Watts...Again?

Perhaps my last entry on the Alan Watts theme. Again, from "The Essential Alan Watts" (1977).

...imagine what it would be like to regress, as it's called in psychotherapeutic language, to babyhood. And, here you are. You really don't know anything about anything. All you know is what you feel. You've no sense of time. You don't know the difference between who you are and what you see. You don't know anything. You don't know any language, no words in your head. Now consider what it would be like to stop thinking, stop talking to yourself, and simply be aware. You hear all the sound going on but you don't put names on them. You see all these colors and forms buzzing at you, but you don't call them anything. You just experience.

That's a pretty crazy state of consciousness because there's no past, there's no future, there's no difference between you and what you're aware of. It's all one, or none, or both, or neither--there are no words. You would be in a state which in yoga is called nirvikalpa samadhi, a very high consciousness in which illusions vanish--Eternal Now. It is a kind of metaphorical death. It is the death of your self-image, your idea of yourself, your concept of yourself.

Literal death, or the immediate prospect thereof, can bring a person into that state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is highly invigorating, because all the energy which you were wasting on worrying is now available for other things. All the energy you were wasting on trying to hold onto yourself is now available for things that can be done, and so people, paradoxically, are pepped up by the acceptance of death in its various senses. So a hospital, where many people are in one way or another dying, should be a place of immense joy.

But we don't allow it to be like that, because we have the fixed idea that people in the hospital are in trouble, and we show them by the way we attend and relate to them emotionally: "Yes, you are in trouble." Well then, of course they feel in trouble. They have to play that role.

There is nothing that causes more trouble to people than helping them. The moment you take the attitude of, "you are sick," people learn to eat pity, and thrive on it, and play sick as a role to get attention, sympathy, care, and to engage in a masochism of gaining a sense of identity through being in peril or misfortune.

When I was an Anglican minister, I once had a woman come to me when her husband died of a heart attack and her son was killed in a terrible accident. She was beside herself with grief. Understandably. I took a look at this woman and I thought, I'm not going to give her any bullshit. So I asked her to explore her grief. What is it to grieve? Where do you feel grief? What part of your body is it in? What sort of feeling is it? What images are connected with it? In every way we explored grief. And by God, she got over it. Because eventually, concentrating on it as a sensation, she stopped talking to herself and saying, "Poor little me, I've lost my son, I've lost my husband," and repeating these words over and over which hypnotize you and perpetuate a feeling of being important because you're in a state of grief.

So it seems to me that anybody in the hospital professions, the healing professions, must get the hang of this somehow, and stop running unskillful institutions. There's no reason why hospitals should be designed the way they are. Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. Dying only happens once to you, so it should be a great event. Special "sanitariums", which means "a place of sanity" should be arranged for different methods of dying. How would you like to die? Do you want a very, very marvelous religious ceremony? Do you want to invite all your friends to a champagne party? Do you want to be among flowers? How would you like to die if you really had a choice?

You could take an extremely positive attitude to death as the greatest opportunity you'll ever have to experience what it's like to let go of yourself... that which there is no greater bliss.

...Jung once made a joke, "Life is a disease with a very bad prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends in death."

So death is most important. Westerners, particularly, are scared of it. It's the one awful awful that mustn't happen, because, well...why are we afraid of it? Some of us say, "It's not death I'm afraid of, it's dying." Well that makes sense, but then medicine doesn't help: medicine prolongs dying. It doesn't really prolong life, I mean, it sometimes does, but for old people particularly, it prolongs dying. Terminal cancer is prolonged dying.

Still, there is something spooky about death. even if you're not religious and you don't believe in an afterlife which might be awful, I mean, who knows? But supposing death is like going to sleep and never waking up. That's quite something to think about. I find thinking about death is one of the most creative things one can do. To go to sleep and never wake up. Fancy that. It won't be like going into the dark forever, it won't be like being buried forever. There'll be no problems at all: there's no regret. It will be as if you had never existed at all, and not only you, everything else as well. It never was there. No further problems.

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Gaga Sez:

This summer I spent reading about cosmological physics (sort of part of my job as a test designer actually). What this is all about is the science of the phsyical universe...how big it is, how it moves, how it began, and where it is going.

But even without going into the measurements and all that, I look out into the sky at night, and see all these little dots of light, and they tell me most of these dots are stars. The stars are so very far away that the light of some of them takes 4 billion years to reach my eyes. Imagine that. It's almost impossible to give any kind of meaning to 4 billion years.

But if this were true as they say it is (it's all based on scientific observation) it means that as I look out at the night sky, I am seeing events that took place 4 billion years ago. And yet, these events are unfolding now. Further, tomorrow, I will see more light from 4 billion years ago... and tomorrow has not even happened!

So when I look out at the night sky, I am in the now moment, seeing events that took place in the far, far, past, and yet tommorow, this light will be in the future.

Further, they say that the universe is infinite. That is even too hard for us to imagine at all. It means it goes on forever and ever.

If this were true, then wherever you are right now, you are in the middle of the universe. Everything is in the middle. Wherever your position is, it is the center.

Things continue to be just so juicy....