Alan Watts animated lectures (By Trey Parker, Matt Stone)
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I suppose most of you have heard of zen
But before going on to explain any details about it, i want to make one thing absolutely clear
I am not a zen buddhist, i am not advocating zen buddhism, i am not trying to convert anyone to it.
I have nothing to sell
I am an entairtainer
That is to say, in the same sense,
that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play mozart
he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music
he doesn't want to convert you to anything, he doesn't want you to join an organisation, in favor of Mozart's music as opposed, to say, Beethoven's
And i approach you in the same spirit. As a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin
I just want you to enjoy, a point of view which i enjoy
Prickles and Goo
You see in the history of philosophy and poetry and art, we always find the interchange of two peronality types, which i call prickles and goo
The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupanism
They want rigour, they want precise statistics
And they have a certain flick attitude in their voices. And you know that, very well in academic circles
There are people who are always edgy like that
And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical
But the vague, miasmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being near skeletons with no flesh on their bones
And they say to you "You just rattle"
You're not really a human being, you know the words but you dont know the music
And so therefore, if you belong to the prickly type you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles
if you belong to the gooey type you hope it's waves
If you are prickly you are a catharsist and if you are gooey you are a romanticist
And, we 're going back into mediaval philosophy, if you are prickly you are a normalist, if you're gooey you re a realist
But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively
It's gooey prickles and prickly goo
And, you see it all depends on your level of magnification
If you got your magnification on something, so that the focus is clear. You've got a prickly point of view
You got structure, shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined
You look look out of focus and it all goes "blewa" and you got goo
We are always playing with the two
Appling
Look. Here is a tree in a garden and every summer it produces apples
And we call it an apple tree. Because the tree apples, that's what it does
Now here is a solar system inside a galaxy
And one of the peculiarities of this solar system, is that, there is , at least, on the planet earth a thing called peoples
In just the same way as a tree apples
Now maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer
and had a look at the solar system. And they looked it over and shrug their shoulders and said "Just a bunch of rocks". And they went away.
Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again
And they said "Excuse me, we though it was a bunch of rocks but it's peopleing and it's alive.After all it has done something intelligent"
Because you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.
If evolution means anything it means that
But you see, we curiously twist it
We say, well first of all in the beginning, there was nothing but gas and rock. And then intelligence happened to arise in it
You know like a fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing
But we're thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects intelligence from the rocks
Where there are rocks. Watch out! Watch out, because the rocks are going, eventually, to become alive
I
I've always been trementously interested in what people mean by the word " I "
Because it comes out in curious lapses of speech
We don't say "I am a body" .
We say "I have a body"
Ans somehow we don't seem to identify ourselves with all of ourselves
We say. sort of, "My feet", "My hands", "My teeth"
As if they were something, somehow outside me.
And as far as i can make up, most people, feel that they are something other, about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes
Inside the head, that is what you call the ego
That's not what you are at all
Because it gives you the idea that you are a chauffeur inside your own body
As if your body were an automobile and you were the chauffeur principle inside it
But you've been caught in a trap, because your body is kind of a mess
It gets sick, tired, hurts and eventually, wears out and dies
But you feel caught in the thing, because you feel different from it
And you feel the world outside your body is an awfull trap, full of stupid people
Who are some times nice to you, but mostly aren't, because they are all out for themselves, like you are
And the rest of it, outside of people, are absolutely dumb. Animals, plants , mere vegetables, rocks
And finally behind the whole thing, blazing, centers of radioactivity called stars
and out there where there is no air, that is no place for a person to live.
And so, we have come tho feel ourselves as confronted with, a world that doesn't give a damn about us
Life and Music
In music, one doesn't make the end of the composition, the point of the composition
If that was so, the best conductors would be those who played bach
And there would be composers who wrote only finales
People going in concerts, just to hear one crushing gong, so that's the end
But we don't see that, as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct
We've got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression
It's all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of "Come on, kitty kitty kitty"
And then you go into the kindergarden, you know, and that's a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade
And then, come on, first grade leads into second grade and then so on.
And then you get out of grade school, you got high school
And it's revving up, the thing is coming, then you gonna go to college
By then, you go to graduate school
An when you are through with graduate school, you go out and join the world
And then you get into some racket, where you are selling insurance
And they got that quota to make, and you gotta make that
And all this time this thing it's coming, it's coming, that great thing, the success you are working for
And then you wake up one day, about 40 years old and you say "My God! I've arrived"
"I'm there". And you don't feel very different from what you always felt
And there is a slight letdown because you feel is a hoax
And there was a hoax. A dreadfull hoax
They made you miss everything
We thought of life by analogy with a journey,
with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end
Success or whatever it is maybe heaven, after you're dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along.
It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.