In the Asiatic traditions it is well recognized that people who get the knowledge that you are It, may very well run amok. And therefore they always couple any method of gaining this, whether it is yoga or smoking something, drinking something whatever is the method they always couple it with a discipline. The word discipline isn't very popular these days. Most of the people who teach disciplines don't teach them very well, they teach it with a kind of violence, as if a discipline was something that is going to be extremely unpleasant. Something that you are going ti have to put up with, but that is not the real secret of discipline.
Discipline is a way of expression, say we want to express your feelings in stone. Stone doesn't give way very easily, it is tough stuff. So you have to learn the skill of the discipline of the sculptor, in order to express yourself in stone.
So in every other way, whatever you do you require a skill.
It is enormously important to understand that there is absolutely no possibility of having any pleasure in life at all without skill. Money doesn't buy pleasure. Look, if you want to get stoned drunk and go out and get a bottle of bourbon and down it, you cant do that except for people who have practiced the distillers art.
You can't even make love without art.
For example in Sausalito where Alan Watts used to live there was a harbor full of ever so many pleasure craft, Motor cruisers, sailing boats all kinds of things and they never leaved the dock. All that happened with them is their owners had cocktail parties on Saturdays and Sundays, because they discovered having bought these things that the discipline of sailing is difficult to learn and takes a lot of time.
They didn't have time for it and they just bought the things as a status symbol.
So in other words you can't have pleasure in life without skill. But it isn't an unpleasant task to learn a skill, if the teacher in the first place gets you fascinated with it. There is immense pleasure in learning how to do anything skillfully. Anything you want to learn can be immensely pleasurable to learn the discipline and it is completely indispensable, because you may be a very inspired musician but a person who isn't may hear in his head all kinds of symphonies and all kinds of marvelous compositions. But he may not have the technique to write them down on paper and share them with somebody else.
But, you see. So far as words are concerned I can express ideas because i have studied language. And I work very hard. Not that i didn't like it. I intensely enjoy the work of writing. Although it is difficult, but it is fascinating to say what can never possibly be said.
You see, you have inspiration but you have to have technique to incarnate, ti express your inspiration.
That is to say, to bring Heaven down to Earth. Of course they are really one, behind the scenes.
But there's no way of pointing it out unless you do something skillful.
You see, we are all at the moment absolutely in the midst of the beatific vision.
We are all one with the divine or some.. I don't like that sort of wishy-washy language.
But we are all there, but we are so much there that we are like fish in water, they don't know they are in the water like the birds don't know they are in the air because it is all around them and the same way we don't know what the real color of our eyes is. I don't mean whether you've got blue or brown eyes, but the color of the color of the lens of your eye. You call that transparent, no color because you can't see it. But it's basic to be able to see anything.
so in order to find out where you are there has to be some way to draw attention to it, and that involves skill.
Biography: Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Many of his books are now available in digital format and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. His "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.
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