The One Thing Everyone Should Learn (feat. Alan Watts)

So, if I may start by insulting your

intelligence with what is called the most elementary lesson

The thing that we should have learnt

before we learnt 1, 2, 3 and A, B, C

But somehow was overlooked

Now, this lesson is quite simply this

That any experience that we have through our senses

whether of sound or of light or of touch is a vibration

And a vibration has two aspects,

one called on and the other called off

Vibration it seems to be propagated in waves

and every wave system has crests and it has troughs

And so life is a system of now you see it now you don't

And these two aspects always go together

For example, sound is not a pure sound,

it is a rapid alteration of sound and silence

And that's simply how the way things are

Only you must remember,

that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable

Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests

Just as you don't encounter in life people with fronts and no backs

Just as you don't encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails

And although the heads and tails,

the fronts and the backs,

the positives and the negatives are different

They're at the same time one

And one has to get used fundamentally to the

notion that different things can be inseparable

That what is explicitly true and at the same time be implicitly one

If you forget that very funny things happen

If therefore we forget you see, that black and white are inseparable,

and that existence is constituted

equivalently by being and non being, then we get scared

And we have to play a game called 'uh oh, black might win'

And once we get into the fear that black, the negative side might win

We are compelled to play the game, but white must win

And from that, start all our troubles

Because you see, human awareness is a very odd mechanism

That is to say we have as a species specialised in a

certain kind of awareness which we call conscious attention

And by this we have the [?

] of examining the details of life very closely

We can restrict our gaze and correspond to

somewhat the central field of vision in the eyes

We have central vision, we have peripheral vision

Central vision is that which we use for reading,

for all sorts of close up work, it's like using a spotlight

Whereas peripheral vision is more light using a floodlight

Now, civilisation and civilised human beings or maybe five thousand

years, maybe much longer have learnt

to specialise in concentrated attention

Even if a persons attention span is short [?]

Wavering his spotlight over many fields

The price which we pay for specialisation in conscious

attention is ignorance of everything outside it's field

I would rather say ignorance than ignorance because if you

concentrate on a figure, you tend to ignore the background

You tend therefore to see the world in a disintegrated aspect you

take separate things and events

seriously, imaging that these really do exist

When actually they have the same kind of

existence as an individuals interpretation of a [?]

They're what you make out of it

In fact, our physical world is a system of inseparable differences

Everything exists with everything else

But we can try not to notice that

Because what we notice is what is note worthy

And we notice it in terms of notations, numbers, words, images

What is notiful, noteworthy, notated,

noticed is what appears to us to be significant

And the rest is ignored as insignificant

And as a result of that,

we select from the total input that goes

to our senses only a very small fraction

And this causes us to believe that we are separate beings

Isolated by the boundary of the epidermis on the rest of the world

You see this us also the mechanism involved

in not noticing that black and white go together

Not noticing that every inside has an outside

And that the inside,

what goes on inside your skin is

inseparable to what goes on outside your skin

You see that for example, in the science of ecology

One learns that a human being is not an organism

in an environment but is an organism [?] environment

That is to say a unified field of behaviour

If you describe carefully the behaviour of any organism you cannot do

so without at the same time

describing the behaviour of the environment

And by that you know that you've got a new entity of study

The organism is not the puppet of the

environment, being pushed around by it

Nor on the other hand is the environment the puppet

of the organism being pushed around by the organism

The relationship between them is transactional

The transaction being the situation like buying and selling

In which there is no buying unless

somebody sells and not selling unless somebody buys