Alan Watts Teaches Meditation

I was listening to a lecture “Alan Watts Teaches Meditation” (mp3 format) and I thought that I would share a bit of what he said on this blog. I enjoy listening to Alan Watts. Thankfully, there is a lot of great recordings of his available on the web. While in Berkeley, I used to listen to these dharma talks of his on a local public radio station. Anyway, I took the time to transcribe a few minutes of the talk. If anyone is interested in the audio files, let me know and I will tell you how to get them.

Alan Watts: The Vegetable Root Discourses

[Here is a transcript from one of the scores of Alan Watts’ talks I have in mp3 format.]

[Begin transcript of Alan’s talk.]

I’m not really a musician but it just so happens that I have in front of me a fabulous instrument which the Japanese call koto. I suppose it would be best described as a table harp. Long instrument stringed with bridges – horizontal harp.

It was customary among Chinese poets in the old days to read poetry and strum on the lute or table harp at the same time. And I have got here a curious old text called Ts’ai-ken T’an – which means the “Vegetable Root Discourses” – written by Koji Tse (sp?) somewhere around 1624.

The Monk and the Philosopher

All the successful techniques for manipulating matter originated mainly in the West but the greater achievement of manipulating the mind – I am justifiably proud to claim – originated in India. In my opinion, the mind has precedence over matter. For the moment I will sidestep the other matter that it is a mistake to make a distinction between mind and matter – there isn’t in my opinion. But for the moment, I will treat them as being different as most people do.

Reduce your attention deficit

Everything has a cost and this arises from the basic fact that we are mortals. We are given a finite amount of time. Time is the limiting constraint, not money or stuff. The more stuff out there that clamors for our attention, the more acutely we wish “had we but world enough, and time.”[1] Aside from material stuff, we are also drowning in information. They call it the “attention economy.”[2] The result of a surfeit of things to attend to is the premium on attention.

Form is Emptiness

Buddha Purnima

You have to agree that Siddhartha Gautama had great timing. His birth was during the full moon in the month of May. He attained enlightenment and became a buddha some years later on a full moon in the month of May. And to round it all off, he attained parinirvana (died) during a full moon of May when he was old.

The full moon is so bright outside my bedroom window this morning that it woke me up at 4 AM. It being the 2nd of May, this month we will have “a blue moon” – a second full moon in the same month. Two “purnima’s,” as a full moon is called in Sanskrit (and many of its daughter languages.) This purnima is called the Buddha Purnima.

Who am I?

The delightful story told in an earlier post Thoughts Without a Thinker must be followed by the story that Amar was kind enough to point me to on his blog. Go read Tat Tvam Asi (That Thou Art).

Thoughts Without a Thinker

Many years ago I had read a book by Mark Epstein called Thoughts Without a Thinker, which is about psychotherapy from a Buddist perspective. I enjoyed the book immensely of course, but there is something in the first chapter that I cannot resist quoting in full.

The Four Noble Truths

Little drops of water
Little grains sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the beauteous land

I think the time has come to speak of little things. Things that add up like little grains of sand and little drops of water. Individually, they seem irrelevant and inconsequential. But they matter very much in the end.

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Saturday evening plans included meeting friends for drinks at the Cricket Club of India near the Churchgate station. Karthik said it was so close to the station that anyone would be able to tell me. I asked but there was no address he could give me. I arrived at the Churchgate station well on time. Then for the next 25 minutes I tried to get to the Cricket Club of India.

It was not more than 10 minutes walk from the station. But not having an address, I had to rely on asking people. They generally waved in various, often contradictory, directions. Finally, after a couple of mobile calls to Karthik, I arrived about 10 minutes late at the CCI.

It does not take a genius to figure out that without numbers and addresses, it is difficult to locate a place; that it is wasteful and frustrating. It is not as if addresses and numbers are a modern new-fangled invention that requires all sorts of fancy high-tech equipment and massive amounts of capital spending to put in place. Any idiot with half a brain can figure out that without a proper addressing scheme, people waste time and effort needlessly. Yet, I notice the almost universal lack of a rational street addressing in India.

Sure, in business cards you see addresses printed. But it is not an address but rather a description of the general neighborhood. “In front of this, and behind that, and near to the other, and opposite something else, close to the cinema.” The addresses generally run into 4 or 5 lines. Even then you are not likely to find it in a hurry.

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This morning, I thought I would call the Confederation of Indian Industries offices in New Delhi. I am invited to speak at their 6th Social Summit Dec 17-19 “National Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility” in Bhopal. It was supposed to be just a simple call to ask for a list of participants.

