.
And he challenges you. In any way that he thinks is appropriate to your situation.
If you’ve got a thin shell, and your mask is easily dispatched with, he simply uses what we might call an easy method.
Listen Shiva, come off it. Don’t pretend you’re this guy here, I know who you are.
And the guy sort of twinkles a bit and says, well I guess you’re right.
But there aren’t people like that, who have very thick shells and so he has to invest ways of cracking them.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
So here’s how it goes…
The problem is that we have one-sided minds and we notice the wave of life when it’s at its peak or crest, we don’t notice it when it’s at the trough, not in the ordinary way. It’s the peaks that count, take a buzz-saw, what seems important to us is the tips of the teeth. They seem to do the cutting, not the valleys between the teeth, but see you couldn’t have tips of teeth without valleys between them. Therefore the saw wouldn’t cut, without both tips and V-shaped valleys.
Valleys point down, mountains point up, and we prefer things that point up because up is good and down is bad, but seriously, we don’t praise the peaks for being high and the valleys for being low.
But it is so, you see, that we ignore the valley aspect of things, and all wisdom begins by emphasizing the valley aspect as distinct from the peak aspect. We pay plenty of attention to the peak aspect. That’s what kept our attention, but we somehow screen out the valley aspect. It makes us feel very uncomfortable. It seems that we get pleasure from looking at the peaks, but actually this denies our pleasure.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
Because secretly, we know that every peak is followed by a valley.
The valley of the shadow of death and we are always afraid because we are not used to looking at valleys, because we are not used to living with them. They represent to us a strange and threatening unknown, maybe we are afraid the principle of the valley will conquer and the peaks will be overwhelmed. Maybe death is stronger than life because life always seems to require an effort. Death is something into which you slide effortlessly.
Maybe nothing will overcome something in the end. Wouldn’t that be awful, so you resist change ignorant of the fact, that change is life and that nothing is invariably the obverse face of something.
Most people are afraid of space.
They ignore it and they think that space is nothing. Space and Solid are two ways of talking about the same thing. Space-Solid. You don’t find space without solids, you don’t find solids without space. If I say there’s a universe where there isn’t anything but space, you’re almost to say space between what?
Space is relationship and it always goes together with solid like back goes with front. But the divisive mind ignores space. And it thinks it’s the solids that do the whole job. That they’re the only thing that’s real.
Alan Watts Chillstep Mix 4
That’s to put it in words, that conscious attention ignores intervals because it thinks that they’re unimportant.
Consider music: when you hear music, what you really hear when you hear melody is the interval between one tone and the other. The steps, as it were, on the scale. It’s the interval that’s the important thing. So in the same way, in the interval between this year’s leaves, last year’s leaves, this generation of people, and that generation.
The interval is just as important in some ways more important than what it’s between—actually, they go together. I say the interval sometimes the interval is more important because we underemphasize it, so I’m going to say overemphasize it as a correction.
So space night death darkness not being there is an essential component of being there. You don’t have the one without the other, just as your buzz saw has no teeth without having valleys between the tips of them. That’s the way Being is made up.
