Dhyana or Zen, because ordinarily when we use the word meditate in English, we mean to muse, to ponder, to think deeply about, whereas the word dhyana in Sanskrit doesn't mean thinking in any way, rather it means not thinking. Because you see, if I were to talk all the time, I wouldn't hear what you have to say. And similarly, if I think all the time, that is to say, if I talk to myself inside my head, which is what I mean specifically by thinking, then I don't have anything to think about

[01:14]

except thoughts. And I never get into touch with reality. And this is the sickness of every high civilization, that we have the capacity for thought, and that is too much of a good thing. Even the most unintellectual person, once he has learned to speak, chatters to himself incessantly, and therefore begins to confuse the world of thought, the world of speech, on the one hand, with the world of reality on the other. He comes to be hypnotized into the belief that the way the world is described is the way the world is. And it ain't necessarily so, in fact it ain't so at all, because thoughts, words, are strung

[02:22]

out in a line. And we say you could think only of one thing at a time, whereas in fact the world does not exist in a one thing at a time fashion. It exists altogether everywhere at once. And so if we try to understand life by translating it into thought, we run into very strange problems. It makes it appear that nature itself, reality itself, is exceedingly complicated. Now reality is not complicated. Reality is perfectly neither complicated nor simple. But when you try to translate what is going on into words, ideas, concepts, numbers, you create complication. Why?

[03:25]

Let me give examples. The average person cannot think of more than four processes or variables at once without using a pencil. The maximum performance usually is playing an organ, where you use two hands on two or three keyboards, and you use your feet as well, and you can keep a different rhythm with each hand and with each foot. And that's pretty tricky. You know, it's like patting your head and circling your stomach at the same time, you see. And a lot of people find that quite difficult. Now then, a physicist can consider nuclear problems where there are millions of variables involved, but he handles it by a statistical method.

[04:27]

But neither of these two methods, either with the pencil or with the statistics, will handle the practical problems of human life, in which we might say there are 150,000 variables. And so, in trying to deal with the practical problems of life by thought, we are always confused. And we make decisions mostly upon hunch, fortunately for us. Now, the brain is brighter than the mind. When I say the word mind, I mean quite specifically the order of words intellect, logic, mathematics. Brain is something else. We don't know what brain is. The science of neurology has not yet really figured out the brain, which only goes to

[05:32]

say that the brain is smarter than the science. But if I use the word brain, you might think that I was simply reducing the human being to a physical complex. You know, a lot of frothy stuff inside the skull. But that's only an idea, you see. When we ask what is the real world, we cannot say what it is. We attempt to. Some people say, well, the real world is simply matter. But that notion that the real world is simply matter is itself an idea. It is a concept. Other people say that the real world is spirit or mind. And that also is a concept, a formulation of words.

[06:35]

The real world is not matter. The real world is not mind. It is. And we cannot say what that is. If you say it's a clap, the sound clap is different from the sound so is not clap. The sound clap represents this, but is not it. So we can never say what the real world is. It is therefore what the mystics call ineffable, unutterable, or as our fellow Chicagoan Count Korzybski put it, unspeakable. He was, you know, the founder of the science of general semantics. And he used the slogan, always remember that the map is not the territory.

[07:38]

But you see, all civilized people confuse the map with the territory, the money with the wealth, and the menu with the dinner, and are therefore in trouble. Because you cannot efficiently deal with the territory if you confuse it with the map. And that's why we are in trouble with our technology. That is why we are destroying our environment, fouling our nest, making a total mess of things. Because we are in pursuit of goals in life which have only an abstract existence and which simply cannot be realized concretely. The American people are particularly guilty of this.

[08:50]

Everybody else is doing it too, but we do it in an exaggerated way. People call us and we call ourselves materialists, and we are not materialists in any sense whatsoever. If by a materialist you mean a person who loves material, we certainly don't. Look out of the window. Does what you see around you look as if it were made by people who love material? Compare a country village in France with what you see outside. And nobody loves it, they hate it, and are dedicated to abolishing material, getting

[09:51]

rid of what we call the limitations of time and space, so that everywhere in the world becomes the same place. The Hilton Hotel is the same in Tokyo as it is in Chicago. It's all plastic and utterly boring. Even people are going to be made of plastic. You're going to have plastic hearts and plastic lungs and all sorts of things put into you, and you're just going to turn into a reproduction. You know, I sometimes illustrate points by funny stories which are not to be taken too seriously, but they're what Marshall McLuhan calls probes. When you read Marshall McLuhan, you must understand that he's not always being serious. He's being sincere, but not necessarily serious.

