"Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" Man and Nature

1 00:00:00,334 --> 00:00:08,050 And modern life with Alan W. Watts. 2 00:00:08,175 --> 00:00:15,140 Produced by KQED San Francisco for the Educational Television and Radio Center. 3 00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:23,074 4 00:00:24,608 --> 00:00:27,527 Alan Watts is a scholar, lecturer, 5 00:00:27,653 --> 00:00:34,618 and the author of many widely read books on comparative philosophy and religion. 6 00:00:54,221 --> 00:00:55,764 It was as a result 7 00:00:55,889 --> 00:00:58,558 of looking at paintings like this. 8 00:00:58,684 --> 00:01:03,021 But I first became interested in Eastern philosophy. 9 00:01:03,146 --> 00:01:08,986 That was many years ago when I was a boy, only about 14 years old. 10 00:01:09,111 --> 00:01:12,406 And the thing that grasped me and excited me about this vision of the 11 00:01:12,531 --> 00:01:16,076 world was the astonishing sympathy and feeling for the world of nature. 12 00:01:25,502 --> 00:01:32,509 Think, for example, of a painting like this, which is called Mountain After Rain. 13 00:01:34,803 --> 00:01:38,223 A painting by the Chinese artist Gao Kogung, showing the mist 14 00:01:38,348 --> 00:01:41,810 and clouds drifting away after a wet night of pouring rain. 15 00:01:53,488 --> 00:01:56,867 And it's fascinating for us to think that pictures of this 16 00:01:56,992 --> 00:02:00,495 kind are not what we would call just landscape paintings. 17 00:02:05,500 --> 00:02:07,127 They are also icons. 18 00:02:07,252 --> 00:02:12,632 That is to say, they are a religious and philosophical kind of painting. 19 00:02:12,758 --> 00:02:16,136 We are used, of course, in thinking of iconographic or religious paintings, of 20 00:02:16,261 --> 00:02:19,765 thinking of pictures of human figures, of angels and saints and divine beings. 21 00:02:23,268 --> 00:02:26,813 But when the mind of the Chinese expresses its religious 22 00:02:26,938 --> 00:02:30,275 feelings, it expresses it in the objects of nature. 23 00:02:35,530 --> 00:02:38,700 And their feeling for nature is in one very 24 00:02:38,825 --> 00:02:42,537 important respect strangely different from ours. 25 00:02:44,122 --> 00:02:48,418 And that is as a result of the sensation that the human being 26 00:02:48,543 --> 00:02:51,546 is not someone who stands apart from nature and 27 00:02:51,671 --> 00:02:54,674 looks at it from an entirely outside position. 28 00:02:54,800 --> 00:02:59,638 But the human being has himself the feeling of belonging right in nature. 29 00:02:59,763 --> 00:03:01,848 And this is very startlingly illustrated. 30 00:03:01,973 --> 00:03:05,310 If you look at another painting, this one by the great Song 31 00:03:05,435 --> 00:03:08,980 Dynasty painter, Ma Yuan, called Poet Drinking by Moonlight. 32 00:03:15,529 --> 00:03:16,196 You would think 33 00:03:16,321 --> 00:03:21,535 It was just a landscape painting and Puzzle find the poet. 34 00:03:21,660 --> 00:03:25,080 But if you look very closely in the bottom part of the painting, you will see him right 35 00:03:25,205 --> 00:03:28,667 there, drinking a cup of wine, sitting at a table with his boy attendant beside him. 36 00:03:34,381 --> 00:03:37,759 I suppose that's the equivalent of what would be a graduate 37 00:03:37,884 --> 00:03:42,013 student or a professor of English literature in these days. 38 00:03:42,139 --> 00:03:45,434 But that tiny man lost in the landscape is representative and symbolic of the whole 39 00:03:45,559 --> 00:03:49,146 attitude of the Chinese mind and of Chinese philosophy to the harmony of man and nature. 40 00:03:55,318 --> 00:04:03,034 Man not dominating nature but fitting into it and feeling perfectly at home. 41 00:04:03,160 --> 00:04:08,415 But you know our attitude is very strangely different. 42 00:04:08,540 --> 00:04:11,835 And we constantly use a phrase which in the ears 43 00:04:11,960 --> 00:04:15,172 of Chinese people sounds very peculiar indeed. 44 00:04:15,297 --> 00:04:18,925 We speak constantly of the conquest of nature. 