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Alan Watts (1915-1973)

The Complete Alan Watts Bibliography

Lecture on Zen Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen The

Nature of Consciousness The Book: On the Taboo
Against Knowing Who You Are From Time to
Eternity The World As Emptiness The Philosophies of
Asia Taoism Self and Other - a lecture

The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of

Consciousness Psychedelics and Religious
Experience The Value of Psychotic Experience The New
Alchemy A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy?
The Houseboat Summit: February, 1967, Sausalito,
Calif. Featuring Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts
and Allen Ginsberg Psychotherapy East and West
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_a
lan.shtml

The Soul-Searchers The Cross of Cards

Lecture on Zen by Alan

Watts http://www.deoxy.org/w_lectur.htm

Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted

an old Buddhist poem to his teacher, which says: The
voices of torrents are from one great tongue, the lions
of the hills are the pure body of Buddha. 'Isn't that
right?' he said to the teacher. 'It is,' said the teacher,
'but it's a pity to say so.'

It would be, of course, much better, if this occasion

were celebrated with no talk at all, and if I addressed
you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I
should hit the microphone with my fan and leave. But I
somehow have the feeling that since you have
contributed to the support of the Zen Center, in
expectation of learning something, a few words should
be said, even though I warn you, that by explaining
these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious
hoax. Because if I allow you to leave here this evening,
under the impression that you understand something
about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely.
Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not
possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever, so that
any concepts, any ideas, any words that I shall put
across to you this evening will have as their object,
showing you the limitations of words and of thinking.

Now then, if one must try to say something about what

Zen is, and I want to do this by way of introduction, I
must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a
doctrine. There's nothing you're supposed to believe in.
It's not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of
ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the
fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more like
water--it always slips through the net. And in water you
know when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to.
All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it
is changing. And when you're thrown into the water
after being accustomed to living on the dry land, you're
not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on
the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you
drown. The only way to survive in the water, and this
refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical
confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical
propositions are meaningless, and there's really nothing
to hang on to, because we're all just falling apart. And
the only thing to do under those circumstances is to
learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go,
you give yourself to the water, and you have to know
how to breathe in the right way. And then you find that
the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you
become the water. And so in the same way, one might
say if one attempted to--again I say misleadingly--to
put Zen into any sort of concept, it simply comes down
to this:

That in this universe, there is one great energy, and we

have no name for it. People have tried various names
for it, like God, like *Brahmin, like Tao, but in the West,
the word God has got so many funny associations
attached to it that most of us are bored with it. When
people say 'God, the father almighty,' most people feel
funny inside. So we like to hear new words, we like to
hear about Tao, about Brahmin, about Shinto, and __-
__-__, and such strange names from the far East
because they don't carry the same associations of
mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past.
And actually, some of these words that the Buddhists
use for the basic energy of the world really don't mean
anything at all. The word _tathata_, which is translated
from the Sanskrit as 'suchness' or 'thusness' or
something like that, really means something more like
'dadada,' based on the word _tat_, which in Sanskrit
means 'that,' and so in Sanskrit it is said _tat lum asi_,
'that thou art,' or in modern America, 'you're it.' But 'da,
da'--that's the first sound a baby makes when it comes
into the world, because the baby looks around and says
'da, da, da, da' and fathers flatter themselves and think
it's saying 'DaDa,' which means 'Daddy,' but according
to Buddhist philosophy, all this universe is one 'dadada.'
That means 'ten thousand functions, ten thousand
things, one suchness,' and we're all one suchness. And
that means that suchess comes and goes like anything
else because this whole world is an on-and-off system.
As the Chinese say, it's the _yang_ and the _yin_, and
therefore it consists of 'now you see it, now you don't,
here you are, here you aren't, here you are,' because
that the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves
have crests and troughs, only we, being under a kind of
sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is going
to overcome the wave or the crest, the _yin_, or the
dark principle, is going to overcome the _yang_, or the
light principle, and that 'off' is going to finally triumph
over 'on.' And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by
indulging in that illusion. 'Hey, supposing darkness did
win out, wouldn't that be terrible!' And so we're
constantly trembling and thinking that it may, because
after all, isn't it odd that anything exists? It's most
peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy, and it
would have been so much easier for there to have been
nothing at all. Therefore, we think 'well, since being,
since the 'is' side of things is so much effort' you always
give up after a while and you sink back into death. But
death is just the other face of energy, and it's the rest,
the not being anything around, that produces something
around, just in the same way that you can't have 'solid'
without 'space,' or 'space' without 'solid.' When you
wake up to this, and realize that the more it changes the
more it's the same thing, as the French say, that you are
really a train of this one energy, and there is nothing
else but that that is you, but that for you to be always
you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is
arranged that you stop being you after a while and then
come back as someone else altogether, and so when
you find that out, you become full energy and delight.
As Blake said, 'Energy is eternal delight.' And you
suddenly see through the whole sham thing. You realize
you're That--we won't put a name on it-- you're That,
and you can't be anything else. So you are relieved of
fundamental terror. That doesn't mean tht you're
always going to be a great hero, that you won't jump
when you hear a bang, that you won't worry
occasionally, that you won't lose your temper. It means,
though, that fundamentally deep, deep, deep down
within you, you will be able to be human, not a stone
Buddha--you know in Zen there is a difference made
between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha. If you go
up to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head,
nothing happens. You break your fist or your stick. But
if you hit a living Buddha, he may say 'ouch,' and he
may feel pain, because if he didn't feel something, he
wouldn't be a human being. Buddhas are human, they
are not devas, they are not gods. They are enlightened
men and women. But the point is that they are not
afraid to be human, they are not afraid to let themselves
participate in the pains, difficulties and struggles that
naturally go with human existence. The only difference
is--and it's almost an undetectable difference--it takes
one to know one. As a Zen poem says, 'when two Zen
masters meet each other on the street, they need no
introduction. When fiends meet, they recognize one
another instantly.' So a person who is a real cool Zen
understands that, does not go around 'Oh, I understand
Zen, I have satori, I have this attainment, I have that
attainment, I have the other attainment,' because if he
said that, he wouldn't understand the first thing about
it.