[10:55]

And he puts out all sorts of ideas just to make you think, just to unsettle you, to disturb you. And I have one that goes like this, that in ancient times, kings who wanted to marry a princess from a foreign country in order to form a dynastic alliance would have her portrait made and sent to him to see if he approved of her look. But occasionally the artist cheated and made the lady out to be more beautiful than she actually was, as happened in the case of Henry VIII of England and Anne of Cleves. She was a homely broad, and when he found her, he was disgusted, immediately got rid of her. So they said, we've got to have a more honest procedure than painting people to know what they really look like. So we invented photography. But then they said, well, that's all very well, but it isn't colored. So they colored it.

[11:56]

But then they said, a person is not just a still, a cross-section. A person's character is revealed in their movements. So we made movies. And then they said, well, that's all right, but the movie doesn't talk. So we made it talk. And then they said, yeah, but it's awfully inconvenient every time you want to see one of these things. They have to go to a special theater downtown. So they made television. But then they said, television looks like the photographs in French newspapers, as if they were all made on bread. Let's brighten it up. So they did. And then they made it colored. And then they said, now, that's all very well as a reproduction, but it's all behind a glass screen. So why not see it in the round?

[12:58]

They said, we'll do that. We've got a technique we can use with laser beams, so that we can produce a television image inside a plastic cube. So we walk all the way around it. Said, crazy, look at that. But then somebody said, but no, I'm not satisfied with this reproduction. You can't touch it. We can arrange that. We're going to use an electronic technique for solidifying air and color in such a way that you can actually go up and touch the person appears on the stage. Well, then they said, but that's all very well, but the person doesn't notice I'm there. Well, they said, we can arrange that. It's quite simple. All we have to do is to have a TV camera in your home, which photographs your approach to the image. And then a computer figures out what would be appropriate response to your approach.

[14:03]

Wow. And somebody said, isn't that what we had in the first place? See, here's the whole problem. The cortex is an echo chamber. So that you know that you know, just as a guitar has a sounding box on it, you see, which is an echo chamber for the playing of the strings, which brings out in a fuller way the sound of the strings. And so the cortex is an echo chamber for what's going on in the more primitive thalamic regions of the brain. But when you get echoes going, you've got to be careful because you can get that kind of echo that is, bah, [...] and confuses you.

[15:10]

It's like when you're listening to your own voice on an electronic system and you hear it back on the speaker shortly after you've spoken. And you listen to your own voice and you wait for it to go on. And, but you, you're responsible for it, you know, and you get confused. And everybody is confused by feedback, by thinking about what is done, representing what has happening in terms of words. And the words aren't really, they're very, very crude representations of what is happening because they're linear and what is happening is not. And so we imagine, for example, realities that simply don't exist. There is no past and equally there is no future, there's only now.

[16:18]

But we, many of us live for the past and the future and don't live now at all because we think of now as an infinitesimal dividing line through which the future changes into the past. Look at your clock. The minute is represented by a hairline which is as narrow as is consistent with visibility. And because of the clock we come to think of now as simply gone. And so we say, but I don't have any time. Of course you don't have any time, because there is no time. Time is an abstraction. There is such a thing as rhythm, but that is quite different from time. Time is merely a way of measuring energy, just as money is a way of measuring wealth

[17:26]

and just as inches are a way of measuring space. But you can't eat an inch, you can't see a minute, you can't even feel a minute. It doesn't exist, it's an idea in the same sense that the equator is an idea. You will never be able to tie up a package with it. It's an imaginary line, but useful for purposes of navigation. Don't be taken in by it. So in the same way, don't be taken in by time. We believe that there is a future and that's what's important. We say anything that we think is a failure, it has no future. Something must have a future. Everything must have a future to be any good, but the main thing is that it have a present. Because I'm not talking in an anti-intellectual spirit, because I am an intellectual.

