..."Let us try to imagine a universe, a realm of experience or a field of consciousness, lacking any extreme which could be called pain or the horrors. Although a fortunate person may pass days, months, and years in most pleasant and comfortable circumstances, there is always an apprehension, a thought in the back of the mind, that pain in some form is at least possible. It lurks around the corner, and he knows that he is fortunate because, all about him, there are those who suffer. All experience, all awareness, seems to be of varied spectra of vibrations so ordered that their extremes, like yin and yang, must in some way go together. If we cut a bar magnet in halves, so as to take off its north pole, we find only that each half has now north and south poles as before. Thus a universe without the polarity of pleasure and pain would be difficult indeed to imagine. In many societies we have gone a long way towards getting rid of such monstrosities as legal torture and, by medical means, of the pains of disease and surgery. Yet new dreads seem to take their place, and there is always the specter of death in the background. If, then, we go deep into the very nature of feeling, we begin to see that we do not, and even cannot, want a universe without this polarity. In other words, so long as we desire the experience called pleasure we imply, and so generate, its opposite. Therefore Buddhists and Taoists alike speak of the sage as one who has no desires, though the latter also speak of him as one whose ‘joy and anger occur as naturally as the four seasons,’ and here may lie a clue to the problem. For is it even possible not to desire? Trying to get rid of desire is, surely, desiring not to desire. Any project to suppress desire would obviously be contrary to the spirit of ‘wu-wei’, and implies that ‘I’ am some separate potency which can either subdue desire or be subdued by it. Wu-wei is to roll with experiences and feelings as they come and go, like a ball in a mountain stream, though actually there is no ball apart from the convolutions and wiggles of the stream itself. This is called ‘flowing with the moment,’ though it can happen only when it is clear that there is nothing else to do, since there is no experience which is not now. This now-streaming (nuncfluens) is the Tao itself, and when this is clear innumerable problems vanish. For so long as there is the notion of ourselves as something different from the Tao, all kinds of tensions build up as between ‘me’ on the one hand, and ‘experiences’ on the other. No action, no force (wei) will get rid of this tension arising from the duality of the knower and the known, just as one cannot blow away the night. Light, or intuitive understanding, alone will dissipate the darkness. As with the ball in the stream, there is no resistance to the up when now going up, and no resistance to the down when now going down. To resist is to get seasick." ~Alan Watts...
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 11:22:07 +0000
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