So it is Zen that, if I may put it metaphorically, *Jon-Jo

said 'the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It
grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does
not keep.' And another poem says of wild geese flying
over a lake, 'The wild geese do not intend to cast their
reflection, and the water has no mind to retain their
image.' In other words this is to be--to put it very
strictly into our modern idiom--this is to live without
hang-ups, the word 'hang- up' being an almost exact
translation of the Japanese _bono_ and the Sanskrit
_klesa_, ordinarily translated 'worldly attachment,'
though that sounds a little bit--you know what I mean--
it sounds pious, and in Zen, things that sound pious are
said to stink of Zen, but to have no hang-ups, that is to
say, to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like water,
seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion, a plane of
energy, and that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid
of. Fundamentally. You will be afraid on the surface. You
will be afraid of putting your hand in the fire. You will
be afraid of getting sick, etc. But you will not be afraid
of fear. Fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud
will be reflected in the mirror. But of course, the mirror
isn't quite the right illustration; space would be better.
Like a black cloud flows through space without leaving
any track. Like the stars don't leave trails behind them.
And so that fundamental--it is called 'the void' in
Buddhism; it doesn't mean 'void' in the sense that it's
void in the ordinary sense of emptiness. It means void
in that is the most real thing there is, but nobody can
conceive it. It's rather the same situation that you get
between the speaker, in a radio and all the various
sounds which it produces. On the speaker you hear
human voices, you hear every kind of musical
instrument, honking of horns, the sounds of traffic, the
explosions of guns, and yet all that tremendous variety
of sounds are the vibrations of one diaphragm, but it
never says so. The announcer doens't come on first
thing in the morning and say 'Ladies and gentlemen, all
the sounds that you will hear subsequentally during the
day will be the vibration of this diaphragm; don't take
them for real.' And the radio never mentions its own
construction, you see? And in exactly the same way, you
are never able, really, to examine, to make an object of
your own mind, just as you can't look directly into your
own eyes or bite your own teeth, because you ARE that,
and if you try to find it, and make it something to
possess, why that's a great lack of confidence. That
shows that you don't really know your 'it'. And if you're
'it,' you don't need to make anything of it. There's
nothing to look for. But the test is, are you still looking?
Do you know that? I mean, not as kind of knowledge
you possess, not something you've learned in school
like you've got a degree, and 'you know, I've mastered
the contents of these books and remembered it.' In this
knowledge, there's nothing to be remembered; nothing
to be formulated. You know it best when you say 'I
don't know it.' Because that means, 'I'm not holding on
to it, I'm not trying to cling to it' in the form of a
concept, because there's absolutely no necessity to do
so. That would be, in Zen language, putting legs on a
snake or a beard on a eunuch, or as we would say,
gilding the lily.

Now you say, 'Well, that sounds pretty easy. You mean
to say all we have to do is relax? We don't have to go
around chasing anything anymore? We abandon
religion, we abandon meditations, we abandon this,
that, and the other, and just live it up anyhow? Just go
on.' You know, like a father says to his child who keeps
asking 'Why? Why, Why, Why, Why, Why? Why did God
make the universe? Who made God? Why are the trees
green?' and so on and so forth, and father says finally,
'Oh, shut up and eat your bun.' It isn't quite like that,
because, you see, the thing is this:

All those people who try to realize Zen by doing nothing

about it are still trying desperately to find it, and they're
on the wrong track. There is another Zen poem which
says, 'You cannot attain it by thinking, you cannot grasp
it by not thinking.' Or you could say, you cannot catch
hold of the meaning of Zen by doing something about it,
but equally, you cannot see into its meaning by doing
nothing about it, because both are, in their different
ways, attempts to move from where you are now, here,
to somewhere else, and the point is that we come to an
understanding of this, what I call suchness, only
through being completely here. And no means are
necessary to be completely here. Neither active means
on the one hand, nor passive means on the other.
Because in both ways, you are trying to move away
from the immediate now. But you see, it's difficult to
understand language like that. And to understand what
all that is about, there is really one absolutely necessary
prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking. Now, I am not
saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual,
because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and
am a sort of half-baked scholar. But you know, if you
talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else
has to say, and therefore, all you'll have to talk about is
your own conversation. The same is true for people who
think all the time. That means, when I use the word
'think,' talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the
constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and
words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time,
you'll find that you've nothing to think about except
thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear
what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out
what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking,
you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski
called, so delightfully, 'the unspeakable world,' that is
to say, the nonverbal world. Some people would call it
the physical world, but these words 'physical,'
'nonverbal,' are all conceptual, not a concept either, it's
(bangs stick). So when you are awake to that world,
you suddenly find that all the so-called differences
between self and other, life and death, pleasure and
pain, are all conceptual, and they're not there. They
don't exist at all in that world which is (bangs stick). In
other words, if I hit you hard enough, 'ouch' doesn't
hurt, if you're in a state of what is called no-thought.
There is a certain experience, you see, but you don't call
it 'hurt.' It's like when you were small children, they
banged you about, and you cried, and they said 'Don't
cry' because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry
at the same time. People are rather curious about the
things the do like that. But you see, they really wanted
you to cry, the same way if you threw up one day. It's
very good to throw up if you've eaten soemthing that
isn't good for you, but your mother said 'Eugh!' and
made you repress it and feel that throwing up wasn't a
good thing to do. Because then when you saw people
die, and everybody around you started weeping and
making a fuss, and then you learned from that that
dying was terrible. When somebody got sick, everybody
else got anxious, and you learned that getting sick was
something awful. You learned it from a concept.

