Lyrics The Great Things That You Do - Akira the Don, Alan Watts

The Great Things That You Do

Now, you see, if you do that
You do at least give yourself a chance
And it may be that when you are, in this way, freed from busy bodies,
and being out to improve everything, that your own nature will begin to take
care of itself
'Cause you’re not getting in the way of yourself all the time.
You will begin
to find out
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
For example, no great genius can explain how he does it
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
Yes, he says, «I have learned the techniques to express myself because I had
something in me that had to come out
If I were a musician, I had to learn how music is produced
If I wanted to describe something, I had to learn a language so that others can
understand me
I need a technique
But then, beyond that, I’m afraid I can’t tell you how it was that I used that
technique to express this mysterious thing I wanted to show you.»
If we could tell people, if we would have schools, where we would infallibly
train musical geniuses, scientific miracle minds, and there would be so many of
them
We wouldn’t know what to do with 'em, geniuses would be a dime a dozen
Then we would say, «Well, these people are, after all, not very ingenious,
you know?»
PhDs, how many of them are there?
Because what is fascinating, always, about genius is
The fellow does something we can’t understand
He surprises
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
For example, no great genius can explain how he does it
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
But you see, just in the same way, we cannot understand our own brains
Neurology knows relatively little about the brain, which is only to say that
the brain is a lot smarter than neurology
Yet, there is this which can perform all these extraordinary intellectual or
cultural miracles
We don’t know how we do, but we did
We didn’t have some campaign to have an improved brain over the monkeys,
or whatever may be our ancestors
It happened
And all growth, you see, is fundamentally something that happens
But for it to happen, two things are important
The first is, as I said, you must have the technical ability to express what
happens
Second then, you must get out of your own way
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
For example, no great genius can explain how he does it
The great things that you do
Are really happenings
How am I to get out of my own way?
And if I showed you a system
Let’s all practice getting out of our own way
It would turn into another form of self-improvement
See, here’s the dynamics of this
We find this problem, you see, repeatedly throughout the entire history of
human spirituality
In the phraseology of zen Buddhism, you cannot get this by thinking
You cannot attain to it by not thinking
As getting out of your own way ceases to be a matter of choice
When you see that there’s nothing else for you to do
When you see, in other words, that doing something about your situation is not
going to help you
When you see equally that trying not to do anything about it is not going to
help you
Where are you?
Where do you stand?
You’re nonplussed
And you are simply reduced to watching