Live FREE - Alan Watts - Break Attachment and THRIVE

The 17th century master writes in one of his poems that he uses the phrase to seize non-thought in the midst of thoughts, which means to have a mind that is in some way like a mirror, the Chinese Taoist said that the perfect man uses his mind like a mirror it does not capture anything it does not reject anything it receives but it does not keep and that is why the poem says that the wild geese have no intention of projecting their reflection the water has no intention of retaining its image so where is the mind? So that has no

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s now

attachment

is a word that has associations in English that don't give the Buddhist feeling about the meaning of the word, but the slang term that we now use hanging is the correct translation for attachment when you say The person is completely obsessed or you have a particular obsession, which is the Buddhist meaning of attachment, it means a mental fixation or an emotional fixation on some particular pattern of life, so to get rid of obsessions one must first get rid of thinking after yourself.

I have gotten rid of it completely and with that I have revived the background, the mirror, as if it were the mind of the mirror, then you can think again and you can think against the background perfectly comfortably and not become obsessed with the thought, and so on. manner. You have an extraordinary feeling that life happens as a single process all the time that doesn't catch you and everything is one and has all kinds of differentiations within it so that it doesn't become a kind of shapeless blur, but is a kind of uh, it flows like water, since water has all the patterns in its network of sunlight, waves, etc., the same way the world has all this, but it flows constantly because there are no obstacles, so it is the way real. to reach this state is to give up the sense of urgency that you must do something, something is required of you, and to understand, for example, that looking at a rubber band on your fingers may be as important as anything else you can do, in other words , to be here. right now and hearing the sound of my voice without paying the slightest attention to what it means could be as important as anything in the universe why it's not important the tree outside is beautiful it's worth looking at why it certainly is But achieving any great mission in life is not simply being a tree, as Emerson said in his essay.

I think, in compensation, these roses under my window don't care if they are better than last year's roses or if next year's roses will be better than them, simply. the rose

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s today and that is the point when you learn the art of meditation this way you will see other people running wild like chickens with their heads cut off and they think they are going somewhere and they are completely deluded. You are there and they don't know it, that's why they run so wild, but by this means you can begin to learn that you are there now and how extraordinary it is to see the world this way, especially when you see people this way and From this point of view you realize that people are valid natural processes just like trees, birds and clouds.

Do you ever criticize a cloud for having bad shape? Have you ever seen patterns in the foam? You make an aesthetic mistake. Well, no one just doesn't know, there was once an 18th century classicist, one of those people who enjoyed formal gardens and Greek palaces who criticized the stars for not being arranged symmetrically, but that would never occur to us today, we don't want to see our stars in miserable geometric patterns, we love to see the scattering of them and the curious groupings across the sky in a wonderful irregular order, a wonderful orderless order, you could call it yes, the curious thing about the clouds, the stars, the mountains and everything natural.

What is described is that they are beautiful and we know that they have a quality that sets them apart from being a disaster when you know it when you see it, but these things apparently don't cause disaster, so in a way humans don't. And when you see human life as something that is of the same kind as the shape of a tree or a cloud or something like that, you stop judging it and you have to know that about yourself and this is the beginning of all that is. the beginning of all kinds of wisdom to see that you really don't have to go anywhere you don't have to be better than you are because with all your flaws your selfishness your neuroses your diseases and everything good fish have neuroses and diseases and so on for plants, you've often seen plants that have bumps or some strange little diseases and so on, and they all have those kinds of problems, that's life, but when you realize that you are a real projection. of the universe as you are at this moment, then there is nowhere to go, there is no need to do anything and from that peace comes energy, real energy instead of false energy that tries to lift you up on your own, the usual kind of being. human. energy that progressively goes nowhere with more and more business now beyond this state will follow another that I have numbered five.

I called it cellular consciousness and I must repeat the fact that I used this word cellular not in a strictly scientific way. but as a good way to describe the type of consciousness that is what it feels like from the inside because it's like every cell in your body comes to life. Now you know that your cells don't speak English but they are a very, very subtle form and highly organized things, if you have ever seen a model of a living cell, you have seen the most fantastic object and those cells are involved in all kinds of activities, but They don't structure the world the way you structure it because they don't.