So the reason why there is in the practice of Zen, what

we did before this lecture began, to practice Za-zen,
sitting Zen. Incidentally, there are three other kinds of
Zen besides Za-zen. Standing Zen, walking Zen, and
lying Zen. In Buddhism, they speak of hte three
dignities of man. Walking, standing, sitting, and lying.
And they say when you sit, just sit. When you walk, just
walk. But whatever you do, don't wobble. In fact, of
course, you can wobble, if you really wobble well. When
the old master *Hiakajo was asked 'What is Zen?' he
said 'When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep,' and they
said, 'Well isn't that what everybody does? Aren't you
just like ordinary people?' 'Oh no,' he said, 'they don't
do anything of the kind. When they're hungry, they
don't just eat, they think of all sorts of things. When
they're tired, they don't just sleep, but dream all sorts
of dreams.' I know the Jungians won't like that, but
there comes a time when you just dream yourself out,
and no more dreams. You sleep deeply and breathe from
your heels. Now, therefore, Za-zen, or sitting Zen, is a
very, very good thing in the Western world. We have
been running around far too much. It's all right; we've
been active, and our action has achieved a lot of good
things. But as Aristotle pointed out long ago--and this is
one of the good things about Aristotle. He said 'the goal
of action is contemplation.' In other words, busy, busy,
busy, busy, busy, but what's it all about? Especially
when people are busy because they think they're GOING
somewhere, that they're going to get something and
attain something. There's quite a good deal of point to
action if you know you're not going anywhere. If you act
like you dance, or like you sing or play music, then
you're really not going anywhere, you're just doing pure
action, but if you act with a thought in mind that as a
result of action you are eventually going to arrive at
someplace where everything will be alright. Then you
are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what
the Buddhists call _samsara_, the round, or rat-race of
birth and death, because you think you're going to go
somewhere. You're already there. And it is only a
person who has discovered that he is already there who
is capable of action, because he doesn't act frantically
with the thought that he's going to get somewhere. He
acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point,
you see, where we walk not because we are in a great,
great hurry to get to a destination, but because the
walking itself is great. The walking itself is the
meditation. And when you watch Zen monks walk, it's
very fascinating. They have a different kind of walk from
everybody else in Japan. Most Japanese shuffle along,
or if they wear Western clothes, they race and hurry like
we do. Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they
walk, and you have the feeling they walk rather the
same way as a cat. There's something about it that isn't
hesitant; they're going along all right, they're not sort of
vagueing around, but they're walking just to walk. And
that's walking meditation. But the point is that one
cannot act creatively, except on the basis of stillness. Of
having a mind that is capable from time to time of
stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may
seem very difficult at first, because if you sit in the
Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners
start to fidget; they find it very boring to sit for a long
time, but the reason they find it boring is that they're
still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't
notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far
from being boring, the world when looked at without
chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most
ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of
shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things,
without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow,
that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When
you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them.
Because say when a person says 'I see a leaf,'
immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing
outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf
looks like that. No leaves--leaves are not green. That's
why Lao-Tzu said 'the five colors make a man blind, the
five tones make a man deaf,' because if you can only
see five colors, you're blind, and if you can only hear
five tones in music, you're deaf. You see, if you force
sound into five tones, you force color into five colors,
you're blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is
the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing
conceptions on the world of color and the world of
sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.

