Summary
Alan Watts contrasts Eastern and Western philosophies. You’ll question basic assumptions that you’ve never examined, but which have dominated your life so far.
Key Takeaways
- Knowledge is a “sensation”: learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.
- 3 dominant thoughts of nature
- Western: nature is a machine, everything is made.
- East Indian: nature is drama, everything is the Self.
- Chinese: nature is biology, it grows, everything is what-is-so-of-itself.
- An organism is a system of orderly anarchy.
- Do you know what scholarship means, or what a school means? The original meaning of schola is leisure.
- “That which is the knower—the ground of all knowledge—is never itself an object of knowledge, just as fire does not burn itself.”
- Civilized human beings have learned to specialize in concentrated attention. The price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field.
- You do not understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.
What I got out of it
The Tao of Philosophy provided a nice contrast in Western and Eastern philosophies. Putting them side-by-side helped me understand how and why they, and subsequently modern-day culture and political systems, differ.
After reading a bunch of philosophy books and ancient books this month, I feel myself being more and more drawn to Eastern thought, especially Taoism, Zen Buddhism and Hinduism.
Three thoughts that are stuck in my mind:
- Watts’ Daylight Saving Time analogy in the last chapter. This made me realize how much we/I are enslaved by a clock.
- The spotlight and floodlight analogy. We humans have specialized in concentrated attention and the price we’ve paid for it is ignorance of everything outside our field.
- You cannot understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if it’s the only culture you know. Living in Japan 5+ years now, I wholeheartedly agree. The only question: how to help others overcome this (especially in Japan where I see many youth struggle)?
A book to ponder on and revisit from time to time.
Table of Contents
Summary Notes
Introduction
As his close friend, poet Elsa Gidlow, wrote of his growing into the spirit of the Tao: … it transformed him as he allowed it to permeate his being, so that the reserved, somewhat uptight young Englishman, living overmuch in his head, in his mature years became an outgoing, spontaneously playful, joyous world sage. He believed that a widespread absorption of the profound wisdom of Taoism could similarly transform the West.
Foreword – On Philosophical Synthesis
For Oriental philosophy, knowledge is not control. It is rather the “sensation”—the vivid realization—that “I” am not this individualized consciousness alone, but the matrix from which it arises. This knowledge consists, not in a verbal proposition, but in a psychological change, similar to that which occurs in the cure of psychosis. One in whom this change has come to pass does not attempt to control the world, or himself, by the efforts of his own will. He learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.
The Tao of Philosophy – The Edited Transcripts
Myth of Myself
We do not regard “I, myself” as identical with our whole physical organism. We regard it as something inside it, and most Western people locate their ego inside their heads. You are somewhere between your eyes and between your ears, and the rest of you dangles from that point of reference. This is not so in other cultures. When a Chinese or Japanese person wants to locate the center of himself, he points to what Japanese call the kokoro and the Chinese call shin, the heart-mind. Some people also locate themselves in the solar plexus.
It is absolutely absurd to say that we came into this world. We did not: we came out of it! What do you think you are?
Suppose this world is a tree. Are you leaves on its branches or are you a bunch of birds from somewhere else that settled on a dead old tree? Surely everything that we know about living organisms—from the standpoint of the sciences—shows us that we grow out of this world, that each one of us is what you might call a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole.
Western man has, for many centuries, been under the influence of two great myths.
The whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through by the idea that all things—all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all grasshoppers, all worms—are artifacts; they have been made. It is therefore natural for a Western child to say to its mother, “How was I made?” On the other hand, that would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do not think of nature as something that was made. Instead, they look upon it as something that grows, and the two processes are quite different. When you make something you put it together: you assemble parts, or you carve an image out of wood or stone, working from the outside to the inside. However, when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way. It does not assemble its parts. It expands from within and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming or a seed turning into a plant.
“Thou God seest me.” Everywhere is this eye— watching, watching, watching—watching and judging you, so that you always feel you are never really by yourself. The old gentleman is observing you and writing notes in his black book, and the idea of this became too much for the West. We had to get rid of it, and so instead we developed another myth, the myth of the purely mechanical universe.