45 00:04:19,050 --> 00:04:20,594 The conquest of space. 46 00:04:20,719 --> 00:04:23,430 The conquest of mountains like Everest. 47 00:04:23,555 --> 00:04:26,975 And they would say to us, well what's the matter with you? 48 00:04:27,100 --> 00:04:30,437 Why must you be in such a fight all the time as you're inbound? 49 00:04:30,562 --> 00:04:32,731 Aren't you grateful to the mountain? 50 00:04:32,856 --> 00:04:35,901 That it itself lifted you up when you got to the top of it? 51 00:04:36,026 --> 00:04:38,361 Aren't you grateful to space that it opens itself 52 00:04:38,487 --> 00:04:40,739 out for you so that you can travel through it? 53 00:04:40,864 --> 00:04:46,620 Why do you think all the time of getting into a fight with it? 54 00:04:46,745 --> 00:04:51,374 But that is indeed, isn't it, our dominant feeling? 55 00:04:51,500 --> 00:04:55,003 That we are using science and technology, the powers of electricity and steel, to carry on 56 00:04:55,128 --> 00:04:58,840 a fight with our external world and to beat our surroundings into submission with bulldozer. 57 00:05:06,973 --> 00:05:10,852 And it's also the same with our attitude to our own nature. 58 00:05:10,977 --> 00:05:14,481 Because we've been brought up in a religio-philosophical tradition 59 00:05:14,606 --> 00:05:18,818 which has taught us to a great extent to mistrust ourselves. 60 00:05:18,944 --> 00:05:22,447 That is to say, it has taught us as reasoning and willing 61 00:05:22,572 --> 00:05:25,951 beings to mistrust our animal and instinctual nature. 62 00:05:28,787 --> 00:05:32,082 We have inherited a doctrine of original sin which 63 00:05:32,207 --> 00:05:35,794 tells us not to be too friendly, to be very cautious, 64 00:05:35,919 --> 00:05:39,881 with our own human nature and this is something which is all very well for we have indeed achieved marvelous things by technological interference with and alteration of nature but if this thing is carried 65 00:05:40,006 --> 00:05:43,927 beyond a certain point it gets us into very serious trouble indeed as a result of what I would call the law of diminishing returns now it's something like this to illustrate it in a very simple way 66 00:06:06,616 --> 00:06:10,537 supposing you start mistrusting your own senses supposing you're the sort of person that when you go out 67 00:06:10,662 --> 00:06:14,624 for a walk in the morning you're going down to the market and you wonder did I turn off the gas stove? 68 00:06:19,379 --> 00:06:23,258 And you've only gone a few paces from your house and you think you must go back and take a look in the kitchen and see if you really did turn it off so back you go and you open the back door 69 00:06:23,383 --> 00:06:27,387 and look in the kitchen yes you did turn it off you close the back door and off you go again and then a few paces out you think I wonder if I really saw correctly did I look carefully enough? 70 00:06:37,147 --> 00:06:40,400 And if at that point you break down and go back again, the more 71 00:06:40,525 --> 00:06:44,446 careful you're going to be, you're never going to get out shopping. 72 00:06:44,571 --> 00:06:48,199 You're going to be tied in a bind. 73 00:06:48,325 --> 00:06:51,995 And although you may say, well that's only the sort of thing a very stupid person needs to do, 74 00:06:52,120 --> 00:06:55,874 as a matter of fact, this is what our culture is beginning to carry on in very big dimensions. 75 00:07:01,379 --> 00:07:06,885 For example, we are privileged in the United States 76 00:07:07,010 --> 00:07:12,265 to enjoy freedom in a way that many other people in the world don't have it. 77 00:07:12,390 --> 00:07:20,106 Yet at the same time we are very anxious to be sure that our freedom won't be abused. 78 00:07:20,231 --> 00:07:23,485 And we keep saying when somebody does something that is 79 00:07:23,610 --> 00:07:26,946 an abuse of freedom, there ought to be a law against it. 80 00:07:27,072 --> 00:07:30,408 And so hundreds and thousands of laws are put into 81 00:07:30,533 --> 00:07:34,079 effect to prevent people from abusing their freedom. 