The One Thing Everyone Should Learn (feat. Alan Watts)
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โฑ๏ธ 8:19 duration
๐ ID: 12538619
๐ Lyrics
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
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