Does It Matter?

Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

Alan W. Watts

• Editorial: New World Library
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781577318392
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Eastern Philosophy

This classic series of essays represents Alan Watts's thinking on the astonishing problems caused by our dysfunctional relationship with the material environment. Here, with characteristic wit, a philosopher best known for his writings and teachings about mysticism and Eastern philosophy gets down to the nitty-gritty problems of economics, technology, clothing, cooking, and housing. Watts argues that we confuse symbol with reality, our ways of describing and measuring the world with the world itself, and thus put ourselves into the absurd situation of preferring money to wealth and eating the menu instead of the dinner.With our attention locked on numbers and concepts, we are increasingly unconscious of nature and of our total dependence on air, water, plants, animals, insects, and bacteria. We have hallucinated the notion that the so-called external world is a cluster of objects separate from ourselves, that we encounter it, that we come into it instead of out of it. Originally published in 1972, Does It Matter? foretells the environmental problems that arise from this mistaken mind-set. Not all of Watts's predictions have come to pass, but his unique insights will change the way you look at the world.

SEVEN SHORT ESSAYS

THE BASIC MYTH

According to the Tradition of Ancient India

In the beginning—which was not long ago but now–ever—is the Self. Everyone knows the Self, but no one can describe it, just as the eye sees but does not see itself. Moreover, the Self is what there is and all that there is, so that no name can be given to it. It is neither old nor new, great nor small, shaped nor shapeless. Having no opposite, it is what all opposites have in common: it is the reason why there is no white without black and no form apart from emptiness. However, the Self has two sides, the inside and the outside. The inside is called nirguna, which is to say that it has no qualities and nothing can be said or thought about it. The outside is saguna, which is to say that it may be considered as eternal reality, consciousness, and delight. Thus the story which follows will be told of the saguna side.

Because of delight the Self is always at play, and its play, called lila, is like singing or dancing, which are made of sound and silence, motion and rest. Thus the play of the Self is to lose itself and to find itself in a game of hide–and–seek without beginning or end. In losing itself it is dismembered: it forgets that it is the one and only reality, and plays that it is the vast multitude of beings and things which make up this world. In finding itself it is remembered: it discovers again that it is forever the one behind the many, the trunk within the branches, that its seeming to be many is always maya, which is to say illusion, art, and magical power.

The playing of the Self is therefore like a drama in which the Self is both the actor and the audience. On entering the theater the audience knows that what it is about to see is only a play, but the skillful actor creates a maya, an illusion of reality which gives the audience delight or terror, laughter or tears. It is thus that in the joy and the sorrow of all beings the Self as audience is carried away by itself as actor.

One of the many images of the Self is the hamsa, the Divine Bird which lays the world in the form of an egg. It is said also that with the syllable ham the Self breathes out, scattering all galaxies into the sky, and that with the syllable sa it breathes in, withdrawing all things to their original unity. Yet if one repeats the syllables ham–sa they may also be heard as sa–ham or sa–aham, which is to say “I am that,” or THAT (the Self ) is what each and every being is. As breathing out, the Self is called Brahma, the creator. As holding the breath out, the Self is called Vishnu, the preserver of all these worlds. And as breathing in, the Self is called Shiva, the destroyer of illusion.

This is, then, a story without beginning or end since the Self breathes out and in, loses itself and finds itself, for always and always, and these periods are sometimes known as its days and nights—each day and each night lasting for a kalpa, which is 4,320,000 of our years. The day, or manvantara, is further divided into four yuga, or epochs, which are named after the throws in a game of dice: first treta, with a score of three; third dvapara, with a score of two; and fourth kali, the worst throw with a score of one.

Krita yuga is the Golden Age, the era of total delight in multiplicity and form and every beauty of the sensuous world, enduring for 1,728,000 years. Treta yuga is somewhat shorter, lasting for 1,296,000 years, and is like an apple with a single maggot in the core: things have just started to go amiss and every pleasure contains a slight shadow of anxiety. Dvapara yuga is shorter still. Its time is 864,000 years, and now the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, pleasure and pain, are evenly balanced. In the temporary end there come the 432,000 years of the kali yuga when the world is overwhelmed by darkness and decay, and when the Self is so lost to itself that all its delight appears in the disguise of horror. Finally, the Self is manifested in the form of Shiva, ten–armed and bluebodied and wreathed in fire, to dance the terrible tandava–dance whereby the universe, incandescent with his heat, turns to ash and nothingness. But as the illusion vanishes the Self finds itself in its original unity and bliss, and remains for another kalpa of 4,320,000 years in the pralaya of total peace before losing itself again.

