Just Trust The Universe – Alan Watts

lauza puts it in this way the great dao flows everywhere both to the left and to the right it loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them and when merits are accomplished it lays no claim to them the more therefore you relinquish power trust others the more powerful you become but in such a way that instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else and they carry it on for you so you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning you can even tell it i want to wake up at six o'clock and it'll wake you up just like an alarm clock this seems a sort of paradox to say this but the principle of unity of coming to a sense of of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe that will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever the way to become one with the universe is to trust it as another as you would another and say let's see what you're going to do but in doing that you see in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you you are also saying it to yourself because finally as i pointed out you do not know where your decisions come from so when we decide we're always worrying did i think this over long enough did i take enough data into consideration and if you think it through you find you never could take enough data into consideration the data for a decision in any given situation is infinite so what you do is you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this and then when the time comes to act you make a snap judge i mean i'm speaking a little extremely uh making some fun of it and so on because after all uh we we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds but we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right it's amazing how often it works but warriors are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen so then when you make a decision and it works out all right i think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control but somehow or other you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority that's why very great businessmen are those who can delegate authority trust others to work for them because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism delegation of authority it loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them and you see then what is happening is this the more you let go of it and trust it as if it were quite other than you the more you realize the inseparable identity of self and other to go back if you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self no go if on the other hand you you find it through giving self that is control over to other and trusting that you may make a mistake you may make a bad gamble but in the long run you're acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution this is the way biological evolution goes on constant delegation of authority that's why obviously the democracy is superior to the monarchy mr tockfield who said that democracy is always right but for the wrong reasons because there is operating in a democracy the principle that buckminster fuller calls synergy synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members because that's goes back again to this point that we're always entering a new environment we don't ever know fully what the new environment is because the only environments we know the past ones there is always then operating in uh the development of cellular life on any level a new way of organization higher than any existing reform and we are not aware of it until after it's happened so we do come out of this uh way of of thinking to something which has i i would say the most enormously creative and revolutionary social consequences that it has become not virtuous not self-sacrificing and not anything like that it has become the hardest practical politics to let go control to others to give up trying to dominate the scene also in a parallel way it has become at this time in our history very much hard practical politics to learn how to enjoy ourselves you can go to the protestant people with their protestant ethic who are against this kind of thing and now say to them with greatly it is your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy yourself why because in an age of leisure people have really got to know how to enjoy themselves because if they don't they'll smash the whole future of the human race you