This myth was invented at the end of the eighteenth century, and became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, so that today it is common sense. Very few people today really believe in God in the old sense. They say they do, but although they really hope there is a God, they do not really have faith in God.
Instead, it has become fashionable, and it is nothing more than a fashion, to believe that the universe is dumb and stupid, and that intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis, and beyond that it is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces.
And to thinkers of the nineteenth century like Hegel, Darwin, and T.H. Huxley, there was similarly the notion that at the root of being is an energy, and this energy is blind. This energy is just energy, and it is utterly and totally stupid, and our intelligence is an unfortunate accident.
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery —the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets—is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is to look as different as possible, and yet underneath to be identical.
Man in Nature
We need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what is inside the skin but includes our whole total external environment. If we do not experience ourselves that way, we tend to mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission, and if we do that, then comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in and we do not treat it with love and gentleness and respect.
In the history of philosophy there are three dominant theories of nature.
The first theory is the Western theory, which is that nature is a machine, or an artifact. We inherited this idea from the Hebrews who believed that nature was made by God in somewhat the same way a potter makes a pot out of clay or a carpenter makes a table out of wood.
However, it so happens that in the eighteenth century Western thought began to change. People became increasingly doubtful as to whether there was a maker—whether there was a God—but they continued to look upon the creation as an artifact, as a machine. By the time of Newton, people were explaining the world in terms of mechanism and we are still under the influence of that idea today. After all, in an article on human physiology the author will usually include drawings which show the human body as a sort of factory.
So this is the theory which has grown up in the West of nature as an artifact, or something that is made.
The second theory of nature is an East Indian theory. Nature is seen not as an artifact but as drama. Basic to all Hindu thought is the idea that the world is maya, a Sanskrit word which means many things. It means magic, illusion, art, and play. All the world is a stage, and in the Hindu idea of nature the ultimate reality of the universe is the self which they call brahman, or atman.
That is what there is; the self—universal, eternal, boundless, indescribable— and everything that happens happens on the self. This is the same as saying, “It’s on me, the drinks tonight are on me,” or as we say when we hear the radio, “It’s on the speaker.”
The universe does not let you in on the truth that all sense experiences are vibrations of the self; not just your self, but the self, and all of us share this self in common because it is pretending to be all of us.
There is a third theory of nature which is Chinese, and it is very interesting. The Chinese word for nature is tzu-jan, and this expression means “of itself, so,” or what happens of itself. We might say “spontaneity,” but it almost means “automatic,” because automatic is what is self-moving, and we associate the word “automatic” with machinery. However tzu-jan, what-is-so-of-itself, is associated in the Chinese mind not with machinery but with biology. Your hair grows by itself; you do not have to think of how to grow it. Your heart beats by itself; you do not have to make up your mind how to beat it. This is what the Chinese mean by nature.
In the Chinese philosophy of nature, nature has no boss. There is no principle that forces things to behave the way they do, and so it is a completely democratic theory of nature.
Correspondingly, most Westerners, whether they be Christians or non-Christians, do not trust nature. Of all things nature is the thing least to be trusted. You must manage it. You must watch out for it and it will always go wrong if you do not watch out, just as the goblins will get you if you do not watch out. So, we are always feeling that we absolutely cannot trust it because we are instilled with the idea of original sin. You cannot trust nature because it comes out with weeds and insects, and above all, you cannot trust human nature.
If you cannot trust yourself, you are totally mixed up. You haven’t a leg to stand on, and you have no point of departure for anything. In this respect, the Taoist philosophy and the Confucian philosophy are in agreement. In Confucian philosophy, the fundamental virtue of a human being is called jen. It is a Chinese character that Confucius placed as the highest of all virtues, higher than righteousness, higher than benevolence, and it means approximately human-heartedness. Now, Confucius once said that “goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.” Virtue in Chinese is teh, and it means virtue not in the sense of moral propriety, but virtue in the sense of magic, as when we speak of the healing virtues of a certain plant. A man of true virtue is therefore a human-hearted man, and the meaning of this is that one should, above all, trust human nature in the full recognition that it is both good and bad, that it is both loving and selfish.
You are unbelievably more wise in your nature than you ever will be in your conscious thoughts, because behind your conscious thoughts lies your nervous system.
