~ ∞ ~ The Essence of Zen - Awaken the Living Awareness Within ~ ∞ ~ |
Alan Watts - Seeing Through the Net Full Lecture. So individuals increasingly feel themselves obstructed by their own cautiousness. This is basically what it is. Now, to explain myself first of all, because most of you are strangers to me, I am a philosopher who has for many years been interested in the mutual fructification of Eastern cultures and Western cultures, studying Oriental ideas, not in the spirit of saying to the West, “You ought to be converted to Oriental ideas,” but in the spirit of saying, “You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.” Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions, but very few people know what they are.
So individuals increasingly feel themselves obstructed by their own cautiousness. This is basically what it is. Now, to explain myself first of all, because most of you are strangers to me, I am a philosopher who has for many years been interested in the mutual fructification of Eastern cultures and Western cultures, studying Oriental ideas, not in the spirit of saying to the West, “You ought to be converted to Oriental ideas,” but in the spirit of saying, “You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.” Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions, but very few people know what they are.
Therefore, we have to find cultures which are in some ways as sophisticated as our own but as different from our own as possible. And of course for this purpose I always thought that the Chinese were optimal, and the Indians, the East Indians and that, by studying the ideas of these people, and by studying their life goals, we could become more aware of our own. It’s the old principle of triangulation, you don’t establish the situation of a particular object unless you observe it from two different points of view, and thereby calculate its actual distance from you.
So, by looking at what we are pleased to call the reality of the physical world from this basic standpoints of different cultures, I think we are in a better position to know where we are than if we only have one single line of sight. Therefore, this has been my interest and my background, and arising out of this there has come a further question which I would call “the problems of human ecology.” How is man to be best related to his environment, especially in circumstances where we are in possession of an extremely powerful technology and have therefore the capacity to change our environment far more than anyone else has ever been able to do so? Are we going to end up not by civilizing the world but by Los-Angelezing it? In other words, are we going to foul our own nest as a result of technology? But all of this gets down to the basic question is, really: “What are you going to do if you are God?