So this, should I be so bold as to use the word

'discipline,' of meditation or Za-zen lies behind the
extraordinary capacity of Zen people to develop such
great arts as the gardens, the tea ceremony, the
caligraphy, and the grand painting of the Sum Dynasty,
and of the Japanese Sumi tradition. And it was because,
especially in tea ceremony, which means literally 'cha-
no-yu' in Japanese, meaning 'hot water of tea,' they
found in the very simplest of things in everyday life,
magic. In the words of the poet *Hokoji, 'marvelous
power and supernatural activity, drawing water,
carrying wood.' And you know how it is sometimes
when you say a word and make the word meaningless,
you take the word 'yes'--yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes, yes. It becomes funny. That's why they use the
word 'mu' in Zen training, which means 'no.' Mu. And
you get this going for a long time, and the word ceases
to mean anything, and it becomes magical. Now, what
you have to realize in the further continuence of Za-zen,
that as you-- Well, let me say first in a preliminary way,
the easiest way to stop thinking is first of all to think
about something that doesn't have any meaning. That's
my point in talking about 'mu' or 'yes,' or counting your
breath, or listening to a sound that has no meaning,
because that stops you thinking, and you become
fascinated in the sound. Then as you get on and you
just--the sound only--there comes a point when the
sound is taken away, and you're wide open. Now at that
point, there will be a kind of preliminary so-called
satori, and you will think 'wowee, that's it!' You'll be so
happy, you'll be walking on air. When Suzuki Daisetz
was asked what was it like to have satori, he said 'well,
it's like ordinary, everyday experience, except about
two inches off the ground.' But there's another saying
that the student who has obtained satori goes to hell as
straight as an arrow. No satori around here, because
anybody who has a spiritual experience, whether you
get it through Za-zen, or through LSD, or anything, you
know, that gives you that experience. If you hold on to
it, say 'now I've got it,' it's gone out of the window,
because the minute you grab the living thing, it's like
catching a handful of water, the harder you clutch, the
faster it squirts through your fingers. There's nothing to
get hold of, because you don't NEED to get hold of
anything. You had it from the beginning. Because you
can see that, by various methods of meditation, but the
trouble is that people come out of that an brag about it,
say 'I've seen it.' Equally intolerable are the people who
study Zen and come out and brag to their friends about
how much their legs hurt, and how long they sat, and
what an awful thing it was. They're sickening. Because
the discipline side of this thing is not meant to be
something awful. It's not done in a masochistic spirit, or
a sadistic spirit: suffering builds character, therefore
suffering is good for you. When I went to school in
England, the basic premise of education was that
suffering builds character, and therefore all senior boys
were at liberty to bang about the junior ones with a
perfectly clear conscience, because they were doing
them a favor. It was good for them, it was building their
character, and as a result of this attitude, the word
'discipline' has begun to stink. It's been stinking for a
long time. But we need a kind of entirely new attitude
towards this, because without that quiet, and that non-
striving, a life becomes messy. When you let go, finally,
because there's nothing to hold onto, you have to be
awfully careful not to turn into loose yogurt. Let me give
two opposite illustrations. When you ask most people to
lie flat on the floor and relax, you find that they are at
full attention, because they don't really believe that the
floor will hold them up, and therefore they're holding
themselves together; they're uptight. They're afraid that
if they don't do this, even though the floor is supporting
them, they'll suddenly turn into a gelatinous mass and
trickle away in all directions. Then there are other
people who when you tell them to relax, they go like a
limp rag. But you see, the human organism is a subtle
combination of hardness and softness. Of flesh and
bones. And the side of Zen which has to do with neither
doing nor not doing, but knowing that you are It
anyway, and you don't have to seek it, that's Zen-flesh.
But the side in which you can come back into the world,
with this attitude of not seeking, and knowing you're It,
and not fall apart--that requires bones. And one of the
most difficult things--this belongs to of course a
generation we all know about that was running about
some time ago--where they caught on to Zen, and they
started anything-goes painting, they started anything-
goes sculpture, they started anything-goes way of life.
Now I think we're recovering from that today. At any
rate, our painters are beginning once again to return to
glory, to marvelous articulateness and vivid color.
There's been nothing like it since the stained glass at
Chartre(sp). That's a good sign. But it requires that
there be in our daily use of freedom, and I'm not just
talking about political freedom. I'm talking about the
freedom which comes when you know that you're It,
forever and ever and ever. And it'll be so nice when you
die, because that'll be a change, but it'll come back
some other way. When you know that, and you've seen
through the whole mirage, then watch out, because
there may still be in you some seeds of hostility, some
seeds of pride, some seeds of wanting to put down
other people, or wanting to just defy the normal
arrangements of life.

So that is why, in the order of a Zen monastary, various

duties are assigned. The novices have the light duties,
and the more senior you get, the heavy duties. For
example, the Roshi very often is the one who cleans out
the _benjo_, the toilet. And everything is kept in order.
There is a kind of beautiful, almost princely
aestheticism, because by reason of that order being
kept all of the time, the vast free energy which is
contained in the system doesn't run amok. The
understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening,
the understanding of-- Well, we'll call it mystical
experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the
world. And for a person who cannot contain it, it's like
putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You
blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you go off in
that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a
pratyeka- buddha--'private buddha'. He is one who goes
off into the transcendental world and is never seen
again. And he's made a mistake from the standpoint of
Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism,
there is no fundamental difference between the
transcendental world and this everyday world. The
_bodhisattva_, you see, who doesn't go off into a
nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back
and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to
see through it, too, he doesn't come back because he
feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind
and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because
he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other
beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a phrase of
G.K. Chesterton's, 'but now a great thing in the street,
seems any human nod, where move in strange
democracies the million masks of god.' And it's fantastic
to look at people and see that they really, deep down,
are enlightened. They're It. They're faces of the divine.
And they look at you, and they say 'oh no, but I'm not
divine. I'm just ordinary little me.' You look at them in a
funny way, and here you see the buddha nature looking
out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it's not,
and saying it quite sincerely. And that's why, when you
get up against a great guru, the Zen master, or
whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say
'I have a problem, guru. I'm really mixed up, I don't
understand,' he looks at you in this queer way, and you
think 'oh dear me, he's reading my most secret
thoughts. He's seeing all the awful things I am, all my
cowardice, all my shortcomings.' He isn't doing anything
of the kind; he isn't even interested in such things. He's
looking at, if I may use Hindu terminology, he's looking
at Shiva, in you, saying 'my god, Shiva, won't you come
off it?'

So then, you see, the _bodhisattva_, who is--I'm

assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this
assembly--but the _bodhisattva_ as distinct from the
pratyeka-buddha, bodhisattva doesn't go off into
nirvana, he doesn't go off into permanant withdrawn
ecstasy, he doesn't go off into a kind of catatonic
_samadhi_. That's all right. There are people who can
do that; that's their vocation. That's their specialty, just
as a long thing is the long body of buddha, and a short
thing is the short body of buddha. But if you really
understand that Zen, that buddhist idea of
enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the
transcendental, neither is it comprehended in the idea
of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in
terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in
terms of the temporal, because they're all concepts. So,
let me say again, I am not talking about the ordering of
ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical
way as being schoolteacherish, and saying 'if you were
NICE people, that's what you would do.' For heaven's
sake, don't be nice people. But the thing is, that unless
you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of
order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of
liberation will blow the world to pieces. It's too strong a
current for the wire. So then, it's terribly important to
see beyond ecstasy. Ecstasy here is the soft and lovable
flesh, huggable and kissable, and that's very good. But
beyond ecstasy are bones, what we call hard facts. Hard
facts of everyday life, and incidentally, we shouldn't
forget to mention the soft facts; there are many of
them. But then the hard fact, it is what we mean, the
world as seen in an ordinary, everyday state of
consciousness. To find out that that is really no different
from the world of supreme ecstasy, well, it's rather like
this:

Let's suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy

as insight, as seeing light. There's a Zen poem which
says

A sudden crash of thunder. The mind doors burst

open, and there sits the ordinary old man.