However, the sages who advised this emperor said that was a very bad thing to do because the moment people see the law written down, they develop a litigious spirit. That is to say, they think out ways of wangling around it, and this is what we do all the time.
They say, “Well, it did not define this and it did not say that.” So some of those Confucians wanted to put the language in order and to make all the words mean just so, but the Taoists laughed at them and said, “If you define the words, with what words are you going to define the words that define the words?” They said, therefore, that the emperor should not have written the laws down because a sense of justice is not something you can put in words. It is what our lawyers call “equity.”
Nature, human nature included, is an organism; and an organism is a system of orderly anarchy.
That is what the Chinese Taoist philosophy calls wu-wei, which does not mean doing nothing. It means not interfering with the course of events and not acting against the grain.
A GI once visited Picasso in Paris during the war and said, “I cannot understand your paintings. They are absurd. Life does not look like that.” Picasso replied, “Do you have a girlfriend?” He said, “Yes.” “Have you a picture?” He said, “Yes.” “Show it to me.” So he drew out his billfold, and there was a little colored photograph of his girlfriend, and Picasso looked at it and said, “Is she so small as that?”
The idea of li, of natural order, is like the patterns in seafoam, patterns in jade, the shapes of the clouds, the forms of trees and mountains. They are orderly, but we cannot put our finger on the order. We know it is orderly but we do not know why. The order of nature is in that way indefinable.
Nature as a self-ordering principle, but it does not really know how it does it.
Do you know what scholarship means, or what a school means? The original meaning of schola is leisure. We spoke of a “scholar and a gentleman” because a gentleman was a person who had a private income and could afford to be a scholar. He did not have to earn a living and therefore he could study the classics and poetry. Today nothing is more busy than a school. They make you work, work, work because you have to get through on schedule. There are expedited courses, and you go to school to get a Ph.D. in order to earn a living. So, on the whole, this is a contradiction of scholarship.
To be able to be true scholars we have to cultivate an attitude in life in which we are not trying to get anything out of it.
You do not have to do anything but it is a great idea, and it is a great experience if you can learn what the Chinese call “purposelessness.”
So, to live we must have faith. We must trust ourselves to the total unknown and to a nature which does not have a boss. A boss is part of a system of mistrust and so that is why Lao-tzu’s Tao loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.
Symbols and Meaning
Ideas are very powerful. Everybody who speaks any language at all has, underneath the surface of the language or the figuring that he uses, certain basic assumptions which are usually unexamined, and these unexamined systems of belief are extremely influential in our lives.
One very pervasive idea that is built into our common sense, which is that the physical world consists of two aspects: respectively, form and matter.
For centuries, scientists and philosophers wanted to know, “What is that stuff? What are we made of?” A carpenter makes tables out of wood; however, I ask you: is a tree made of wood? Obviously not. A tree is wood, it is not made of it. Is a mountain made of rock? Obviously not, it is rock. In this sense our language contains innumerable ghosts.
We populate the world with ghosts which arise out of the structure of our language, and therefore from the structure of our thinking because we think in language, figuring, and numbers. So it is fascinating to find the hidden assumptions that underlie language and mathematics, and there is a basic assumption, that almost all of us have, that organisms are made of something, and it comes into our everyday speech again and again as a form and pattern of organization.
What they did not realize was that as you develop more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe becomes smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. In just the same way, when the telescopes become more and more powerful the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes because what is happening in all these investigations is, through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. When you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away! You will never get at it. You cannot touch the tip of your finger with the tip of your finger.
“That which is the knower—the ground of all knowledge—is never itself an object of knowledge, just as fire does not burn itself.”
As Van Dallieu put it, “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
You begin to get a philosophical itch, to scratch your head and think about why this is so. After awhile you may realize that “Why?” is a meaningless question, and so you may ask: “How is it so?” Well, that leads you into science and other investigations. So you want to know, “What is it?” I mean, what is this happening, this thing called existence? If you ask that question long enough, it will suddenly hit you that if you could answer it, you would not know what terms to put the answer in.
When you ask the question “What?” it is like saying: “Is you is or is you ain’t?”
Everything is a matter of form.
What stuff we see is a pattern seen out of focus, where it becomes fuzzy like cotton or kapok.
