You Always Get What You Want - Alan Watts

you always get what you want invariably even though you may think that it's entirely opposed to your wishes but if it's your karma everything that happens to you putting in another way everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you yes obviously that's absurd if you conf find the definition of yourself to your voluntary conscious Behavior that's a ridiculous definition of oneself oneself by any any stretch of the imagination must involve far more than the conscious and voluntary aspects of our behavior and if we see that it involves

intimately and inescapably the behavior of what we call the other the not self the environment and see that these two are moving together like the two sides of the snake when it swims then you get a very curious feeling you have to be careful of it if you've got a western background because this is what happens to a lot of people who play around with psychedelic chemicals there are many many cases of inflation among these people that is to say when you get this Sensation that the two sides of the world world the inside and

the outside are moving together you may think I am ruling it I am God in the western sense of the word Therefore your ego instead of being as it were integrated and uh transcended with all this process merely assumes vast Dimensions as megalomania is blown up by the Mystic experience and so you get the holier than thou people going around who seem to think that they're above all human conventions and uh have no obligations to anyone or anything because they're Divine and they can do as they damn please that what they haven't realized is that

doing as you will isn't a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and stay from now on I'm going to go around doing as I will you have to realize first that that's what you've always been doing and you could look at this from a very simple point of view is not a complete point of view but you can say well now what about the people who who did good and who did the things that they didn't want to do you know everybody's mother said to us darling sometimes we have to do things

we don't like what about that well you can always say the kid obeyed the mother and did the thing that it didn't like because that was the better part of wisdom in other words if he hadn't done that something worse would have happened and we choose the lesser of two evils and when you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose the lesser of two evils then you say I want out of here and you take the easiest way you take the line of least resistance so that's you're doing now uh you you

can pursue that more profoundly when you stop thinking about human behavior as something that responds to the compulsion of an environment and you can get out of that when you see the behavior of the environment as an essential aspect of you so it isn't as it were the environment starting something which you are therefore compelled to follow it's the whole system moving together so then you get in the state of liberated or mystical Consciousness you very often feel that a hill is lifting you up as you walk up it the ground seems to heave beneath

your feet and up you go and you get the strange feeling of lightness of effortlessness Walking on Air never a care you know this uh wonderful sense that there are no obstructions anywhere there's nothing as it were banging you and making you do that it all flows together and that's a very common sense that's you are actually uh in that state of consciousness you are perceiving the going on the da the course of nature in the way it's happening but in the ordinary way you've been conditioned to resist it to fight it and to use

those sensations of resistance to create a sensory BAS is for what you describe as the ego the ego in practice is a sense of strain when you are aware of ey you are aware of a dis basic discomfort which is located basically between the eyes somewhere in here a sort of tightness also it's in other centers too it's in the solar plexus and uh there are various physical centers in other words where this constant tension or resistance against it is going on and that's what you feel when you talk about I when that tension ceases

you discover immediately that the separate ego has disappeared and that what I refers to is simply the total Panorama of experience everything that's happening obvious I don't know all of it CU I can't inspect all of it with my radar with my conscious attention that would be a ridiculous undertaken to know everything in that sense we know it in a much better way as we know how to grow hair and open and close our hands so this point of view can be understood if we clarify the initial problems we have about it and I suppose

the first problem is if we accept the notion that everything that happens to us is our own Karma our own doing then we have to be very careful of shall we say the devil of omnipotence of inflation of uh feeling that your ego is what is in control of all this and the second thing is if you think then that everything that happens to everybody is what they really want to happen then you can absolve yourself from any qualms about being unkind to someone because you could say well the unkindness I did you was what

you really wanted wasn't it you know that business about the responsibility of the person who gets murdered for getting murdered uh there is a curious sense in which a lot of people go around looking for trouble uh Freud points pointed out quite correctly uh the psychology of accident prone individuals they seem to be attracting trouble like lights attract moths and we're all doing that but we manage to remain unconscious of it so that we can praise and blame and play the game which says that's not my fault that's your fault and so we go around

apportioning faults to everybody because if we're going to a portion praise for what the good things people do you can't make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming praise and blame go together supposing everybody was acting in a praiseworthy way and we praised everybody for everything they'd get tired of it they wouldn't even notice it anymore so so long as you're going to get a kick out of being praised you got to go around blaming too it's very simple but if you see the Folly of that that praising and blaming are just creating

