Talking Zen by Alan Watts

Talking Zen by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts [Watts, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00


It may be that the refreshing naturalness of the child is something that the civilized adult loses as irreplaceably as the cat its kittenishness. But I do not think this is a proper analogy. I have lived a lot with cats, and I much prefer them to kittens. Furthermore, I have from time to time met with adults—highly sophisticated and cultured adults—who have somehow regained, or perhaps never lost, their unaffected spontaneity. It does not seem to me to be a necessary law that an advanced culture requires the loss of these natural qualities.

I am not trying in any way to idealize the child. With five of them, I know better than that! The point is that children begin to develop certain virtues that, as a result of their upbringing, they do not continue to develop. Social conventions require them to develop their orderliness and skill rather than their simplicity and unaffectedness, since the two types of virtue seem to be mutually exclusive at a young age. If this is the cost of civilization, there is a serious question as to whether the cost is not much too great, as to whether—indeed—it may not eventually be fatal to civilization.

Perhaps I can try to define, or at least to suggest, the qualities that we are losing. These are qualities that the child exhibits in a rather primitive and embryonic form, and which one finds more fully developed only in the most exceptional people. To use psychological jargon again, we say that people of this rare type are integrated. That’s to say, they are not at cross-purposes with themselves; they do not get in their own way and stand in their own light. They are what the Gospels call “single-eyed,” for “if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” We call this trait sincerity—the virtue of not being self-deceived, of not thinking one thing and feeling another, or of not feeling one thing and trying to feel another. It is, furthermore, the marvelous quality of unselfconsciousness—the quality of the person who can think, act, and live without anxious side-glances at themselves that spoil the directness and effectiveness of their action. And this lack of self-consciousness involves something else besides, of a still deeper order. A truly unselfconscious person feels related to their environment, or rather, integrated with their environment. To put it in another way, they do not experience any gulf or gap between their own inner workings—their thoughts and feelings—and the natural processes going on around them. And thus they have a kind of unaggressive but nonetheless unshakable assurance, which at a deep level is religious faith, or at its deepest level a kind of metaphysical certainty. I do not mean by this that one is certain as to the truth of some idea or proposition. What I call a metaphysical certainty cannot really be put into words at all, for it is more nearly a feeling, shall I say a feeling of the inescapable naturalness



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