Anything solid is going so fast that there is no way to get your finger through it, that is all.
We could devise a language such as that of the Neutka Indians, where there are no nouns and there are only verbs. The Chinese language is very close to that, and the superimposition of the idea of noun and verb on the Chinese language seems to be a Western invention. However, all those languages of Indo-European origin have nouns and verbs in them; they have agents and operations. Now here is one of the basic snags: when we divide the world into operations and agents, doings and doers, we ask such silly questions as, “Who knows?” “Who does it?” “What does it?” Actually, the “what” that is supposed to do it is the same as “the doing,” and you can very easily see that the whole doing of the universe may be understood as a “process.” Nobody is doing it.
Limits of Language
The only thing anybody can agree about today, so far as the discussion of ethical and moral problems are concerned, is that we ought to survive. Therefore certain forms of conduct have survival value and certain forms do not. However, when you say to yourself, “I must go on living,” you put yourself in a double bind because you submit to a process which is essentially spontaneous and then insist it must happen.
When we say to ourselves, “I must go on,” the reason we say this is because we are not living in the realization of eternal now. Instead we are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later.
As the Hindus have taught us, in the course of time everything gets worse and eventually falls apart, and comes the Kali-Yuga and Shiva at the end, which is to say, only suckers put hope in the future.
Nature is multidimensional, and language is linear and scrawny. Therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the way the world is described, it is as if you were trying to eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. A lot of people try to eat numbers. People play the stock market and they are doing nothing but eating numbers. They are always unhappy because they never get anything.
Confucius very wisely said, “A man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.” This is so because when you gain understanding, you do not put your hope in time because time will not solve a thing. So when we enter into the practice of meditation, of yoga, we are doing something radically unlike other human activities.
It is the one activity which you do for its own sake and not for any other reason. Obviously it will not lead anywhere, because you cannot go to the place where you are now. Yoga is to be completely here and now.
The point is this: eternal life means to be here now, to come to your senses.
The only place to begin is here and now, because here is where we are. So why do we put it off?
A lot of people say, “Well, I am not ready.” What do you mean you are not ready? What do you have to do to be ready? You might say “I am not good enough because I am neurotic, I am perhaps not old enough or not mature enough for such knowledge. I am still frightened of pain, and of course I would have to overcome that. I am still dependent on material things. I have to eat a lot, drink a lot, have sex, and all that kind of thing, and I think I had better get all that under control first.” But what you really mean is you have a case of spiritual pride. You want to be able to congratulate yourself for having gone through the discipline which is rewarded with realization. That is like trying to quench fire with fire.
The reason you cannot do anything about it is because you do not exist, that is, as an ego, as a soul, as a separate will. It just is not so. When you understand that, you are liberated.
As they say in Zen, “You cannot take hold of it nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you are silent it speaks. When you speak it is silent.”
Images of God
How would you know that something was good unless you were able to contrast it with something not good at all?
First of all the feminine “she” represents what is called philosophically “the negative principle.” Now women in our culture today do not like to be associated with the negative because the negative has acquired very bad connotations. We say, “Accentuate the positive.” Well, that is a purely male chauvinistic attitude. How would you know that you were outstanding unless by contrast there was something instanding? You cannot imagine the convex without the concave and you cannot appreciate the firm without the yielding. Therefore, the so-called negativity of the feminine principle is obviously life-giving and very important, but we live in a culture which does not notice it. You may see a painting, a drawing of a bird, and you do not notice the white paper underneath it. If you look at a printed book, you may think that the words are what is important and that the page does not matter. Yet, if you reconsider the whole thing, how could there be visible print without the page underlying it?
What is called substance stands underneath; sub is underneath, stance stands. To be substantial is to be underlying, to be the support and the foundation of the world. It is of course the great role of the feminine to be the substance. Therefore the feminine is represented by space, which is of course black, and were it not for black and empty space there would be no possibility whatsoever of seeing the stars. Stars shine out of space, and certain very high-powered astronomers are beginning to realize that stars are a function of space.
Kali also is the principle of death. She carries a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other. Death is tremendously important to think about but we put it off, and it is swept under the carpet in our culture.