I don't use that language, and as you enter cellular consciousness, you begin to feel like the artist who paints nonsense, that everything is dots, tiny little vortices, you become aware of the texture of things to an extraordinary degree, it's almost as if the world had been photographed through a screen that conveyed to the senses a sensation of intense detail, as if each of the nerve endings were now detected sending its separate message to the brain, making the world seem highly textured. no more things like green on white or white on white or spaces, the whole space is rich and that is what those painters represent by doing brush spaces like this, and you will also notice that certain types of painting particularly say Persian miniatures if you look at them and You will see that the artist is painting the world, uh, as the Arabian nights describe the secret garden that Aladdin entered, where all the trees were made of jewels and where everything seemed as precious as if it had been carved by a master carver and They try to His art gives the impression that the more you look at the background, suddenly you see that the background of a pillar, the painter has not made it white, but has put a white design on it, but just a slightly different tone. white complex design you feel that within the design there is still another design and that it has an infinitely carved rich texture.

This is the reason why oriental art in general we find this among the Chinese in a certain period, you find it constantly in India. You find it in persia, you find it in the arabic work and you also find it in the first celtic manuscripts like the book of kells, the lindisfarne gospels, etc., this bad fascination with what seems to be a world of infinite details and this, of course. It is the world of paradise, this is what all those angels and all that are about. Now from cellular consciousness you can move to what I would call, again, symbolically molecular consciousness, it is not that you are going to be conscious of the molecules, no, but it's like suddenly, uh, this is the state that Buddhists or part of the state that Buddhists call suchness, it's like it can be quite terrifying because everything becomes perfectly meant people, everything that's happening is just jazz, almost electronic jazz, it's a dance process of energy and you feel a little lost in what's supposed to happen, I mean what is it about?

It is just dancing energy and you can be careful here because this is the dangerous point in the meditative process because here you can suddenly have the vision of hell and the vision of hell is that this world is a monstrous mockery that is meaningless in the worst sense. of the word, it's just a spin, a meaningless spin of particles or waves or whatever is tormenting itself, it keeps going. with a certain kind of hope that eventually it can destroy things and then you see the horror of biology as a mutual devouring society, what a horrible conception everything is and everything is false, people say they are people, but they are not.

They're just robots, everything is made of plastic or enameled tin, everything is buzzing, that's a danger, you see it here, but if this happens to you, and you have the feeling that everything doesn't make sense, everything is just a hum mechanic, what you do is what you do. An Arab does it in a sandstorm, he knows there is no chance of conquering the sandstorm, so he kneels in the fetal position, takes his wool burners, covers himself completely and waits until the storm is over if he is covered by sand. uh it's usually porous enough to admit some air to breathe or the same way as an ocean liner in a typhoon they just turn off the engines and drift, it's the only thing that can do it the same way if any time you get into this. particular type of psychic horrors drift just let it be and it will resolve itself and it's important to go through that state in a major way to realize that you don't know anything, you don't know what it's about, you don't understand the universe it's all incomprehensible words and systems were just a way of whistling in the dark we all whistled together in the dark and agreed that we had the same whistle and that was great, but we don't really know anything about anyone proposing an authority on that. anything at all is this making an authoritative noise and he may be able to make some remarkable demonstrations, for example by interfering with diseases in various ways, we can make people healthy for a while until we can no longer make them healthy, This may be a good thing, it may not be a good thing, perhaps it is better not to interfere with nature, but simply to let human beings be alone and regulate, through a kind of internal natural homeostasis, their own population, level out and, let's let it happen.

There is no way to conclusively prove that our way of dealing with these things is better than doing nothing, but life is, in a way, an experiment all the time, all of existence, the very form of the body is appearing, See, you have to do it. We go in some way and one way is that we all come together, we look like each other and we have certain common characteristics, but look at the skin of a snake, each scale is quite similar to the other and they all come together, so suddenly you see that. There's no particular reason why you should be this way instead of that way, that everyone is putting on a good show, a great act, and if you're not prepared for that, if you're not educated to the point of being able to understand that situation, you can get very nervous you say well everyone always wants to know what I'm supposed to do see this is a common question what am I supposed to do how am I supposed to feel I want an authority I want someone to convince me that the way I'm doing it the right way, but don't you realize that every time you accept authority you accept it under your authority?

