Alan Watts - A Natural Satori

Transcribed by yours truly from The Inevitable Ecstasy (Part One) lecture, part of the Out of Your Mind lecture series (click here for the audio):

Back in 1958 I was in Zurich, and there met an extraordinary man by the name of Karlfried von Dürckheim.  He was a former German diplomat, who had studied Zen in Japan, and when he came back after the war, he opened a meditation school and retreat in the Black Forest.  And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, a lot of my work has to do with people who went through spiritual crises during the war.”  And, he said, “You know, we all know when a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation, and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori.”  And that’s what I mean when I was explaining that when one gets to an extreme – that is to say to the point when you realize there is nothing you can do about life, nothing you can not do about life, then you’re the mosquito biting the iron bull.  Well, so in the same way he said, “Look.  You heard a bomb coming at you, you could hear it whistle, and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you and that you were finished.  And you accepted it.  And suddenly, there was a strange feeling that everything is absolutely clear.  You suddenly see that there isn’t a grain of dust in the whole universe that’s in the wrong place.  That you understand completely, absolutely, totally what it’s all about, cause’ you can’t say what it is.”  But he said in so many cases the bomb was a dud, and they lived to tell the tale. Or he said you were in a concentration camp, and you’ve been there so long that you gave up all hope whatsoever of ever getting out.  You were just going through this miserable, boring, degrading grind week after week after week; nobody paid the slightest attention to you as an individual.  You knew you would never get out, and you accepted it, and suddenly something changed.  This extraordinary feeling: freedom.  Or he said, you were a displaced refugee. You had lost your family, you didn’t know whether they even existed, you were miles from your home, you didn’t know whether it existed, you had lost your job, your very identity.  You were absolutely nowhere, and you accepted it, and suddenly you were as light as a feather and free as the air.  Now he said, so many people have had those experiences and they’d talk about them to their families and friends, and they’d say, “Oh well, you were under terrific pressure and you probably had some hallucination, you know?”  Well he said, “I am showing those people that so far from having a hallucination, those were the few, few occasions in which they woke up.”

So you see this is always the opportunity presented by death.  That if one can go into death with eyes open, and have somebody help you if necessary, to give up before your die, this extraordinary thing can happen to you.  So that from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say, “I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for the world – now I understand why we die.  The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life’s all about – by letting go, because then we come to a situation that the ego can’t deal with.  When we are no longer hypnotize by that, then our natural consciousnesses can see clearly what all this universe is for. 

So therefore we have missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way, instead of having a socially understood acceptance of death and rejoicing in death.  Now I could imagine that one person would want to rejoice in death in an entirely different way from another.  Like, um, let’s say a wedding – is a rite of passage.  There are certainly some forms of celebrating a wedding which I would find a total bore, and quite offensive; other ways would be good, I would enjoy it.  So everybody, in other words, I’m not saying that you’ve gotta get mixed up with a lot of people coming laughing around you and giving you presents and cards and everything because you’re going to die.  Heh heh! But, I’m only indicating a general thing, that the doctor, the ministers, the psychiatrists, and above all us – really owe it to our friends to work out an enitrely new approach to death.  Because what has happened you see, from earliest childhood the child learned that great-uncle was dying, and saw the family put on long faces and say, “Aahhhh, that’s too bad.”  Even Christians, who think they’re going to go to heaven, you know, they get absolutely morbid, more so than anybody else about death because heaven as they all know is a very boring place.  And so, this frightful thing, “Oh this death, you know.” And one understands that for the living, to lose someone you love, or even for a dying person to worry about what on Earth my wife, my children, my whatever are going to do without me… One can understand  a certain worry in that, but nobody’s indispensable, and there comes a point when you have to say, “I’m sorry, but I am completely going to abandon responsibility for anything, because there is no further way I can do it.”  This is another way of that surrender.  And then the curious thing that occurs is the moment all that is dropped, suddenly it dawns on you that to be important, existence does not have to go on any longer than a moment.  Quantitative continuity is of no value.  How long can you hold your breath?  Who cares? 

       So, it follows from that you see, that if any one of us, without being shocked into it by being bombed or put in a concentration camp, could at this moment be as one about to die, genuinely and honestly, we would understand the mystery of life, because death is the - in a certain sense - the source of life.  Just as we see in nature when the leaves fall from the trees they mold and rot, and this supplies hummus from which more plants can grow, it’s a cycle like that.  But in every way, symbolic and otherwise, human beings try to stop that cycle.  Unamuno said, “Human beings are the only species that horde their dead.”  And therefore with the ghastly art of the mortician, we try to make the body unpalatable to the worms, and so to stop life, as if to be eaten in due course were an indignity to the human being, whereas we eat everything else and we give nothing back.  So that is a kind of a social symptom of our profound disorientation with respect to death.  We think death is unnatural, and furthermore, we think birth is a disease, and send the mamma to the hosptial for the most unnatural, weird kind of parturition.  In other words, more and more one regards the healthy and inevitable and natural transformations of the body as pathological.  I can imagine, you know, people having sexual intercourse on an operating table to be sure that the whole thing is hygienic.  Ha ha!  You know, uhh, everything about us like that has become over-interfered with by specialists, and less and less the province of our own preferences.  It’s very very hard indeed to die in your own way, without some blasted bunch of relatives that come fussing around and insisting that you go to a hospital, that you get fixed with the tortures of being fed through tubes and things to keep you alive indefinitely and waste the family savings.  It’s even a crime to commit suicide.  Now this is simply nonsense.  It’s this perfect panic to survive at all costs.

Comments

[JoeyBrilliant]

Fascinating piece.

[Scarlet Nat]

I came here as I was trying to find the origin of the opening sequence of the song 'Edison's medicine' by the band In Letter Form. Seems I have found the source here!

[Jhoan Laguna]

Hi! The video with the audio of Watt's speech isn't available anymore. Please, post another link to hear the audio. Thanks a lot!