[18:37]

I use words and writing and ideas to make my living and I'm some kind of a amateur scholar. But the point is that there is no advantage whatsoever in life, in making plans for any future, unless you can live in the present. Because when your plans mature, if you can't live in the present, you won't be able to enjoy their maturation. It'll all be in vain. You'll be endlessly chasing phantoms and ghosts. So we need a way of getting free of mental ghosts and of coming to reality. And that is the process of meditation. When the Hindus say that the universe is an illusion, the world is an illusion, which

[19:45]

they call maya, what they mean is that our conception of the world is an illusion. Because the highest state of consciousness developed through yoga is called nirvikalpa samadhi. And nirvikalpa means free from concepts, so that you experience the world directly as is. But you don't define that experience. You don't put any words on it, any names, any identification. You just experience it directly, like that. So don't think that when a Buddhist gets into the state of nirvana, that he has a blank mind, or that he enters into a state of consciousness which is like an infinite sea of vaguely mowed

[20:53]

transparent jello, or sees a very bright light. All that's irrelevant. Nirvana, liberation, actually nirvana means blow out, the outbreath, and we're going to see why that's important in a practical way. But it means, you know, becoming free from ideas, opinions, doctrine. To give a very practical illustration of this, we are now fighting a war in Vietnam on an entirely doctrinal basis, because we are against the ideology of communism. And we are therefore totally destroying the territory of Vietnam. It will be an absolute waste by the time everything is through.

[21:56]

It would have been a good idea, from a very practical viewpoint, to fight a war in Vietnam in order to take possession of the territory, and carry off their beautiful women and bring them back to the United States. That would, we would say, you know, have been a kind of worldly motivation, but it would be a very sane one. As it is, because we have a purely spiritual motivation, we are creating a bigger disaster than if we had a merely material motivation. So always watch out for people who are too spiritual. They are the real villains. Fortunately for us, our so-called communist enemies do not believe in a life after death.

[23:00]

And therefore, will be very reluctant to explode bombs that will destroy the whole planet. We, on the other hand, might be persuaded that we can sit around in heaven before the throne of God. We will be on the right hand of God, and those wretched communists will be on the left. We'll wag our fingers at them and say, we told you so, and then they'll be kicked over into hell. You see, too much belief in spirituality can be destructive to life, because it is confusing the sign, the symbol, the word, with what it represents. Now a lot of people get frustrated because they say, my life has no meaning. Why should your life have any meaning? What is the meaning of a cloud? What is the meaning of flowing water?

[24:06]

What is the meaning of the stars? Only words have meaning, because they represent something other than themselves. That is to say, they mean something else. But a star doesn't have to mean anything. When a bird sings, it doesn't have to mean something. It's just, dig that sound, baby, that's what it's all about. So with other people, when you relate to other people, they have to mean something, to represent something beyond themselves. That's it. It's that beautiful person. So when you ask life to have a meaning, you are turning life into literature, into a system of signs. Even Goethe made this mistake, all that is mortal is but a symbol.

[25:07]

It isn't. It's where it's at. And it's always here, and always now. Every memory is a present experience. Every expectation is a present experience. And so therefore, the function of the discipline of meditation, which we call a discipline, is not like other disciplines, because most disciplines have a future objective. You practice the piano, say, in order to get ready for a concert. Practice dancing in order to get ready for a performance on the stage. But you don't do that with meditation. Meditation has no objective whatsoever. It is complete centering in the present.

[26:11]

So it's so unlike other things. You cannot do it because it's good for you. Because the moment you do it with that sort of feeling, that I'm doing this, that is practice, that I will make progress in the spiritual life and improve myself in some way, you are not practicing meditation. Practice is a difficult word, but I would use it in the sense, not practice to make perfect, but when I say to someone, do you practice medicine, he says, yes, I'm a doctor. That means he does it every day, that's his way of life. But it isn't done, as it were, with a design on the future. So, I'm in the odd position of talking to you and explaining to you something, and even charging admission for something which you must understand is of no use to you.

[27:21]

So that you may be liberated from a style of life in which you always have to ask of everything, is it of use? What can I get out of it? Because when you ask, what can I get out of life, you separate yourself from life. And so become dead. You become a concept, you become an idea. And to identify yourself with the idea of yourself, you see, is to be confused with your ego, because your ego is your idea of yourself. It's what everybody has told you you are, from childhood on, you aren't that. So, being confused with our idea of ourselves, we have an impoverished existence. What you really are, your living organism, is continuous with and identical with the