each other then you don't praise and you don't blame you just dig the whole thing and that's why when we encounter very great sages you never hear them blame people and they very rarely praise anyone you try to start gossip in the presence of such a person and you make a derogatory comment about someone it's as if you had thrown a rock into a well and heard no splash and a funny feeling because that you get no response you get no agreement and uh if you praise somebody there there's also likely nothing to be said

except perhaps some remark that of course you're praising the Beloved in all its manifestations and this this disconcerts some people terribly I've always noticed that real sages never gossip never criticize persons and uh because they understand so well the French saying to to to understand all is to forgive all uh is so true if you are experienced in just the ordinary way of dealing with human problems you've been a counselor or psychotherapist or minister or anything like that you very soon get to realize how vastly complicated people are and to see that they really are

in the messes they're in not because of anything but that's the way it is and you stop blaming people and because you don't blame people you have open ears and people come and see seek your advice they don't want to come to someone who's a counselor who will ball them out it's like d s who simply accept the fact that people really don't take care of their teeth and realize that the job of a dentist is precisely to look after people who can't be bothered to take care of their team it's why he's in business

so a good dentist doesn't ball his patients out because they didn't do this that and the other just accept it same with doctors they know perfectly well that nobody's going to live by the rules of health and they're very vague as to what they are you know there's every kind of theory about how you ought to live what is healthy but they change in fashion and uh you ought to eat this kind of diet in 1921 by the time it's 1930 they've changed their ideas all together by the time it's 1960 it's back again to

a mixture between 1921 in 1894 something like that you see it's always changing so um while the rules are not so see if if they were all absurd it would be easy they're not all absurd there's some truth in it always but nobody's ever quite sure so the function of healers and doctors and so on is just to do what can be done to stop the mess getting too messy and they must accept it as that that's their job if I were healthy say to the doctor I wouldn't need you so you're in business now

what about it then uh we have difficulty in seeing this mutuality of our relationship to the rest of the world because it's contrary to Common Sense contrary to the way we've been brought [Music] up and therefore we have what I would call an initial intellectual block to understanding it quite apart from any emotional blocks or anything of that kind but obviously we must overcome that intellectual block if we're going to go any further and actually realize and feel this way of life's working and this relationship between what you do and what happens to you then

the question arises then what do I do do I go around saying to myself all this that's happening to you is what I wanted I am inside and outside I am the subjective and I am the objective I didn't me to go around thinking thoughts about this so as as it were to talk yourself into this way of feeling well that's very superficial because this new sense of relationship to Nature is something much more than an idea see ecologists and physicists have the idea that this is so but they mostly in their private life and

in their ordinary human behavior are just like other people who don't feel it and who feel themselves in a Newtonian Billiards game even though they've gone on to quantum mechanics so that there may be a transition from our ordinary way our feeling how things go on to the new way we have to do something other than think because actually thinking is causing the trouble It Is by thinking that we divide the world into separate events and separate things that is calculus and Ananda kumaraswami once Describe the life of the liberated being as a Perpetual uncalculated

life in the present and you say wow I don't think I could do that that saying of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount now be not anxious for the tomorrow the uncalculated life if God so clothed the ground pass of the field will he not much more clothe you faithless ones and I've never met a preacher yet who would uh really take that up they all say well of course that's too hard a saying for most of us uh it's not practical everybody has to uh take thought for tomorrow and uh calculate well at

this point people can go in two directions there's one class of people who will say all right let's live the uncalculated life let's not make any plans and before you know where they are they're living in a filthy pad and uhing around and living on Petty thievery and so on this is the usual thing this is is uh got into it the wrong way the first thing to do is just as I said whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not the relationship between you and the environment is always one

that is harmonious so in the same way you are always living the uncalculated life you have to find out first of all that you always doing it and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations in other words your ego has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it because as I pointed out most of the functions most of the goings on in you

around you the circumstances of Life have nothing to do with your ego at all and you don't even know why you make up your mind to do certain things superficially we have a few ideas it's like when you uh enter into a marriage you have really no control over its outcome in the ordinary sense of ego control you've taken a colossal gamble in which you've involved enormous complexes of patterns and maybe it'll come out all right if you don't interfere with it too much you don't it's like Oppenheimer said it's perfectly obvious that the whole