See? There's a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee!

And the doors of the mind are blown apart, and there
sits the ordinary old man. It's just little you, you know?
Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your
eyes, you've missed seeing. Why? Because here is the
light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the
world has 'seen the light.' That brilliant, blazing energy,
brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in
everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you're seeing it.
Like you see aureoles around buddhas. Like you see the
beatific vision at the end of Dante's 'Paradiso.' Vivid,
vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the
void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond light,
it's so bright. And you watch it receeding from you. And
on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of
red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, violet. You see this great mandela
appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet, there's
black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but
transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of
the black, as the _yang_ comes from the _yin_, more
light. Going, going, going. And along with this light,
there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous
with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing
that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with
the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic
intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a
deep thundering base which is so vibrant that it turns
into something solid, and you begin to get the similar
spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been
watching a kind of thing radiating out. 'But,' it says,
'you know, this isn't all I can do,' and the rays start
dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it
comes out, and the textures start varying themselves,
and they say, well, you've been looking at this this as
I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let's
add a third dimension; it's going to come right at you
now. And meanwhile, it says, we're not going to just do
like this, we're going to do little curlicues. And it says,
'well, that's just the beginning!' Making squares and
turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details
that become so intense, that all kinds of little subfigures
are contained in what you originally thought were the
main figures, and the sound starts going all different,
amazing complexities if sound all over the place, and
this thing's going, going, going, and you think you're
going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns
into... Why, us, sitting around here.

Thank you very much.

(Scribbled down by Alan Seaver.)

The Nature of Consciousness by Alan
Watts http://www.deoxy.org/w_nature.htm

I find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter

of this seminar is going to be, because it's too
fundamental to give it a title. I'm going to talk about
what there is. Now, the first thing, though, that we have
to do is to get our perspectives with some background
about the basic ideas that, as Westerners living today in
the United States, influence our everyday common
sense, our fundamental notions about what life is about.
And there are historical origins for this, which influence
us more strongly than most people realize. Ideas of the
world which are built into the very nature of the
language we use, and of our ideas of logic, and of what
makes sense altogether. And these basic ideas I call
myth, not using the word 'myth' to mean simply
something untrue, but to use the word 'myth' in a more
powerful sense. A myth is an image in terms of which
we try to make sense of the world. Now, for example, a
myth in a way is a metaphore. If you want to explain
electricity to someone who doesn't know anything
about electricity, you say, well, you talk about an
electric current. Now, the word 'current' is borrowed
from rivers. It's borrowed from hydrolics, and so you
explain electricity in terms of water. Now, electricity is
not water, it behaves actually in a different way, but
there are some ways in which the behavior of water is
like the behavior of electricty, and so you explain it in
terms of water. Or if you're an astronomer, and you
want to explain to people what you mean by an
expanding universe and curved space, you say, 'well,
it's as if you have a black balloon, and there are white
dots on the black balloon, and those dots represent
galaxies, and as you blow the balloon up, uniformly all
of them grow farther and farther apart. But you're using
an analogy--the universe is not actually a black balloon
with white dots on it.
So in the same way, we use these sort of images to try
and make sense of the world, and we at present are
living under the influence of two very powerful images,
which are, in the present state of scientific knowledge,
inadequate, and one of the major problems today are to
find an adequate, satisfying image of the world. Well
that's what I'm going to talk about. And I'm going to go
further than that, not only what image of the world to
have, but how we can get our sensations and our
feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of
the world that we can manage to conceive.

All right, now--the two images which we have been

working under for 2000 years and maybe more are what
I would call two models of the universe, and the first is
called the ceramic model, and the second the fully
automatic model. The ceramic model of the universe is
based on the book of Genesis, from which Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity derive their basic picture of the
world. And the image of the world in the book of
Genesis is that the world is an artifact. It is made, as a
potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a
carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out
of it. Don't forget Jesus is the son of a carpenter. And
also the son of God. So the image of God and of the
world is based on the idea of God as a technician,
potter, carpenter, architect, who has in mind a plan, and
who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan.

So basic to this image of the world is the notion, you

see, that the world consists of stuff, basically.
Primoridial matter, substance, stuff. As parts are made
of clay. Now clay by itself has no intelligence. Clay does
not of itself become a pot, although a good potter may
think otherwise. Because if you were a really good
potter, you don't impose your will on the clay, you ask
any given lump of clay what it wants to become, and
you help it to do that. And then you become a genious.
But the ordinary idea I'm talking about is that simply
clay is unintelligent; it's just stuff, and the potter
imposes his will on it, and makes it become whatever he
wants.

And so in the book of Genesis, the lord God creates

Adam out of the dust of the Earth. In other words, he
makes a clay figurine, and then he breathes into it, and
it becomes alive. And because the clay become
informed. By itself it is formless, it has no intelligence,
and therefore it requires an external intelligence and an
external energy to bring it to life and to bring some
sense to it. And so in this way, we inherit a conception
of ourselves as being artifacts, as being made, and it is
perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its
mother 'How was I made?' or 'Who made me?' And this
is a very, very powerful idea, but for example, it is not
shared by the Chinese, or by the Hindus. A Chinese child
would not ask its mother 'How was I made?' A Chinese
child might ask its mother 'How did I grow?' which is an
entirely different procedure form making. You see,
when you make something, you put it together, you
arrange parts, or you work from the outside in, as a
sculpture works on stone, or as a potter works on clay.
But when you watch something growing, it works in
exactly the opposite direction. It works from the inside
to the outside. It expands. It burgeons. It blossoms.
And it happens all of itself at once. In other words, the
original simple form, say of a living cell in the womb,
progressively complicates itself, and that's the growing
process, and it's quite different from the making
process.