[28:27]

entire energy of the universe. But each organism is particularized in a special way. It's the whole universe playing at this here and now expression. That's what you are. And it's like every other form of energy, now you see it, now you don't. It will be born and it dies, it appears and it disappears, again and [...] again. It's always you. And if you realize that, you're not hung up. Or as Buddhists would say, you're not under the spell of attachment. Now a lot of people accuse me of inventing my own idea of Oriental doctrines, such as Buddhism, and saying that, well, this is Alan Watts' version, and he's not really

[29:36]

very reliable, but he's not a very sound scholar. But I have here with me a little book called Meditation in Action, by Chögyam Trungpa, who's a Tibetan Lama. Chögyam Trungpa says, in our kind of Buddhist meditation there is no belief in higher and lower. The idea of different levels, or of being in an underdeveloped state, does not arise. One does not feel inferior. And what one is trying to achieve is not something higher than oneself. Therefore, the practice of meditation does not require an inward concentration on the heart. There is no centralizing concept at all. Even such practices concentrating on the chakras, as is done in certain forms of yoga, or psychic centers of the body, are approached in a different way.

[30:36]

Although in certain teachings of Buddhism the concept of chakras is mentioned, the practice is connected with them, are not based on the development of an inward center. So this basic form of meditation is concerned with trying to see what is. There are many variations on this form of meditation, but they are generally based on various techniques for opening oneself. The achievement of this kind of meditation is not, therefore, the result of some long-term arduous practice through which we build ourselves up into a higher state, nor does it necessitate going into any kind of inner trance state. Remember that. It is rather what one might call working meditation, or extrovert meditation, where skillful means, upaya, and wisdom, prajna, must be combined like the two wings of a bird. This is not a question of trying to retreat from the world.

[31:41]

In fact, without the external world, the world of apparent phenomena, meditation would be almost impossible to practice. For the individual and the external world are not separate, but merely coexist together. Therefore the concept of trying to communicate and trying to become one with some higher being does not arise. In this kind of meditation, the concept of nowness plays a very important part. In fact, it is the essence of meditation. Whatever one does, whatever one tries to practice, is not aimed at achieving a higher state, or at following some theory or ideal, but simply, without any object or ambition, trying to see what is here and now. One has to become aware of the present moment through such means as concentrating on the breathing, a practice which has been developed in the Buddhist tradition.

[32:45]

This is based on developing the knowledge of nowness, for each respiration is unique. It is an expression of now. Each breath is separate from the next, and is fully seen and fully felt, not in a visualized form, nor simply as an aid to concentration, but it should be fully and properly dealt with. Just as a very hungry man, when he is eating, is not even conscious that he is eating food. He's so engrossed in the food that he completely identifies himself with what he is doing, and almost becomes one with the taste and enjoyment of it. Similarly with the breathing. The whole idea is to try and see through that very moment in time. So in this case, the concept of trying to become something higher does not arise at all, and opinions do not have much importance. In a sense, opinions provide a way to escape. They create a kind of slothfulness, and obscure one's clarity of vision.

[33:48]

The clarity of our consciousness is veiled by prefabricated concepts, and whatever we see, we try to fit into some pigeonhole, or in some way make it fit in with our preconceived ideas. So, concepts and theories, and for that matter theology, can become obstacles. One might ask therefore, what is the point of studying Buddhist philosophy? Since there are scriptures and texts, and there is surely some philosophy to believe in, wouldn't that also be a concept? Well that depends on the individual, but basically it is not so. From the start, one tries to transcend concepts, and one tries, perhaps in a very critical way, to find out what is. I don't know who this guy is. He's some kind of high lama, but I get, you know, kind of a weird feeling that he's been

[34:52]

reading my books, or something, I don't know. Now, I'm pulling your leg, but there it is, that's what it's all about. So, it's going to be difficult, I suppose, for most Americans to understand the process of jhana, or meditation, because we do everything so compulsively. We even go to concerts, to improve our minds, to be cultured, to get somewhere. Now, you know, supposing you're on a board to raise money for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,

[35:53]

well, how do you go about that? How do you justify raising money for the symphony? Because you're going to go to a lot of businessmen, who say, well I'm a practical sort of fellow, and what's the good of all this? Well, you say, well, it's a good culture, and it's very important that we have culture. He says, you know, because he's always thinking in terms of results. Now, extend that kind of thinking to its ultimate limit. Be as practical as you can. What will that be like? It will be the final technological achievement of having absolutely everything under control. You will predict the future perfectly, and be able to manage everything. You will have Aladdin's lamp, and be able to fulfill instantly any wish whatsoever.