The worlds that are manifested when the Self breathes out are not just this one here and those that we see in the sky, for besides these there are worlds so small that ten thousand of them may be hidden in the tip of a butterfly’s tongue, and so large that all our stars may be contained in the eye of a shrimp. There are also worlds within and around us that do not reverberate upon our five organs of sense, and all these worlds, great and small, visible and invisible, are in number as many as grains of sand in the Ganges.

Throughout these manifested worlds all sentient beings pass through the six paths or divisions of the Wheel of Becoming. These, counting clockwise from the top of the Wheel, are, first, the realm of the deva, that is, of gods and angels at the summit of happiness and spiritual success. Second is the realm of the ashura>, of dark angels who manifest the Self in the bliss of rage. Third is the realm of animals, of beasts, fish, birds, and insects. Fourth is the naraka realm, which is the depth of misery and spiritual failure, lying at the bottom of the Wheel and comprising the purgatories of ice and fire, manifesting the Self in the ecstasy of pain. Fifth is the realm of the preta, that is, of frustrated ghosts having immense bellies and tiny mouths. Sixth, and last, is the realm of mankind. All beings in the six paths are bound to the Wheel of Becoming by their karma, which is to say action motivated by desire for results—whether good or evil. Every being is desirous for the fruits of action so long as it remains ignorant of its true nature, thinking “I have come to be, and I shall cease to be,” not realizing that there is no “I,” no Self, except that which is one and original and beyond all time and space.

It is thus that anyone who, setting aside all ideas and theories, and looking earnestly and intently at the feeling of “I am,” will—all of a sudden—awaken to the knowledge that there is no self but the Self. Such a one is called jivanmukta, that is, liberated while still in his individual form, before the death of the body, and before the dissolution of all worlds at the end of the kalpa. For him there is no longer self and other, mine and yours, success and failure. On all sides, within and without, he sees all beings, all things, all events, only as the playing of the Self in its myriad forms.

THE GREAT MANDALA

People have always been fascinated by circles of glory, known in India as mandala: the rose windows of gothic cathedrals, Byzantine mosaic upon the inner surface of a dome, the radiant and radiating petals of certain flowers, the design of snow crystals, precious stones set in coronas of varicolored gems, and mandala proper as they are found in Tibetan painting—circular paradise gardens with their jeweled plants and trees surrounding an inner circle of Dhyani Buddhas and their attendant Bodhisattvas. It is in this form, too, that Dante described his vision of God, ringed by the saints and angels, at the end of the Paradiso.

C.G. Jung suggested that this fascination might be explained by some correspondence between the mandala form and the basic formative energy of the psyche. For there is indeed an almost universal tendency to express the divine in terms of radiating light. Sometimes I wish I had the time and skill to project such an image in motion and in highly articulate form and color upon the dome of a planetarium, as in the Vortex demonstrations of Jacobs and Belsen.

I think of a sunburst of electric blue–white light lasting only long enough to avoid blinding the eyes, and then softening to

white gold. With the light goes sound, the high, exulting blast of Gabriel’s trumpet that shatters the sleep of the dead. The sunburst recedes (or ascends) to its own center, and as it does so gives out a concentric aureole of fluorescent red, and then, ring upon ring, the whole visual spectrum—orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple—and beyond a transparent, mirrorlike blackness, about which a ring of lightning sets off another rainbow circle encompassing the first. And as the colored rings emerge, the sound descends at various harmonic intervals until, with the lacquer black, it reaches a bass so deep as to shake the walls and become tangible, thus generating a spectrum of vibrations that are felt only by the skin, converting the sonic into the solid, and all its textures.

In turn, these vibrations affect the mucous membrane of the nose, evoking a procession of scents which begins with jinko, or burning aloes wood, the perfume most pleasing to Buddha, and descending through roses, carnations, and the salt wind of the sea, to freshly ground coffee, mint, thyme, and warm brandy, and then on to excellent cheese, to ammonia, excrement, and burning blood.

The ordered rings and sequences of vibration touch every sense and emotion, and, as the lacquer black generates lightning, it becomes clear that feeling is a cycle in which the highest intensities of pleasure and pain are the same extreme.

But thus far the image has been only of rings and sequences. Within the rings we now distinguish rays, innumerable, but shooting straight as spokes from the central light. A moment later, the rays ripple, and with them the descending tones of sound begin to oscillate. Likewise the vibrations of scent, texture, and taste start to mix and combine according to an arithmetic that becomes increasingly complex. And the ripples are now something more than simple undulations: they are curves turning back upon themselves, spirals winding and unwinding, begetting patterns that resemble sunlit smoke, or foam in broken waves.