82 00:07:35,872 --> 00:07:37,040 And so much 83 00:07:37,165 --> 00:07:41,002 legislation involves the most complicated processes of record keeping as for example the records you have to send in every April to be sure you didn't cheat on your financial affairs records which become 84 00:07:41,127 --> 00:07:45,173 more and more and more complicated so that nowadays sending in an ordinary individual income tax return is as complicated as extracting the cube root of a complicated number and the net result of our anxiety 85 00:08:04,234 --> 00:08:08,029 to write down just exactly and to the last hair, so that some shyster lawyer won't find a loophole, exactly and to the 86 00:08:08,154 --> 00:08:12,242 last hair what we may and may not do, the net result of this is it's becoming increasingly difficult to do anything at all. 87 00:08:18,790 --> 00:08:22,627 In other words, if you want to start a business enterprise, if you want to create, say, a non-profit society, you have to hire lawyers, 88 00:08:22,752 --> 00:08:26,798 you have to have whole staffs of secretaries to attend to the bookkeeping, the records, the returns that must be made to the government. 89 00:08:34,347 --> 00:08:37,559 And some of our great universities even have vice 90 00:08:37,684 --> 00:08:41,229 presidents in charge of relations with the government. 91 00:08:41,354 --> 00:08:44,858 The same thing comes out, for example, also, in our animosity 92 00:08:44,983 --> 00:08:48,361 to nature in the sense of wanting to obliterate distance. 93 00:08:50,071 --> 00:08:53,116 We want to go faster and faster everywhere we go. 94 00:08:53,241 --> 00:08:56,161 And so annihilating the span of the earth 95 00:08:56,286 --> 00:08:59,831 between ourselves and the place we want to reach. 96 00:08:59,956 --> 00:09:01,791 But what is the ultimate result of this? 97 00:09:01,916 --> 00:09:02,667 Just think of it. 98 00:09:02,792 --> 00:09:06,171 If you're getting faster and faster from point to point, and 99 00:09:06,296 --> 00:09:09,799 obliterating the distance between points, two things happen. 100 00:09:10,884 --> 00:09:14,095 In the first place, all points that are set next to each 101 00:09:14,220 --> 00:09:17,891 other by, say, jet propulsion, tend to become the same point. 102 00:09:22,312 --> 00:09:25,690 In other words, the faster you can get from Los Angeles to 103 00:09:25,815 --> 00:09:29,235 Hawaii, the more Hawaii becomes exactly like Los Angeles. 104 00:09:29,360 --> 00:09:32,197 And therefore tourists keep asking, well, has it been spoiled yet? 105 00:09:32,322 --> 00:09:37,160 And by that they mean, is it just exactly like home? 106 00:09:37,285 --> 00:09:41,080 And furthermore, if we begin to think about our goals in life as destinations, as points to which we must get it begins to cut out all that makes the 107 00:09:41,206 --> 00:09:45,293 point worth having it's like saying, well, instead of giving you a full banana to eat I will give you the two precise ends of the banana and that would not 108 00:10:00,642 --> 00:10:03,394 be in any sense a satisfactory meal. 109 00:10:03,520 --> 00:10:06,898 But that is what happens as we tend to fight our environment and to 110 00:10:07,023 --> 00:10:10,527 want to get rid of the wonderful limitation of space and distance. 111 00:10:14,614 --> 00:10:18,034 And you know, if we carry this kind of thing to its ultimate extreme, we get into a 112 00:10:18,159 --> 00:10:21,621 most extraordinary tangle, which I think I could very well illustrate in this way. 113 00:10:25,834 --> 00:10:29,587 Let's go and have a look over here 114 00:10:29,712 --> 00:10:33,675 at a sentence which has been written on the board that is the sentence which is behaving like we are behaving in our mistrust 115 00:10:33,800 --> 00:10:37,720 of nature that is a sentence which fundamentally does not trust itself and it says of itself this statement is false now 116 00:10:59,284 --> 00:11:02,412 What do you see funny about that? 117 00:11:02,537 --> 00:11:05,957 This sentence behaves in an extremely peculiar way. 118 00:11:06,082 --> 00:11:09,294 Because if it is true, then it is not true. 119 00:11:09,419 --> 00:11:11,796 And if it's not true, then that's what it says. 120 00:11:11,921 --> 00:11:14,215 That it isn't true, so it's true. 121 00:11:14,340 --> 00:11:16,843 So that if this statement is true, it is false. 