Alan Watts was one of my favourite philosophers and I think his talks on zen are absolutely essential for anyone in the western world who hopes to understand the discipline. If you listen to enough of his talks, you’ll find that they tend to repeat a few central themes that Watts was obsessed with – the notion of irreducible rascality, buddhism as a dialog, the perils of being too serious about life, and so on. Some may find this repetition annoying – evidence that Watts never had all that much to say. I find it endearing. The man had his issues, but he understood a few things about life very well, and he chose to focus on those things, patiently explaining them in as many ways possible to as many as he could. One of my favourite talks, mainly due to its relevance in today’s very fast paced, technology-driven world is the “Reproduction” talk. And it goes something like this…
From very early on, humans have been obsessed with reproducing reality. First, there were the painters who would try to capture it on canvas. And, depending on how good the artist was, a painting could represent a person, place, or thing very faithfully. Someone who had never met that person, never been there, or never seen that thing could get a pretty good idea of what they were like…
Eventually, we invented the camera. At first, it was blurry and cumbersome, but in terms of being able to capture and store reality, it was a giant leap forward. Blurry as it was, it helped keep that memory of “Grandpa” sharp in our minds…
Add some colour to that photo and you have an even better representation of reality.
But to truly know some people, you had to know how they moved. A static photograph could never capture what it was like to be around them. And so we came up with the motion picture and we could see them move over and over and over again.
You can probably see where this is going. Add sound to the motion picture. And colour again. Add more definition to the picture. All of this in an effort to make it more like you were really there. All in an effort to capture reality and play the good parts over and over again.
Here’s where it gets a little more interesting…