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chapter seven Listening to the Rain: Embodied Awareness in Watts Michael C. Brannigan In his wonderfully written autobiography, In My Own Way, Alan Watts quotes Zen roshi Morimoto who says “The sound of rain needs no translation” (Watts, 1972, p. 386).1 What matters is simply listening—not translating , interpreting, deciphering, not sidetracking attention from an encounter that is bodily and sensual. Listening is a confluence of impressions as when a “soft rain” mixes aural and tactile, and a “sweet rain” blends in taste and smell. Although such expressions are reflective translations, the encounter is pre-reflective. It rests on an implicit bodily awareness, awareness in the most fundamental sense. Listening to the rain reminds us of the elemental truth that we are our bodies. AWARENESS NAKED AND CLOTHED As he artfully applies the rich texture of Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings to highlight the distinction between our pre-reflective experience and our description of that same experience, Watts reminds us of this truth2 : Bodily awareness is the conduit of our experience. We live in and through our bodies. Bodiliness enables taste, sight, smell, hearing, and touch. To a firm degree, we are our bodies. Moreover, by bodiliness, Watts does not confine its meaning to the mere physical, “simply a given chunk of flesh and bones,” but views body as dynamic, in the spirit of though not identical to Henri Bergson’s élan vital or the Daoist chi, manifesting “as much a streaming pattern of energy as a flame” (Watts, 1972, p. 201). This pre-reflective bodily awareness is a naked awareness, pure and simple. There is another level of awareness that supersedes nakedness, an added layer of awareness that naturally follows in the wake of listening, seeing, smelling , tasting, and feeling. It is clear mindfulness of my bodily encounter.3 It is reflective, focused, and aware of awareness. As such, mindfulness clothes our initial naked awareness. 149 150 ALAN WATTS—HERE AND NOW We can think of these two levels of awareness—its primordial rootedness in the body and mindful attention to this rootedness—as an embodied awareness, a theme that runs throughout Watts’ works. Watts did not explore our bodiliness with the same philosophical acumen as we find in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 1964) ontology of the body. Still, the undercurrent is there. Both naked and clothed awareness anchor us in the experience. Furthermore, embodied awareness enables us to get to the core of our encounter in the experience through providing the groundwork for cultivating what we may consider the “virtue” of presence. That is, through embodied awareness, in both senses as naked and clothed, we remain present to the encounter, and the encounter remains present in us. Here we face a problem, a hurdle of our own making. In embodied awareness, transitioning to mindfulness is extraordinarily difficult. Our reflective natures take over so that our own internal mental commotion impedes mindfulness. We face a perennial snag when we proceed to reflect further in ways that in effect remove us from the experience on which we reflect. There is a deep-seated difference between the world we experience and the world that we conceptualize as a result of reflecting on that experience. The process of reflecting is not in itself the problem. Socrates’ prescriptive prompt that “The unexamined life is not worth living” only makes sense because we human creatures naturally think and ponder. Problems arise because we do not acknowledge the above distinction, so that we blur the line between our interpretation of our experience, with its attached concepts, theories, and categories , and the experience itself. In so doing, in becoming less present to the encounter, we have trekked away from embodied awareness, our fundamental awareness on both levels. This has powerful implications for whether or not we can sustain a more ecological consciousness through recognizing our natural connections with the environment. Watts was discerningly ahead of his time in reminding us of our innate affinity with the natural world. As he puts it in his Nature, Man and Woman , “the skin is just as much a joiner as a divider, being, as it were, the bridge whereby the inner organs have contact with air, warmth, and light” (Watts, 1958, p. 55). At the same time, he warns us that our natural propensity to divide our “field of awareness” through deliberate acts of “selective attention” artificially structures that which is inherently vibrant, or nonstructurable, and divides that which is indivisible. Although this tendency is epistemic, dangers...

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