Stop Trying to Find It And You’ll Have It - Alan Watts On The Backwards Law

you always get what you want invariably even though you may think that it's entirely opposed to your wishes everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you yes obviously that's absurd if you can 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 [Music] 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 when you get this sensation that the two sides of the 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 [Music] your ego instead of being as it were integrated and uh transcended with all this process merely assumes vast Dimensions has megalomania is blown up by

the mystical experience and so you get the holier than thou people going around who seem to think that they're above all human conventions and have no obligations to anyone or anything because they're Divine and they can do as they damn please [Music] 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 can look at this from a

very simple 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 well what about that well you can always say the kid debate the mother and did the thing that it didn't like because that was the better part of wisdom in other words if he'd 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 lesson of two evils then

you say I want out of here and you take the easiest way you take the line of least resistance 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 we're all doing that but we managed 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 the portioning faults to everybody [Music] because if we're going to apportion praise for what the good things people do you can't make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming now 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 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 feeling that your ego is what is in control of all this [Music] 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'll

get this strange feeling of lightness of effortlessness Walking on Air never occur you know this 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 that's a very common sense that's you are actually in that state of consciousness you are perceiving the goings-on the Dao 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 basis for what you describe

as the ego the ego in practice is a sense of strain when you are aware of I you are aware of this basic discomfort which is located basically between the eyes 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 that's I 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've 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 [Music] 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 if you praise somebody there is 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 because they understand so well the French saying two companies to understand all is to forgive all