But we have thought, historically, you see, of the world

as something made, and the idea of being--trees, for
example-- constructions, just as tables and houses are
constructions. And so there is for that reason a
fundamental difference between the made and the
maker. And this image, this ceramic model of the
universe, originated in cultures where the form of
government was monarchial, and where, therefore, the
maker of the universe was conceived also at the same
time in the image of the king of the universe. 'King of
kings, lords of lords, the only ruler of princes, who thus
from thy throne behold all dwellers upon Earth.' I'm
quoting the Book of Common Prayer. And so, all those
people who are oriented to the universe in that way feel
related to basic reality as a subject to a king. And so
they are on very, very humble terms in relation to
whatever it is that works all this thing. I find it odd, in
the United States, that people who are citizens of a
republic have a monarchial theory of the universe. That
you can talk about the president of the United States as
LBJ, or Ike, or Harry, but you can't talk about the lord of
the universe in such familiar terms. Because we are
carrying over from very ancient near-Eastern cultures,
the notion that the lord of the universe must be
respected in a certain way. Poeple kneel, people bow,
people prostrate themselves, and you know what the
reason for that is: that nobody is more frightened of
anybody else than a tyrant. He sits with his back to the
wall, and his guards on either side of him, and he has
you face downwards on the ground because you can't
use weapons that way. When you come into his
presence, you don't stand up and face him, because you
might attack, and he has reason to fear that you might
because he's ruling you all. And the man who rules you
all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he's the
one who succeeded in crime. The other people are
pushed aside because they--the criminals, the people
we lock up in jail--are simply the people who didn't
make it.

So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall
and his henchmen on either side of him. And so when
you design a church, what does it look like? Catholic
church, with the alter where it used to be--it's changing
now, because the Catholic religion is changing. But the
Catholic church has the alter with it's back to the wall at
the east end of the church. And the alter is the throne
and the priest is the chief vizier of the court, and he is
making abeyance to the throne, but there is the throne
of God, the alter. And all the people are facing it, and
kneeling down. And a great Catholic cathederal is called
a basilica, from the Greek 'basilikos,' which means
'king.' So a basilica is the house of a king, and the ritual
of the church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium.

A Protestant church is a little different. Basically the

same. The furniture of a Protestant church is based on a
judicial courthouse. The pulpit, the judge in an American
court wears a black robe, he wears exactly the same
dress as a Protestant minister. And everybody sits in
these boxes, there's a box for the jury, there's a box for
the judge, there's a box for this, there's a box for that,
and those are the pews in an ordinary colonial- type
Protestant church. So both these kinds of churches
which have an autocratic view of the nature of the
universe decorate themselves, are architecturally
constructed in accordance with politcal images of the
universe. One is the king, and the other is the judge.
Your honor. There's sense in this. When in court, you
have to refer to the judge as 'your honor.' It stops the
people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers
and getting rude. There's a certain sense to that.

But when you want to apply that image to the universe

itself, to the very nature of life, it has limitations. For
one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and
spirit. This idea doesn't work anymore. Long, long ago,
physicists stopped asking the question 'What is matter?'
They began that way. They wanted to know, what is the
fundamental substance of the world? And the more they
asked that question, the more they realized the couldn't
answer it, because if you're going to say what matter is,
you've got to describe it in terms of behavior, that is to
say in terms of form, in terms of pattern. You tell what
it does, you describe the smallest shapes of it which you
can see. Do you see what happens? You look, say, at a
piece of stone, and you want to say, 'Well, what is this
piece of stone made of?' You take your microscope and
you look at it, and instead of just this block of stuff, you
see ever so many tinier shapes. Little crystals. So you
say, 'Fine, so far so good. Now what are these crystals
made of?' And you take a more powerful instrument,
and you find that they're made of molocules, and then
you take a still more powerful instrument to find out
what the molocules are made of, and you begin to
describe atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of
sub-nuclear particles. But you never, never arrive at the
basic stuff. Because there isn't any.

What happens is this: 'Stuff' is a word for the world as it

looks when our eyes are out of focus. Fuzzy. Stuff--the
idea of stuff is that it is undifferentiated, like some kind
of goo. And when your eyes are not in sharp focus,
everything looks fuzzy. When you get your eyes into
focus, you see a form, you see a pattern. But when you
want to change the level of magnification, and go in
closer and closer and closer, you get fuzzy again before
you get clear. So everytime you get fuzzy, you go
through thinking there's some kind of stuff there. But
when you get clear, you see a shape. So all that we can
talk about is patterns. We never, never can talk about
the 'stuff' of which these patterns are supposed to be
made, because you don't really have to suppose that
there is any. It's enough to talk about the world in
terms of patterns. It describes anything that can be
described, and you don't really have to suppose that
there is some stuff that constitutes the essence of the
pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the
essence of pots. And so for this reason, you don't really
have to suppose that the world is some kind of helpless,
passive, unintelligent junk which an outside agency has
to inform and make into intelligent shapes. So the
picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of
today is not formed stuff--potted clay--but pattern. A
self-moving, self-designing pattern. A dance. And our
common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with
this.