We have made death howl with all kinds of ghouls. We have invented dreadful afterlives, and the Christian version of Heaven is as abominable as the Christian version of Hell. After all, nobody wants to be in church forever.
There are other people who say, “Well, when you are dead you are dead, and nothing is going to happen at all. So what do you have to worry about?” Well, we do not quite like that idea because it spooks us. What would it be like to die, to go to sleep and never, never wake up? Well, there are a lot of things it is not going to be like. It is not going to be like being buried alive. It is not going to be like being in the darkness forever. It is going to be as if you never had existed at all, and not only you, but everything else as well. There never was anything, there is no one to regret it, and there is no problem. Well, think about that for awhile.
It is kind of a weird feeling you get when you really think about that and imagine what it would be like to really just stop altogether. Of course you cannot even call it stopping because you cannot have stopping without starting, and so there never was any start. There is just nothing and when you come to think of it, that is the way it was before you were born. If you go back in memory as far as you can go you come to the same place as you do when you go forward in your anticipation of the future. You may, ask what it is going to be like to be dead and this gives you the funny idea that this blankness is the necessary counterpart of what we call being.
What gives us any ghost of a notion that we are here except by contrast with the fact that we once were not, and later on will not be?
This attitude that “We must follow the laws which have been laid down and we are bound to follow” are not the only way of being religious and of relating to the ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world.
Sense of Nonsense
It is commonly said that the root of most human unhappiness is the sense that one’s life has no meaning.
This sense of nonsense as the theme of the divine activity also comes across very strongly in the Book of Job. I always think that the Book of Job is the most profound book in the whole Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. Here is the problem of the righteous man who has suffered and all his friends try to rationalize it and say, “Well, you must have suffered because you really had a secret sin after all, and you deserve the punishment of God.” So after they had their say, the Lord God appeared and said, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel with words without knowledge?” He then proceeded to ask Job and his friends a series of absolutely unanswerable conundrums, pointing out all the apparent irrationality and nonsense of His creation.
He somehow surrenders to the apparent unreasonableness of the Lord God, and this is not, I think, because Job is beaten down and becomes unduly impressed with the royal, monarchical, and paternalistic authority of the deity and does not dare to answer back. Instead, he realizes that somehow these very questions are the answer. Of all the commentators on the Book of Job, I think the person who came closest to this point was G. K. Chesterton. He once made the glorious remark that it is one thing to look with amazement at a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist, but it is quite another thing to look at a hippopotamus, a creature who does exist, but looks as if he does not. In other words, when you see this strange world with its weird forms like hippopotami, do not take them for granted. Stones and trees and water and clouds and stars are as weird as any hippopotamus, or any imagination of fabulous beasts of gorgons and griffins. They are just plain improbable, and it is in this sense that they are the “alleluia,” as it were, or the nonsense song of the universe.
It seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is nonsense.
Coincidences of Opposites
Just as you do not encounter in life people with fronts but no backs, you do not encounter a coin that has heads but no tails. Although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different, they are at the same time one. Fundamentally, one has to get used to the notion that different things can be inseparable, and that what is explicitly two can at the same time be implicitly one. However, if you forget that, very funny things happen. We forget that black and white are inseparable, and that existence is constituted equivalently by being and non-being.
We have central vision and we have peripheral vision. Central vision is that which we use for reading and for all sorts of close work, much like using a spotlight. However, peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight. Civilized human beings have learned to specialize in concentrated attention. Even if a person’s attention span is short, they are, as it were, wavering their spotlight over many fields. The price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field. I would rather say “ignore-ance,” than ignorance, because if you concentrate on a figure, you tend to ignore the background and you tend, therefore, to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things and events seriously, imagining that these really do exist, when actually they have the same kind of existence as an individual’s interpretation of a Rorschach blot; they are what you make out of it.
Our physical world is a system of inseparable differences. Everything exists with everything else, but we contrive not to notice that because what we notice is what we consider noteworthy, and we notice it in terms of notations, numbers, words, and images. What is notable, noteworthy, notated, and noticed is what appears to us to be significant, and the rest is ignored as insignificant. As a result we select from the total input to our senses only a very small fraction of our perception, and this causes us to believe that we are separate beings, isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the rest of the world.