122 00:11:16,968 --> 00:11:18,678 And if it is false, it is true. 123 00:11:18,803 --> 00:11:19,721 And so on and so on. 124 00:11:19,846 --> 00:11:23,516 In other words, the meaning of the sentence is oscillating. 125 00:11:23,641 --> 00:11:29,522 It's shaking from true to false, true to false, like an electric bell vibrating. 126 00:11:29,647 --> 00:11:33,568 In other words you might say that this particular sentence is suffering from anxiety for anxiety is the condition that comes upon us when we fundamentally mistrust ourselves when we 127 00:11:33,693 --> 00:11:37,655 mistrust our own nature and are trying to keep such a tight grip on it that we start to tremble as one's hand starts to tremble if you become extremely anxious to hold it still now 128 00:11:59,177 --> 00:12:02,472 Chinese thinking, of which there are really two main currents, the Taoist 129 00:12:02,597 --> 00:12:06,184 current and the Confucian, Taoist, that's spelled T-A-O-I-S-T, and Confucian. 130 00:12:15,526 --> 00:12:18,655 And both of these main currents of Chinese thought agree on one fundamental 131 00:12:18,780 --> 00:12:22,533 principle, and that is that the natural world in which we live and human nature itself 132 00:12:27,372 --> 00:12:30,667 must basically be trusted they would say of a person who can't trust his own nature 133 00:12:30,792 --> 00:12:34,379 well, if you can't trust your own nature how can you trust your very mistrusting of it? 134 00:12:40,635 --> 00:12:43,805 How do you know that that's not wrong too? 135 00:12:43,930 --> 00:12:47,266 And so if you don't trust your own nature you are as fundamentally balled up 136 00:12:47,392 --> 00:12:50,937 as anyone can get now it's interesting to look at the fundamental Chinese word 137 00:12:56,067 --> 00:12:59,946 which we translate as nature because it has a rather different meaning from the word that we use in Chinese nature is written like this you 138 00:13:00,071 --> 00:13:04,075 know that Chinese characters are fundamentally pictures and this first one is the picture that used to be a face and so it means oneself or 139 00:13:26,305 --> 00:13:29,726 of itself and the second character, I don't know what this was originally, it's become 140 00:13:29,851 --> 00:13:33,271 now a very abstract figure that means so and so the whole figure means of itself so 141 00:13:54,876 --> 00:14:00,423 And we should give the rough English equivalent of that as spontaneity. 142 00:14:00,548 --> 00:14:04,427 That which happens of itself, just in the same way, for example, that your hair is growing by itself, your heart is beating by itself, so that if you feel your pulse, you get 143 00:14:04,552 --> 00:14:08,556 the funny sensation of movement going on inside your body, and you think, ha ha, I'm not doing that, that's something queer going on inside me over which I have no control. 144 00:14:20,735 --> 00:14:23,738 But when you come to think of it, what is more fundamental? 145 00:14:23,863 --> 00:14:25,740 What is more central to you? 146 00:14:25,865 --> 00:14:32,830 What is more the very middle of yourself than your own heart? 147 00:14:34,373 --> 00:14:38,127 And so this idea of nature, that which happens of itself so, is a process which is fundamentally not under our control, which is 148 00:14:38,252 --> 00:14:42,340 happening all on its own, just as our breathing is happening all on its own, and just as our heart beating is happening all on its own. 149 00:14:52,350 --> 00:14:53,684 And the fundamental thought 150 00:14:53,810 --> 00:14:57,647 of Daoist philosophy is that this self-sow process has to be trusted if you turn now to Confucian ideas we will find 151 00:14:57,772 --> 00:15:01,818 another word that represents the basis of human nature this word written like this has a funny pronunciation although 152 00:15:21,587 --> 00:15:28,594 When we romanize this word in English, we spell it J-E-N, it's pronounced J-E-N. 153 00:15:33,182 --> 00:15:38,146 Sort of like rolling an R, or rather saying R but not rolling it. 154 00:15:38,271 --> 00:15:45,611 And this word is the cardinal virtue in the whole system of Confucian morality. 