Well now, in the course of time, in the evolution of

Western thought. The ceramic image of the world ran
into trouble. And changed into what I call the fully
automatic image of the world. In other words, Western
science was based on the idea that there are laws of
nature, and got that idea from Judaism and Christianity
and Islam. That in other words, the potter, the maker of
the world in the beginning of things laid down the laws,
and the law of God, which is also the law of nature, is
called the 'loggos.?,.' And in Christianity, the loggos is
the second person of the trinity, incarnate as Jesus
Christ, who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine
law. So we have tended to think of all natural
phenomena as responding to laws, as if, in other words,
the laws of the world were like the rails on which a
streetcar or a tram or a train runs, and these things
exist in a certain way, and all events respond to these
laws. You know that limerick,

There was a young man who said 'Damn, For it certainly

seems that I am A creature that moves In determinate
grooves. I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.'

So here's this idea that there's kind of a plan, and

everything responds and obeys that plan. Well, in the
18th century, Western intellectuals began to suspect
this idea. And what they suspected was whether there
is a lawmaker, whether there is an architect of the
universe, and they found out, or they reasoned, that you
don't have to suppose that there is. Why? Because the
hypothesis of God does not help us to make any
predictions. Nor does it-- In other words, let's put it this
way: if the business of science is to make predictions
about what's going to happen, science is essentially
prophecy. What's going to happen? By examining the
behavior of the past and describing it carefully, we can
make predictions about what's going to happen in the
future. That's really the whole of science. And to do this,
and to make successful predictions, you do not need
God as a hypothesis. Because it makes no difference to
anything. If you say 'Everything is controlled by God,
everything is governed by God,' that doesn't make any
difference to your prediction of what's going to happen.
And so what they did was drop that hypothesis. But they
kept the hypothesis of law. Because if you can predict, if
you can study the past and describe how things have
behaved, and you've got some regularities in the
behavior of the universe, you call that law. Although it
may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word, it's
simply regularity.

And so what they did was got rid of the lawmaker and
kept the law. And so the conceived the universe in
terms of a mechanism. Something, in other words, that
is functioning according to regular, clocklike mechanical
principles. Newton's whole image of the world is based
on billiards. The atoms are billiard balls, and they bang
each other around. And so your behavior, every
individual around, is defined as a very, very complex
arrangement of billiard balls being banged around by
everything else. And so behind the fully automatic
model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is,
to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind
energy. In say the metaphysics of Ernst Hegel, and T.H.
Huxley, the world is basically nothing but energy--blind,
unintelligent force. And likewise and parallel to this, in
the philosophy of Freud, the basic psychological energy
is libido, which is blind lust. And it is only a fluke, it is
only as a result of pure chances that resulting from the
exuberance of this energy there are people. With
values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and
with love. Just a fluke. Like, you know, 1000 monkeys
typing on 1000 typewriters for a million years will
eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica. And of
course the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia
Britannica, they will relapse into nonsense.

And so in order that that shall not happen, for you and I
are flukes in this cosmos, and we like our way of life--
we like being human--if we want to keep it, say these
people, we've got to fight nature, because it will turn us
back into nonsense the moment we let it. So we've got
to impose our will upon this world as if we were
something completely alien to it. From outside. And so
we get a culture based on the idea of the war between
man and nature. And we talk about the conquest of
space. The conquest of Everest. And the great symbols
of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer. The
rocket--you know, compensation for the sexually
inadequate male. So we're going to conquer space. You
know we're in space already, way out. If anybody cared
to be sensitive and let outside space come to you, you
can, if your eyes are clear enough. Aided by telescopes,
aided by radio astronomy, aided by all the kinds of
sensitive instruments we can devise. We're as far out in
space as we're ever going to get. But, y'know,
sensitivity isn't the pitch. Especially in the WASP culture
of the United States. We define manliness in terms of
agression, you see, because we're a little bit frightened
as to whether or not we're really men. And so we put on
this great show of being a tough guy. It's completely
unneccesary. If you have what it takes, you don't need
to put on that show. And you don't need to beat nature
into submission. Why be hostile to nature? Because
after all, you ARE a symptom of nature. You, as a human
being, you grow out of this physical universe in exactly
the same way an apple grows off an apple tree.

So let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which

apples, using 'apple' as a verb. And a world in which
human beings arrive is a world that peoples. And so the
existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of
universe we live in. Just as spots on somebody's skin is
symptomatic of chicken pox. Just as hair on a head is
symptomatic of what's going on in the organism. But we
have been brought up by reason of our two great
myths--the ceramic and the automatic--not to feel that
we belong in the world. So our popular speech reflects
it. You say 'I came into this world.' You didn't. You came
out of it. You say 'Face facts.' We talk about
'encounters' with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting
of completely alien agencies. And the average person
has the sensation that he is a someone that exists
inside a bag of skin. The center of consciousness that
looks out at this thing, and what the hell's it going to do
to me? You see? 'I recognize you, you kind of look like
me, and I've seen myself in a mirror, and you look like
you might be people.' So maybe you're intelligent and
maybe you can love, too. Perhaps you're all right, some
of you are, anyway. You've got the right color of skin, or
you have the right religion, or whatever it is, you're OK.
But there are all those people over in Asia, and Africa,
and they may not really be people. When you want to
destroy someone, you always define them as 'unpeople.'
Not really human. Monkeys, maybe. Idiots, maybe.
Machines, maybe, but not people.