world is going to hell and the only possible way we might stop that happening is not to try to prevent it and you know all these wars are started out by people who think that they're helping someone that uh it's going to make things better so when you begin from the basis not of saying I should now live the spontaneous and improvident and non-calculative style of life but realize you've always done that only you rationalized that you didn't you always did what you wanted to do basically only you said sometimes it was my duty but

you preferred a conception of yourself as someone who always does his duty that flattered you and so you were still following your own way now the first thing then is to see that that's what's happening so that you don't think well now there is some special thing I have to do to understand this harmonious relationship between the individual and the world because if you work on it that way you will start from the presupposition that that relationship doesn't already exist and has to be brought into being thing is it doesn't have to be brought into

being it's there but now when you see that that's so it obviously starts to make a difference you do behave in a different way but the behavior the new kind of behavior that is a result of a transformation is not forced behavior when you try to imitate the way a saint behaves you have made a forced change and you know all forced behavior is phony it's like someone saying I love you I love you I love you when you don't you feel you ought to but you don't really and there's something it doesn't ring true

well think of the poor Lord listening to all the prayers of all those people people saying I love you Jesus and they and he knows they don't they're just saying this because they think they ought to and uh be very trying so whenever you do a thing like that you see you you you make a forced change now if the changes to happen in the same way that a seed at proper season breaks open sends up a choot see it comes from the whole force of life itself now when you see that without you're having

to do anything see you are living the uncalculated life and you're only pretending you're calculating it and arranging it then as it were you will have a grasp of the total situation and it will you can allow it to produce changes in action which are not forced so this is why there is always a trend in every kind of spiritual Doctrine which says something about Grace divine grace there must come about something in you or change which you can't produce and if you try to produce it you will be a victim of spiritual Pride but

on the other hand and all teachers are University saying you've got to make an effort there's some discipline there is some something you must do well that's the only way to get it across to people that you as a separate effort maker are a myth are a fantasm because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think are good thoughts what to think you will find that you're going around in a circle Krishna is awfully good at pointing this out when he people ask him how do you meditate

he says why do you want to meditate why are you concentrating why are you saying prayers why do you think you should believe in God and it always comes up because I'm just a son of a I mean I'm out for my own good and this seems to be the be the way so he says you see you don't have any genuine love at all it's all fake and so you have to find first of all where the genuine love is now you love you don't you that's genuine you won't argue about that but then

when you start from this I gave a talk sometime ago to the Air Force they Camp lab where they make weapons do all the research and they got a bunch of us there who were ministers and philosophers and they had the nerve to ask us what was our basis for moral Behavior personal moral Behavior well I said my basis for moral behavior is pure selfishness and uh I'm talking after all to realistic people here and I don't think we need to be sentimental and beat about the bush for all your all Warriors and Fighters and

so on and uh you know how rough things are so um I'm going to say to you frankly uh I'm out for me but of course I don't do it in a tactless way I don't go around and hit people over the head and say give me this give me that I much more subtle I say good manners and please and uh how nice you all are and so on and finally uh people feel massaged psychologically into the state where they'll give but then I said after that there are some things that bother me the

first one is if I love me what do I want and furthermore who am I CU if I'm going to be realistic about getting what I want I got to be pretty sure what it is that's me and what is the state of desire in me if I am desire see if I am a center of Desire what's it all for well I think of all the things I want but it so turns out that none of them are me but I say I want dinner doesn't mean I'm going to eat me up if I

any pleasure I can think of is the enjoyment of something that I have hadn't thought of defining as myself course I like my Sensations I like what happens to my body when I take a fine wine and down it but then what's the difference between my body and the wine if I say I like the wine I also mean I like me and the wine together the mixture but then I don't eat you or a friend or a lover in the same way as I drink wine I live an association and like this but then

I'm loving things that aren't formally supposed to be me and as I go into it in other words as I investigate what I mean by me I find that I can't put any limits on it that I cannot experience me without you or without the other and they're inseparable but you don't find this out until you investigate it until you really go into the question what do I want and that's the most important investigation anyone can make which I'm going to into in the next session uh the question of power and all these military men

you think they they think they want power and so I said to them some very subversive and undermining things uh without anybody knowing it until long after I left