To be able to predict is very useful because that has survival value, but at the same time it creates anxiety. You pay for the increased survivability gained in prediction by knowing that in the end you will not succeed. Everyone is going to fall apart by one way or another; it might happen tomorrow, it might happen fifty years from now, but it all comes apart in the end. So people get worried about that and they become anxious, and what they gain on the roundabout, they lose on the swings.
Seeing Through The Net
You do not understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.
It is very difficult to get down exactly to your basic assumptions and ask, “What do you mean by consistency? What do you mean by rationality? What do you mean by the good life?” The only way of finding out what you mean by these things is by contrasting the way you look at something to the way it is looked at in another culture.
To gain perspective we have to find cultures which are in some ways as sophisticated as our own but at the same time as different from our own as possible.
In keeping with the old principle of triangulation, you cannot establish the position of a particular object unless you observe it from two particularly different points of view, and thereby calculate its actual distance from you.
Whether you are a Jew, a Christian, an agnostic, or an atheist you are not uninfluenced by the whole tradition of Western culture. The models of the universe which our culture has employed influence our very language, and the structure of our thought, indeed the very constitution of our logic, is seen in the architecture of today’s computers.
The Western model of the universe is political, being derived from engineering or architecture. All Western thought is based on the idea that the universe is a construct, and even when we get rid of the idea of the constructor or the personal god we continue to think of the world in terms of it being a machine. We see the world in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and later in terms of what we call quantum mechanics, although I find it rather difficult to understand how quantum theory is in any sense “mechanics.” It is much more like “organics,” which is a different concept. However that may be, the Newtonian concept has percolated into the very roots of our common sense.
The advantage of the spotlight is it gives you intensely concentrated light on restricted areas. A floodlight, by comparison, has less intensity. However, if this room were in total darkness, and you used the spotlight with a very thin beam and you scanned the room with it, you would have to retain in memory all the areas over which it passed and then, by an additive process, you would make out the contours of the room. Now it seems to me that this is something in which civilized man, both in the East and in the West, has specialized. This is a method of paying attention to things which we call “noticing,” and therefore it is highly selective.
However, the problem that arises is very obviously one of over-specialization. Everybody knows this is prevalent in the science of medicine. On the one hand you may have a specialist who really understands the function of the gallbladder and has studied gallbladders ad infinitum. However, whenever he looks at a human being he sees them in terms of their gallbladder.
A mechanism is assembled; you add this bit to that bit, that bit to this bit. However, an organism grows from within, you do not see little bits coming from all directions to join each other, finally making up a shape. It is more like watching a photographic plate developing.
So then, if we are trying to control and understand the world through the scanning system of conscious attention which takes in everything a bit at a time, and if that is the only method we rely on, we are going to run into a problem. Everything is going to appear increasingly to be too complicated to manage.
Let us go back from the spotlight to the floodlight, to the extraordinary capacity of the human nervous system to comprehend situations instantaneously without analysis, that is to say without verbal or numerical symbolism of the situation in order to understand it. We rely heavily upon abstract representation, yet we have this curious ability of pattern recognition which the mechanical systems have only in a very primitive way.
The axioms of any given system must always be defined in terms of a higher system. However, you are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos, and so you cannot figure you out.
The assumption of Judeo-Christian culture is that man in his nature is sinful, and therefore cannot be trusted. On the other hand, the assumption of ancient Chinese culture is that man in his essential nature is good, and therefore has to be trusted.
This position has amazing political consequences. If we come to a different assumption and say, “No, we human beings are fallible, basically selfish, and really fundamentally evil, we therefore need law and order and a control system to put us in order.” We thereby project these control systems onto the church or the police, or onto somebody who is really ourselves disguised. All of this is very much like the convention of daylight savings time. Everybody could simply get up an hour earlier, but instead of doing that we alter the clock because a clock is a kind of authority, and we say “Well, the clock says it is time for you to get up.” The Native Americans laugh at the “palefaces” because they say, “The paleface does not know when he is hungry until he looks at his watch.” So in this way we become clock-dominated, and the abstract system takes over from the physical, organic situation. As a result, we have run into a cultural situation where we have confused the symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth, the menu with the dinner, and as a result we are starving from eating menus.