[36:58]

So, you will have no surprises. You will be totally bored, because a completely known future is already passed. You've had it. It will be like making love to a plastic woman. You know, a perfect replica, but without the slightest capacity for surprising you. She'll do anything you want. You suddenly realize you're embracing death. So, the whole power game, the goal of conquering the world, is absolutely barren. Nobody wants it, not really. They think they want it, because they haven't thought it through. And I've been going all over the country, proposing that one's college entrance examination

[38:02]

be a very detailed essay on your conception of heaven. What you would really like. And then the professor, or the tutor, looks at it and says, You haven't thought it through. You said you would like this and that and the other, but what goes with it? What inevitably accompanies this thing that you say you want in the same way that a bat inevitably accompanies a front? And he makes you think all that out. And your entrance examination finally turns into your PhD dissertation. Because you have to think it all through. And of course, you probably come in the end to the realization that you don't know what you want. You want to be surprised. So then, I'm in a very odd position, because I say we're going to practice meditation.

[39:10]

But what we're going to do has no purpose. It's in rather the same way that music has no purpose. You don't play music in order to get anywhere, do you? Otherwise the fastest orchestras would be the best. He says here, well, meditation is dealing with purpose itself. It is not that meditation is for something, but it is dealing with the aim. Generally, we have a purpose for whatever we do. Something is going to happen in the future. Therefore, what I am doing now is important. Everything is related to that. But the whole idea of meditation is to develop an entirely different way of dealing with things. Where you have no purpose at all. In fact, meditation is dealing with the question of whether or not there is such a thing as purpose.

[40:20]

And when one learns a different way of dealing with the situation, one no longer has to have a purpose. One is not on the way to somewhere. Or rather, one is on the way and one is also at the destination at the same time. That is really what meditation is for. In the words of the Taoist book called The Secret of the Golden Flower, when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped. And then you see, here you are. Really here. Most people, you see, aren't consciously here. They are wandering off somewhere else and thinking pasts and futures and all that sort of thing. Nobody is alive and awake. Here. And hence, the chronic frustration that goes on.

[41:24]

Because one's life has been reduced to the hairline present. Which is without content and therefore we are discontented. The Secret of the Golden Flower With Hiroshima bomb. But we can sit in a plane and be safe. So this is inhumane because we are fighting ideologically. Instead of for practical things like food and possessions and being greedy.

[42:27]

So that's why the Confucian would say he trusts human passions more than he trusts human virtues. Righteousness, goodness, principles and all that highfalutin abstractions. Let's get down to earth. Let's come off it. So then, this is why the kind of man in whom the kind of nature, the kind of human nature in which trust is put. Because you see, look. If you are like the Christians and the Jews. Not so much the Jews but mostly the Christians who don't trust human nature. Say it's fallen, it's evil, it's perverse. That puts you in a very funny position. Because if you say human nature is not to be trusted, you can't even trust the fact that you don't trust it. See where you land out? You land out in a hopeless mess. Now it's true, human nature is not always trustworthy. But you must proceed on the gamble that is trustworthy most of the time.

[43:35]

Or even 51% of the time. Because if you don't, what's your alternative? You have to have a police state. Everybody has to be watched and controlled and then who's going to watch the police? And so you end up in this way in China. Just before 250 BC, there was a short-lived dynasty called the Qing Dynasty that lasted 15 years. And the man decided, who was the emperor of that, that he would rule everybody. Everything would be completely controlled and his dynasty would last for a thousand years. And it was a mess. So the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 250 BC to 250 AD, came into being. And the first thing they did was to abolish all laws. Except about two. You know, elementary violence. You mustn't go around killing people and things like that or robbing.

[44:39]

But all the complexity of law. And this Han Dynasty marked the height of Chinese civilization. The real period of great, great sophistication and peace. China's golden age. I may be oversimplifying it, of course, like all historians do. But this was a marvelous thing, you see. But it's based on this whole idea of the humanism of the Far East. That although human beings are scallywags, they are no more so than cats and dogs and birds. And you must trust human nature. Because if you can't, you're up the spout. You've been listening to a lecture by the late Alan Watson titled The Philosophy of Nature. For a catalog of all the available lectures of the late Alan Watson,

[45:42]

you can send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to MEA, Box 303, Sausalito, California. That's MEA, Box 303, Sausalito, California.

[45:51]

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