155 00:15:45,736 --> 00:15:50,992 It's usually translated human-heartedness or humanness. 156 00:15:51,117 --> 00:15:57,290 But when Confucius was asked to give a precise definition of it, he refused. 157 00:15:57,415 --> 00:16:01,210 He said, you have to feel the meaning of this virtue. 158 00:16:01,335 --> 00:16:04,964 You must never put it into words. 159 00:16:05,089 --> 00:16:12,096 And the wisdom of his attitude about not defining young is simply this. 160 00:16:13,848 --> 00:16:20,104 That a human being is always greater than anything he can say about himself 161 00:16:20,229 --> 00:16:23,191 and anything he can think about himself. 162 00:16:23,316 --> 00:16:27,320 If we formulate ideas about our own nature, about how our own minds and emotions work, those ideas are always going to be qualitatively 163 00:16:27,445 --> 00:16:31,324 inferior, that is to say, far less complicated, far less alive than the actual author of the ideas themselves, and that is us. 164 00:16:43,753 --> 00:16:46,088 So there's something about ourselves which we 165 00:16:46,214 --> 00:16:48,507 can never get at, which we can never define, 166 00:16:48,633 --> 00:16:52,428 in just the same way that you can't bite your own teeth, you can't without the aid of a mirror look 167 00:16:52,553 --> 00:16:56,641 into your own eyes, you can't hear your own ears, and you can't make your own hand catch hold of itself. 168 00:17:01,562 --> 00:17:06,234 So that you must basically trust this. 169 00:17:06,359 --> 00:17:09,946 Confucius would say he would rather trust human passions and instincts 170 00:17:10,071 --> 00:17:13,366 than he would sometimes trust human ideas about what is right. 171 00:17:16,369 --> 00:17:17,578 For example, 172 00:17:17,703 --> 00:17:19,789 when people go to war. 173 00:17:19,914 --> 00:17:23,251 They very often go to war about who has the right ideology, who 174 00:17:23,376 --> 00:17:26,921 has the right of this particular dispute, and who has the wrong. 175 00:17:31,592 --> 00:17:34,971 And because there can be no agreement, no compromise between principles of 176 00:17:35,096 --> 00:17:38,599 right and wrong, ideological wars generally tend to be vastly destructive. 177 00:17:44,105 --> 00:17:46,941 On the other hand, when 178 00:17:47,066 --> 00:17:50,903 we go to war for simple, ordinary greed, because I'm greedy of another people, of another nation, I want to carry off their goods, 179 00:17:51,028 --> 00:17:55,074 I want to carry off their women, I will at least be sure in going to war with them that I don't destroy the thing I want to possess. 180 00:18:04,792 --> 00:18:11,799 And so, if we are then bound to trust our own nature, 181 00:18:16,429 --> 00:18:19,724 This attitude of hands-off, of not interfering with oneself beyond a certain 182 00:18:19,849 --> 00:18:23,436 point is called, again in Laubs's Taoist philosophy, this Wu Wei This character 183 00:18:46,125 --> 00:18:49,962 means no, not, or don't and it's said to have been originally based on a picture of bunches of grass tied together like this indicating that a certain area 184 00:18:50,087 --> 00:18:54,133 is taboo you mustn't step on this area, the ground is sacred so don't, keep off, is its meaning and it's possible that this was originally a drawing of a hand 185 00:19:15,946 --> 00:19:19,742 over a bird like this so the meaning of this is grasping a bird the whole idea is don't grasp the bird in 186 00:19:19,867 --> 00:19:23,954 other words don't clutch at what is living if for instance you like sometimes little children pick up a kitten 187 00:19:42,598 --> 00:19:45,226 and they're so eager to hold the kitten, they squeeze it tightly and 188 00:19:45,351 --> 00:19:48,145 the kitty says, yeah, yeah, and scratches the child all over the place. 