Alan Watts - A Natural Satori / Sink | Текст песни

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• Alan Watts
• A Natural Satori / Sink

And, he said, “You know, we all know when a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation, and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori.” And that’s what I mean when I was explaining that when one gets to an extreme – that is to say to the point when you realize there is nothing you can do about life, nothing you can not do about life, then you’re the mosquito biting the iron bull. Well, so in the same way he said, “Look. You heard a bomb coming at you, you could hear it whistle, and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you and that you were finished. And you accepted it. And suddenly, there was a strange feeling that everything is absolutely clear. You suddenly see that there isn’t a grain of dust in the whole universe that’s in the wrong place. That you understand completely, absolutely, totally what it’s all about, cause’ you can’t say what it is.” But he said in so many cases the bomb was a dud, and they lived to tell the tale. Or he said you were in a concentration camp, and you’ve been there so long that you gave up all hope whatsoever of ever getting out. You were just going through this miserable, boring, degrading grind week after week after week; nobody paid the slightest attention to you as an individual. You knew you would never get out, and you accepted it, and suddenly something changed. This extraordinary feeling: freedom. Or he said, you were a displaced refugee. You had lost your family, you didn’t know whether they even existed, you were miles from your home, you didn’t know whether it existed, you had lost your job, your very identity. You were absolutely nowhere, and you accepted it, and suddenly you were as light as a feather and free as the air. Now he said, so many people have had those experiences and they’d talk about them to their families and friends, and they’d say, “Oh well, you were under terrific pressure and you probably had some hallucination, you know?” Well he said, “I am showing those people that so far from having a hallucination, those were the few, few occasions in which they woke up.”

So you see this is always the opportunity presented by death. That if one can go into death with eyes open, and have somebody help you if necessary, to give up before your die, this extraordinary thing can happen to you. So that from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say, “I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for the world – now I understand why we die. The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life’s all about – by letting go, because then we come to a situation that the ego can’t deal with. When we are no longer hypnotize by that, then our natural consciousnesses can see clearly what all this universe is for.

So therefore we have missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way, instead of having a socially understood acceptance of death and rejoicing in death. Now I could imagine that one person would want to rejoice in death in an entirely different way from another. Like, um, let’s say a wedding – is a rite of passage. There are certainly some forms of celebrating a wedding which I would find a total bore, and quite offensive; other ways would be good, I would enjoy it. So everybody, in other words, I’m not saying that you’ve gotta get mixed up with a lot of people coming laughing around you and giving you presents and cards and everything because you’re going to die. Heh heh! But, I’m only indicating a general thing, that the doctor, the ministers, the psychiatrists, and above all us – really owe it to our friends to work out an enitrely new approach to death. Because what has happened you see, from earliest childhood the child learned that great-uncle was dying, and saw the family put on long faces and say, “Aahhhh, that’s too bad.” Even Christians, who think they’re going to go to heaven, you know, they get absolutely morbid, more so than anybody else about death because heaven as they all know is a very boring place.