Vishen Lakhiani explores Alan Watts' three Zen questions: Who am I? What do I desire? What do I know? He connects them to his four levels of conscious evolution and starts with the culturescape level, where Watts argues that things don't exist as separate objects.
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It was 1968, and on CBS television, a man called Alan Watts made one of his first appearances. That's what the footage looked like. It was CBS television. It was a program called Camera 3. And Alan Watts went on with a group of students.
What's the matter with us?
To teach his unique philosophy of Zen to America. Now, in that program, Alan Watts asks people these three questions. He said, if you ponder these questions enough, it unlocks a lot of new meaning in your life. The questions are, who am I? What do I desire? And what do I know? Now, these questions sound simple enough, right? But it goes way deeper. Last week, I was with Alan's son, Mark Watts. It was me, the mindvalley team, and Mark's team. We are working on a new quest with Alan Watts. And this quest goes deep into these questions, plus two additional questions. But Mark explained to me why these questions were so profound. And these questions are why people today, hundreds of millions of people, love Alan Watts. Alan Watts, fans in the house, raise your hand and make some noise. He's so influential. Volvo just used his. One of his talks in one of their advertisements. This was, like, six months ago. Now, the reason these questions are important, according to Mark Watts, is that there's a Sanskrit term called upaya. And upaya really means to get back in flow. So Mark explained it this way. He says, imagine in India, there's this wild river flowing, and the boatmen there know exactly where to aim their boat so that when they take off from their part of the bank, they can gently navigate through the flow of the river, through all the rocks and danger points, and hit the opposite bank. That is upaya. It's knowing where to point. It's being pointed in the right direction, so that no matter how dangerous the rapids are or whatever rocks come in, the way you end up going to where you want to go. And he said, these five questions are like upaya for your soul, for your mind. When you truly, truly, truly reflect and answer these five Zen questions, no matter what crap comes your way, you know how to navigate that and get back to flow. You guys get me. So now let's take what Alan Watts was speaking about and connect it with a model that you guys know as mindvalley students. And that is the model from my book, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind, where I talk about the four different levels of evolution. Because as I was there listening to Mark, I realized that those three questions, you would answer them differently depending on where you are in this particular model of conscious evolution. So first, let me explain this model. This model basically says that at each level of your conscious evolution, you. You react to the world and shape the world in different ways. So let's go deeper, right? Many people in the world today, the majority of human beings exist at level one. They are living in what we call the culturescape. And at this level, the world happens to them. But at a certain point, people start questioning, they start waking up, they go to level two. I call that the awakening. This is where they realize that you can choose certain experiences in the world. Now, when you do that enough, you go to level three. Level three is called recoding yourself. This is where you realize that, wait a minute, the world isn't just outside you, the world is inside you as well. And you start paying attention to your inner world as soon as you start going within. This opens you up to level four. And level four is where I say you really start becoming extraordinary. Level four is where an important shift happens that completely transforms how you live your life. And it puts you in, perhaps, what could be the 1 to 5% of human beings in the world today who are truly fulfilled, happy, and giving back? We'll explore that in a moment. First, let's look at the three questions. Right. Who am I? What do I desire? What do I know? Who am I? What do I desire? What do I know? And in each of these levels, we're going to ask these three questions, and I'm going to show you a couple of things that connects what Alan said to modern science, modern philosophers, and many of our teachers here at mindvalley. Let's start with level one, the culturescape. So the culturescape is that tangled web of rituals, of beliefs, of ideas that come from culture. Whether you live in a tribe in some developing part of the world, or you live in a modern tribe such as a corporation, all of us are part of this culturescape. In other words, the world that we exist in is really a world that is happening cognitively in our minds based on beliefs, rituals, culture, social indoctrination, and what our mom and our dad and our media and our priest and our teachers and our preachers tell us to be, do and think. That's the culturescape. But we don't see that because, like a fish swimming in water, we don't realize that the rules in which we live life are not necessarily true for everyone else. They're only true for us because of our conditioning. Now, the problem with this culturescape is that many people believe it's real, and thus they become a victim of the culturescape. The things that happen to them, a breakup, a business failure, being hospitalized severely influenced them. The world happens to them. Now, the interesting thing is Alan Watts said none of this stuff is real. In fact, there's a famous lecture by Alan Watts. I'm going to play you a minute of that, where he says, there is no such thing as a thing. Nine to five is a thing. No such thing. Marriage, religion, God, mindfulness, none of these exist. They are simply ideas in our head. Listen to Alan explain it in his cool accent.
And so what I would call a kind of a basic problem we've got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say, separate things or separate events. Now, that is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems. I once asked a group of high school children, what do you mean by a thing? And first of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms. They said, it's an object, which is simply another word for a thing. It doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing. Finally, a very smart girl from Italy who was in the group said, a thing is a noun. She was quite right. A noun isn't a part of nature. It's part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either. See, the physical world is wiggly. The clouds, mountains, trees, people are all wiggly. And only when human beings get working at things, they build buildings in straight lines and try and make out that the world isn't really wiggly. But here are we sitting in this room, all built on straight lines. But each one of us is as wiggly as all get out.
