Just Flow – Alan Watts

juancho says when your belt is comfortable you don't feel it when your shoes are comfortable it is as if you weren't wearing any likewise your clothes the more you are aware of these things the less properly they are made or the less properly they fit but we raise an objection to this if I don't know I'm there I seem to be missing everything we want to know that we know if we're happy and we don't know we're happy we might just as well not be happy to be happy and to know that you're happy is really the overflowing of the cup of life of course the penalty for that is to be miserable and to know that you're miserable some people are miserable without knowing it but uh you know my Limerick there was a young man who said though it seems that I know that I know but I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know now this is the great human predicament the development of self-consciousness the development of the possibility of reflecting upon one's own knowledge and this is simultaneously a blessing and a curse and taoism does not escape this problem I mean it doesn't it doesn't avoid this problem it deals with it but it doesn't deal with it obviously so we get back to this fundamental verse about the nature of the what is highly virtuous is a virtue that is not conscious of itself as virtue the moment it's conscious of itself as such you see it fails so in this way we love to see a child dancing all by itself lost in the dance and not performing for an audience we say oh if only I could dance like that if only I could become like a child again innocent but then soon we know when parents notice how beautifully a child dances and they all approve of it and say to this child dance for us child begins to lose this power and it puts on heirs it knows its notice and we don't like that you say that's affectation that's showing off that's phony what we want you to do is to dance as if you had no audience not even yourself which of course puts the child in a double bind because it says to the child we require you to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it as if it wasn't required we do that all the time to our children to each other you must love me after all you promise to do so to when we got married in June so this is the difficulty but somehow a very great artist in the maturity of his life somehow is able at least to give the impression that he does what he does without playing to the gallery without self-consciousness it seems perfectly natural so how does he get there there was a Taoist Sage later that loud sir his name was we romanized that as l i e h and he had a reputation for being able to ride on the Wind so light and Johnson says in one place it's easy enough to stand still the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground because in the state of being in accord with the Dao there is a certain feeling of weightlessness parallel to the weightlessness that people feel when they get into outer space or when they go deep into the ocean this is of course connected with the Sensation that you're not carrying your body around I described this morning the Sensation that an expert driver has when he really is with it on a car that the hill lifts him up and drops him down the other side that he and the road are all one process and that's equivalent to the sense of weightlessness and so this is connected to this is the inner meaning of lieza riding on the Wind when Suzuki was asked what is it like to have Satori he said it's just like ordinary everyday experience except about two inches off the ground a person who has mushin or no mind or no heart in Chinese is a very high order of person it means that his psychic Center doesn't get in its own way it operates as if it wasn't there juanza says that the highest form of man uses his shin like a mirror it grasps nothing it refuses nothing it receives but does not keep and the poem says when the geese fly over the water and the area are reflected in the water that the geese do not intend to cast their reflection and the water has no mind to retain their image so when the human being developed the power to be aware of himself to know that he knows in other words when the cortex was formed over the original brain he fell from Grace that was the fall of Man because when he felt he had the sensation of being in charge of being in control of himself and you can only have that sensation when you are aware of what you're doing he got anxious am I aware enough of myself have I taken enough factors into consideration have I done all that should be done and then he started trembling this was the fall of Man of course this is what is meant the it louder says when the Great Dao lost there came duty to man and right conduct in other words nobody talks about how you ought to behave unless things have gone radically wrong there wouldn't be any conception of faithful ministers of the state unless there are a lot of lousy politicians around no one would talk about filial piety unless there were Wayward sons and daughters so there is constantly in the tradition of taoism the idea that all moral preaching is confusion your attempt to eliminate self is a positive manifestation of selfishness you are like a person beating a drum in search of a fugitive all talk about selfishness all talk about is success in becoming virtuous or enlightened or integrated or non-neurotic or self-actualized let's use all the terms that are being used all this talk attest to the fact that it hasn't happened and will in fact get in the way of its happening