Very inspired this evening!

One day I wiped out all the notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude. I felt a little queer--as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were touching some power unknown to me...and Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming towards me, but all were the same man. All were myself! I had never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created; I was the cosmos; no individual Mr. Sasaki existed.

~ An account by Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki quoted by Alan Watts in The Way of Zen via yakrider

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

-Alan Watts

What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way of showing it because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, "Whew, what a relief." That is called satori.

~ Alan Watts in The Philosophies of Asia

The Creation Myth

"Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental questions which come so readily to their minds: 'Where did the world come from?' 'Why did God make the world?' 'Where was I before I was born? 'Where do people go when they die?' Again and again I have found that they seem to be satified with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this:

'There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

'In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world when on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

'God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

'Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disquise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self-the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

'Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and what is outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Mobius strip-a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. Amd though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not as 'she,' God isn't a man or a women. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive.

'God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

'You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.'

Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

If you want to find out who you were before your father and mother conceived you -- who you really are -- you will probably have to go off by yourself. You go deep into the forest, stop talking and even stop thinking words; you let yourself be absolutely alone, and you listen to the great silences. And then, if you are lucky, you recover from the illusion that you are just 'little me, this so-and-so', and you attain the state of nirvana, which means 'the blown-out state', the relieved state, the sigh of relief.

~ Alan Watts in Zen: the Supreme Experience

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4&feature=related

By the way, can we embed video?

that was a good one simple easy for folks to digest. Don't think we can do the video thing iv'e tried but to no avail. But Raymondsan may come to our rescue hey

yes, very beautiful in its simplicity.

There's a point, "It was a musical thing, and we were supposed to dance or sing while the music was being played," that I always tear up. So beautifully put.

The whole film, which is a 20 minute piece by the creators of South Park, is available here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE5M8743a1s&feature=related

luckymortal wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4&feature=related By the way, can we embed video?

I don't think the software allows it.