Soon this immense arabesque of curling forms develops sharp corners. The rays bend instantly and jump into angles, squares, diamonds, and frets. Simultaneously the other spectra—of sound, texture, taste, and smell—are moving in rhythms and patterns equivalently varied. But just as the dance of vibrations is about to blast the brain, there emerge the forms of ferns and fronds, of watercourses and trees, of ocean waves and mountains, of flowers and shells, of insects, fish, and human faces—all writhing and squirming within the total configuration of concentric rings.

Just then, one is aware that the whole scene has become three–dimensional: the flat circle is a globe, the sound is from every direction, and one is simply engulfed in the vibrations of texture and smell. In some way, the viewer is now inside the spectacle, and his sense of the total form diminishes because of the increasing interest of the detail—the articulation of particular features, of flowers and faces, gardens and cities, rivers and roads. As vision concentrates, the vibrations of sound, touch, smell, and taste become consistent with such details as fascinate the eye. And just then, before we know it, the spectacle as a whole is forgotten. Quite suddenly, we discover ourselves and our surroundings just as they are, here and now.

ON SELECTING VIBRATIONS

A re you yet ready to admit that what you will and what you won’t are one and the same process? . . . That as the recognition of a figure requires a background, the sense of being “oneself ” requires the apprehension that there is something “other” and external, and that the achievement of any kind of power, success, or control cannot be experienced apart from a perpetual contract of failure, surprise, and unpredictability? . . . That, therefore, all our pretentious projects for power over circumstance are a sort of joke or game which, if taken seriously, lead to mayhem and violence—expressing sheer rage at being unable to solve a problem which was absurd from the beginning?

If there is any meaning to the doctrine of Original Sin, transmitted from generation to generation from Adam and Eve, it is simply that all infants are brainwashed or hypnotized by their parents and teachers, elders and betters, into the notion that survival is a frantic necessity. They are taught, by adult reactions and attitudes, that certain experiences of high tension or vibration are to be regarded as “painful” and “bad” because they may be precursors of the monstrous event of death, which absolutely should not happen. Let me cite only two examples of this basic brainwashing to illustrate its fundamental principle— both of them down to what we are now calling the “nittygritty” level of things.

We now know that a woman giving birth to a baby does not have to go through “labor pains.” She can be mentally reoriented to experience what was formerly called pain as orgiastic tension, and therefore find the sensation of birth as erotically arousing as was the sensation of conception. Adults are wont to impress all infants with the vast importance of having regular bowel movements, but when the infant, with understandable pride, complies and does his production, the adults turn up their noses and complain of the stink. What on earth, he wonders, do these mysterious grownups really want?

They do not know. They have never thought it consistently through. The point, however, is that the cosmos is a complex, multidimensional system of vibrations arranged in crisscrossing spectra, as in weaving, and from these—as in playing a harp—we pluck and choose those that are to be considered valuable, important, or pleasant, ignoring or repressing those which (under the rules of our not always well–considered games) we deem unimportant or offensive. “Negative” experiences—which may include physical pain, death, vomiting, dizziness, or even sexual lust (according to taste)—are to be avoided, in the same way and sense that the rules of classical Western music excluded the augmented fourth (e.g., C to F sharp) as a permissible interval.

Liberation, in the Buddhist sense of nirvana or the Hindu of moksha, is the realization that ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what strings are plucked or what vibrations occur. Thus a great yogi can face torture with equanimity for the very reason that he can allow himself to writhe and scream, and to dislike the experience immensely. He trusts his nature—that is, Nature itself—to do whatever is appropriate under the circumstances. He knows that energy always takes the line of least resistance, and that all motion is essentially gravity or falling. His basic commitment is therefore to what Ananda Coomaraswamy called “the perpetual uncalculated life in the present.”

This, however, does not deny the value of culture, art, and morality. On the contrary, it is their essential basis in somewhat the same way that a clean, blank page is the essential basis for writing poetry. Every writer, every poet, loves white paper. As nature abhors a vacuum it sucks out one’s creative energy, and this is why the Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism asserts that emptiness (or void or space) is form, and that form is emptiness.

Now then, to see that we live in a universe where, basically, “anything goes” is what the Mahayana calls prajna or intuitive wisdom. But the inseparable handmaid of prajna is karuna, compassion, which is asking the question: “Given a universe in which anything goes, what are the most lovely, generous, and exuberant things we can do?” Why not ask the opposite question: “What are the most horrible and hateful deeds we can perpetrate?” The answer is irrational or perhaps supra–rational. It is that the whole system of vibration spectra, although comprising intensities of experience that we now call pure agony, is a celebration of love and delight which, were it otherwise, would simply not go on happening. The so–called instinct for survival, for...