After over an hour of my time and significant costs in long distance charges, I still don’t have that information. I had no idea of how difficult it was going to be. I dialed the number, it kept ringing and then the phone system finally timed-out. I called again a few minutes later. It was busy. I tried all four listed numbers; they were either busy, or were not answered. I tried again after a while. This time someone answered. They mumbled something, as if they were answering the phone while asleep.

“Hello, is this CII?”

“Yes.”

“I am trying to reach Ms. xyz.”

Without a word of reply, I find myself listening to muzak. It goes on for few minutes. Finally, someone picks up the phone. I could hear the person talking to someone else in their office with the phone off the hook and I was kept waiting. I hung up after a few minutes. After a while, I re-started the whole process. After another 20 minutes, I was finally speaking to someone. Left a message asking for information.

Later in the afternoon, when I still had not heard back from them, I started the whole thing once again. This time I lost my cool. When the operator answered, I said, “Listen to me carefully, and don’t transfer me before you fully comprehend what I am looking for.” Then I carefully explained her job to her.

To cut a long story short, this was not a 2-bit fly-by-night operation I was trying to reach. It was an industry association representing thousands of firms. One would have expected a little bit of professionalism. They don’t even know how to answer the phone. Their shabbiness is astonishingly blatant. Surely, this is no professionally run organization.

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The two anecdotes illustrate a larger point that I would like to make. I submit that for India to develop, there has to be a change in our outlook. We need to think very carefully about what exactly the problems are and then think very deeply about what are the appropriate solutions for them.

Economists like to remind people that learning by doing is a very powerful device. If you are at the fore-front of some technology, the only way to learn is by doing and making mistakes and so on. But I believe that if you are not at the cutting-edge, then learning by imitating is the way to go. It does not require a rocket scientist to keep ones eyes open, note very carefully how others have solved a specific problem, and simply copy that solution if it is applicable. That way you don’t have to pay the price of having to discover the solution and yet you get the benefit of having the solution. This is the advantage that can come of being a late-comer. Among siblings, it is often the case that the second born appears to be sharper than the first born because of this learning by imitation.

Development economists often wonder about the so-called convergence hypothesis, that is, developing countries grow faster than developed countries and eventually catch up. One of the factors that governs the rate of growth of an economy is the level of knowledge. Information internalized leads to knowledge. Now these days information is no longer a really big secret: it speeds around the globe at electromagnetic speeds. Why is it then, one wonders, that the poor countries cannot use the information effectively to increase their growth rates and pull themselves out of poverty?

My contention is that merely having knowledge is not enough. The system has to be attuned to make use of that knowledge for it to be useful. In a very broad sense, it is larger ecology of the society that determines whether a give bit of knowledge or technology will be useful in a society or not. The tranfer of knowledge is a much harder problem than the transfer of technology.

In other words, you could very easily import a million PCs and tons of software from some advanced industrialized country. Or you could import the technology and build them locally. Will that have an effect on the growth rate of the economy? Marginally at best. But for real change, you would also have to the way things are perceived. That is a much harder problem to crack. It is harder because it is a soft issue — it deals with people, their belief systems, their emotions, their understanding of who they are, their ambitions and hopes, their fears and insecurities.

I come back to my original position: ICT merely provides the tools. How to effectively use the tools is not part of the software package. That cannot be imported in a box any more than merely stacking books on quantum physics in your living room makes you a physicist.

We have to change our view. Two and a half millennia ago, the historical Buddha Gautama had outlined an Eight-fold Path as the Fourth Noble Truth. While all of them are important, the most important in my opinion is that of Right View. We have to find the right way to view the problems we face. Only then can we take the first steps to fixing them. My fear is that we are too eager to rush in with technological fixes to problems that are primarily sociological.

It is ironical that we have not learnt a lesson that was taught in this land by the Buddha. He was unhappy about something. So first he decided to fully understand what the problem was and state it unequivocally. That was the First Noble Truth, the truth about dukkha. Then he figured out the cause and called it the Second Noble Truth. Then he did what I would call an existence proof, that is show that a solution does indeed exist. That was the Third Noble Truth. Finally, the Fourth Noble Truth with its Eight-fold Path.

The lesson we should have learnt is that of the systematic application of reason to any problem. First, define the problem, then understand the cause, then show that the cause can be eliminated, and then finally outline the solution.

So my advice to all those who are ICT-trigger-happy, think before you fire up the internet browser. The answer may not be there at all.