You say: I believe in the Bible because why do you believe in the Bible? Because it says that Jesus says in the Bible that we should believe the Bible. yes, but it is you, that is all, it is your opinion, that is an opinion that must be accepted, it is under your own authority, you create the power of your own master and you create the power of your own government, that is the saying, the people get the government they deserve and if you don't like it and you don't overthrow it well then that's your problem but you always see that authority comes from you and also the way you define yourself you accepted society and its suggestions always in a rather tacit way but you did it here In this incredible moment of seeing the world as one big act, as one big drone, it was jazz doing this, this, this, this, everything is vibration and you see absolutely no compelling reason why it should be that way. way and not otherwise, if you don't do it.

Don't panic, you see them, you enter the domain that Buddhists call suchness, it is just as it is now if it is a great act who does it who is the actor what is behind all this jazz that is a great question and it is asking that question that we went from six to seven to the state that I called light because when you become aware of the energy vibrating from one side to the other and in addition to this, do not forget to become aware that you and the outside world are a single energy system , So what is it?

You realize, for example, that I do not exist as me at all unless there is something else that is other and that immediately is the key to the fact that the self and the other are polar, they go together, how do they go? together, okay, put it the other way around, what would you do if you were god, if you were the works, in other words, if you were this whole ability to shape energy, what would you do well? First of all, you have to draw the line somewhere and then proceed, you have to make a difference because if something makes a difference, it doesn'tthe difference, it doesn't matter, so if you want to make a difference, you have to make a difference, well, if you carry it with you and try. all the amazing differences you can try and differentiate this from that and so on between all the possibilities of being god, eventually you will arrive at what you are doing now, are you just this guy saying circumstance because this will be one of the infinite things to do with certain restrictions on yourself that of course you have tacitly originated because you wouldn't know where you are without them, then suddenly you see this amazing clarity that energy can symbolize itself. for you like a sensation of intense light you see that our understandings have a way of representing ourselves in sensual images we say when very happy he walked in the air you could have knocked me down with the pen uh he saw the light everything became clear Are you transparent now ?

This does not necessarily mean that it is literal, but in intense cases of perception there is a corresponding literal sensory feeling inside and when something becomes completely clear in a way that is emotionally and intellectually overwhelming, you are likely to have the feeling of intensity. light inside your head or sometimes a feeling that everything looks transparent like it's glass but it's still there, you don't really see through it, you don't see the pattern on the chair behind someone's head, but they look transparent because things have become clear and at this point it has become tremendously clear that everything is light, the energy that comes to you in different ways and you approach it and everything lights up.

You can see that light is the basic component of black things there is no place that is not light and if you can't see it, you can hear it, it is coming to you in all kinds of disguises, so here you see it, it is presenting itself here, It's being handled, it's being de

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red, here it's spinning, uh, it's dancing all kinds. of patterns and you are now, as I said, this can clothe this understanding with the sensation of vivid light as the final component of uh, you might say, the inner current of the nerve reduces everything to what it fundamentally is.

That's why when you explode the atom you get this light because everything is enclosed in it, but simultaneously you remember how I described yesterday the guy who gets to the center of the wheel and gets peace there, then gets energy and then leaves. Go back to the circumference, well, then you see that there is really no difference, not fundamentally, between this state of enlightenment and what we call number three or ordinary everyday consciousness. You suddenly realize that the way things are now in perfectly ordinary life is the same. something like light that is somewhat undifferentiated and overwhelmingly bright, the same energy that appears to you as light and that state of pure light, then you understand that it is just what you are looking at, sitting in this room in which you are sitting in the middle of the vision. beatific we just have it, we were taught before that, to look down on the world by saying well, this is chasing ordinary everyday life and we're just sitting in a conference room and on these kind of fun chairs that act as hangers. for the human body and, you know, give a lecture on very common issues and, from this point of view, there is nothing ordinary about it, while we, the Zen poem, supernatural power and wonderful activity.