189 00:19:48,270 --> 00:19:53,567 It's because he is loving it, he is grasping it too tightly. 190 00:19:53,692 --> 00:19:56,987 And so in the same way, we have to allow all 191 00:19:57,113 --> 00:20:00,699 living things to let go and manage themselves. 192 00:20:02,868 --> 00:20:06,539 Look, supposing if in drawing, I wanted to be absolutely 193 00:20:06,664 --> 00:20:09,875 certain that my hand didn't go away from a line. 194 00:20:10,960 --> 00:20:12,294 And, oh, I began to get anxious. 195 00:20:12,420 --> 00:20:13,421 Is it going to go straight? 196 00:20:13,546 --> 00:20:16,215 So let's bring in this hand to hold on to it. 197 00:20:16,340 --> 00:20:17,383 Oh, and let's send this one straight. 198 00:20:17,508 --> 00:20:19,927 But now how can I be sure my left hand's going to stay still? 199 00:20:20,052 --> 00:20:21,720 Maybe the right one will have to catch hold of it. 200 00:20:21,846 --> 00:20:25,850 Oh, and then we're in a total mess. 201 00:20:28,477 --> 00:20:35,484 But you see, we in the West are basically afraid 202 00:20:39,280 --> 00:20:43,075 that if we trust our own nature everything will turn into chaos we're afraid, as it were, not to keep holding a club over our head to 203 00:20:43,200 --> 00:20:47,246 keep watching on our instincts and our passions and our so-called uncivilized animal natures fearing that they will go awry but you know 204 00:21:06,891 --> 00:21:10,811 when you let go of that grip on yourself sometimes astounding things happen you get out of your own life you're functioning all together in one piece I mean after all a person who is basically 205 00:21:10,936 --> 00:21:14,899 divided against himself who is in inner conflict and is trying to go in two directions at once he can't go anywhere he just has to sit and dither whereas if I'm going all in one direction 206 00:21:37,421 --> 00:21:41,342 then at least I'm going and even if I'm going in the wrong way I can change the direction if I'm trying to go in two ways at once I don't get anywhere at all now artists in 207 00:21:41,467 --> 00:21:45,429 the Far East have made a great deal of what they call the controlled accident marvelous things which happen as surprises when an artist does not try to dominate his music 208 00:22:06,033 --> 00:22:09,828 but let the medium itself do some of the work take for example this cigarette jar that I have here you see the glaze has just 209 00:22:09,954 --> 00:22:14,041 been slopped on it with a swift motion of the wrist and you notice as I turn it that there are all sorts of little flecks of white 210 00:22:35,688 --> 00:22:39,066 inside the black outline there. 211 00:22:39,191 --> 00:22:46,198 A little flecks of black, like right here, outside the main band of black. 212 00:22:48,617 --> 00:22:51,912 It's incidental things like this, which to the Chinese and Japanese mind, 213 00:22:52,037 --> 00:22:55,583 and increasingly to our own way of thinking, make the real beauty of things. 214 00:23:02,715 --> 00:23:05,134 For instance, consider 215 00:23:05,259 --> 00:23:10,306 a shell like this. 216 00:23:10,431 --> 00:23:17,313 Here is an object which any one of you would pick up on the beach if you saw it. 217 00:23:17,438 --> 00:23:20,733 And yet, what does it represent? 218 00:23:20,858 --> 00:23:23,527 If you saw a painting with markings on like that, you 219 00:23:23,652 --> 00:23:26,322 might say, well, that's not what I call a painting. 220 00:23:26,447 --> 00:23:29,033 It doesn't look like anything. 221 00:23:29,158 --> 00:23:31,535 And yet, as I say, none of you would hesitate 222 00:23:31,660 --> 00:23:34,288 to pick that up and treasure it if you found it. 223 00:23:34,413 --> 00:23:40,586 For it, too, like the jar, is a sort of controlled accident. 224 00:23:40,711 --> 00:23:44,256 And it is the art of trusting the medium to express itself 225 00:23:44,381 --> 00:23:47,718 along with your own contribution to it as an artist. 226 00:23:54,308 --> 00:23:57,853 When this harmonious relationship of man and nature is brought 227 00:23:57,978 --> 00:24:01,315 into play, we get marvelous little objects of this kind. 228 00:24:05,527 --> 00:24:09,573 And so in the same way, if we can learn to trust our own nature, we will, I think, be profoundly surprised 229 00:24:09,698 --> 00:24:13,494 that things don't go out of control at all, but on the contrary, suddenly come back into control. 230 00:24:27,800 --> 00:24:32,429 Take, for example, a very familiar instance. 231 00:24:32,554 --> 00:24:35,557 Supposing you're learning to ride a bicycle. 232 00:24:35,683 --> 00:24:39,561 Some of you will have known that when you started out this rather difficult art you found yourself immediately falling over and your first instinct was to turn the wheel right opposite the direction in which you were falling and in this way you 233 00:24:39,687 --> 00:24:43,691 collapsed totally on the ground it seemed to be common sense to turn away from the direction in which you were falling and yet the thing you have to learn to do is to turn the wheel in the direction in which you are falling and in this way you 234 00:25:05,129 --> 00:25:09,133 suddenly come up straight again and you're in control you expected to fall you went with the fall and you came to yourself again in precisely 235 00:25:09,258 --> 00:25:13,137 the same way when we go with our own nature our own inner feelings we come into control of them we don't lose control if we fight them 236 00:25:32,781 --> 00:25:35,826 We get in that state of balled-upness, of anxiety, of 237 00:25:35,951 --> 00:25:39,329 dither, which makes us incapable of doing anything at all. 238 00:25:39,455 --> 00:25:42,958 An anxiety and a dither which is comparable to the whole 239 00:25:43,083 --> 00:25:46,420 problem of maintaining freedom in a world like ours. 240 00:25:48,422 --> 00:25:51,508 A problem that we are in danger of losing our 241 00:25:51,633 --> 00:25:55,095 freedom through being over-anxious to preserve it. 242 00:25:55,220 --> 00:25:57,931 Oh, think of another illustration, those of 243 00:25:58,056 --> 00:26:00,893 you who live in the East and the Middle West, 244 00:26:01,018 --> 00:26:05,063 are familiar every winter with the problems of icy roads. 245 00:26:05,189 --> 00:26:08,442 But any good driver knows that when you skid on an icy road, you 246 00:26:08,567 --> 00:26:12,196 have to turn in the direction of your skid and not against your skid. 247 00:26:17,242 --> 00:26:19,620 That again brings you into control. 248 00:26:19,745 --> 00:26:23,207 To fight the trend of things, to fight what the Chinese call the Tao, 249 00:26:23,332 --> 00:26:26,752 the T-A-O, the way of nature, is to come into conflict with nature 250 00:26:29,838 --> 00:26:33,759 so that you can't do anything at all or another common example everybody who ever used a sailing boat knows that if you are going to move you've got to keep the wind in your sails 251 00:26:33,884 --> 00:26:37,846 even if you want to go against the wind you would never dream of turning the boat directly into the path of the wind so you always have in some way to keep the wind behind you 252 00:26:58,450 --> 00:27:02,412 but when you want to go against the wind, you don't fight the wind, you use the wind you, in other words, tack against it at an angle so that it blows you into itself and this is the fundamental principle of Chinese philosophy 253 00:27:02,538 --> 00:27:06,458 which underlies that startling manifestation of it in Japanese wrestling called Judo where you overcome the enemy not by opposing him but by using his own strength to bring about his downfall for this is the philosophy 254 00:27:28,438 --> 00:27:31,650 of bend and survive, of the strength of weakness, as the willow trees under snow go 255 00:27:31,775 --> 00:27:35,445 supple and drop the snow, but the pine with its tough branch piles up the snow and cracks. 255 00:27:36,305 --> 00:28:36,429