So we have this hostility to the external world because

of the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded
theory that you, yourself, exist only inside your skin.
Now I want to propose another idea altogether. There
are two great theories in astronomy going on right now
about the origination of the universe. One is called the
explosion theory, and the other is called the steady
state theory. The steady state people say there never
was a time when the world began, it's always
expanding, yes, but as a result of free hydrogen in
space, the free hydrogen coagulates and makes new
galaxies. But the other people say there was a
primoridial explosion, an enormous bang billions of
years ago which flung all the galazies into space. Well
let's take that just for the sake of argument and say
that was the way it happened.
It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a
wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle,
it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the
little droplets get finer and finer and make more
complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there
was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread.
And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated
human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that
bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end
of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as
being only that. If you think that you are only inside
your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated
little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion.
Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years
ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated
human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't
feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends
how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the
way things started, if there was a big bang in the
beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the
big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet
on the end of the process. You are still the process. You
are the big bang, the original force of the universe,
coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see
not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms
so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the
primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in
this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've
learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

And so what I would call 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. That 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?' 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. And she was quite right. A noun isn't a
part of nature, it's a part of speech. There are no nouns
in the physical world. There are no separate things in
the physical world, either. The physical world is wiggly.
Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. And
only when human beings get to working on things--they
build buildings in straight lines, and try to make out that
the world isn't really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in
this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of
us is as wiggly as all get-out.

Now then, when you want to get control of something

that wiggles, it's pretty difficult, isn't it? You try and
pick up a fish in your hands, and the fish is wiggly and it
slips out. What do you do to get hold of the fish? You
use a net. And so the net is the basic thing we have for
getting hold of the wiggly world. So if you want to get
hold of this wiggle, you've got to put a net over it. A net
is something regular. And I can number the holes in a
net. So many holes up, so many holes across. And if I
can number these holes, I can count exactly where each
wiggle is, in terms of a hole in that net. And that's the
beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world.
But in order to do that, I've got to break up the wiggle
into bits. I've got to call this a specific bit, and this the
next bit of the wiggle, and this the next bit, and this the
next bit of the wiggle. And so these bits are things or
events. Bit of wiggles. Which I mark out in order to talk
about the wiggle. In order to measure and therfore in
order to control it. But in nature, in fact, in the physical
world, the wiggle isn't bitted. Like you don't get a cut-
up fryer out of an egg. But you have to cut the chicken
up in order to eat it. You bite it. But it doesn't come
bitten.

So the world doesn't come thinged; it doesn't come

evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the
physical universe as a wave is continuous with the
ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And
as I wave and say to you 'Yoo-hoo!' the world is waving
with me at you and saying 'Hi! I'm here!' But we are
consciousness of the way we feel and sense our
existence. Being based on a myth that we are made,
that we are parts, that we are things, our consciousness
has been influenced, so that each one of us does not
feel that. We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized
by social convention into feeling and sensing that we
exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original
bang, just something out on the end of it. And therefore
we are scared stiff. My wave is going to disappear, and
I'm going to die! And that would be awful. We've got a
mythology going now which is, as Father Maskell.?, put
it, we are something that happens between the
maternity ward and the crematorium. And that's it. And
therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.

This is what people really believe today. You may go to

church, you may say you believe in this, that, and the
other, but you don't. Even Jehovah's Witnesses, who are
the most fundamental of fundamentalists, they are
polite when they come around and knock on the door.
But if you REALLY believed in Christianity, you would be
screaming in the streets. But nobody does. You would
be taking full- page ads in the paper every day. You
would be the most terrifying television programs. The
churches would be going out of their minds if they really
believed what they teach. But they don't. They think
they ought to believe what they teach. They believe
they should believe, but they don't really believe it,
because what we REALLY believe is the fully automatic
model. And that is our basic, plausible common sense.
You are a fluke. You are a separate event. And you run
from the maternity ward to the crematorium, and that's
it, baby. That's it.

Now why does anybody think that way? There's no

reason to, because it isn't even scientific. It's just a
myth. And it's invented by people who want to feel a
certain way. They want to play a certain game. The
game of god got embarrassing. The idea if God as the
potter, as the architect of the universe, is good. It
makes you feel that life is, after all, important. There is
someone who cares. It has meaning, it has sense, and
you are valuable in the eyes of the father. But after a
while, it gets embarrassing, and you realize that
everything you do is being watched by God. He knows
your tiniest innermost feelings and thoughts, and you
say after a while, 'Quit bugging me! I don't want you
around.' So you become an athiest, just to get rid of
him. Then you feel terrible after that, because you got
rid of God, but that means you got rid of yourself. You're
nothing but a machine. And your idea that you're a
machine is just a machine, too. So if you're a smart kid,
you commit suicide. Camus said there is only one
serious philosophical question, which is whether or not
to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious
philosophical questions. The first one is 'Who started
it?' The second is 'Are we going to make it?' The third is
'Where are we going to put it?' The fourth is 'Who's
going to clean up?' And the fifth, 'Is it serious?'

But still, should you or not commit suicide? This is a

good question. Why go on? And you only go on if the
game is worth the gamble. Now the universe has been
going on for an incredible long time. And so really, a
satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that's
worth betting on. That's very, it seems to me,
elementary common sense. If you make a theory of the
universe which isn't worth betting on, why bother? Just
commit suicide. But if you want to go on playing the
game, you've got to have an optimal theory for playing
the game. Otherwise there's no point in it. But the
people who coined the fully automatic theory of the
universe were playing a very funny game, for what they
wanted to say was this: all you people who believe in
religion--old ladies and wishful thinkers-- you've got a
big daddy up there, and you want comfort, but life is
rough. Life is tough, as success goes to the most hard-
headed people. That was a very convenient theory when
the European and American worlds were colonizing the
natives everywhere else. They said 'We're the end
product of evolution, and we're tough. I'm a big strong
guy because I face facts, and life is just a bunch of junk,
and I'm going to impose my will on it and turn it into
something else. I'm real hard.' That's a way of flattering
yourself.

And so, it has become academically plausible and

fashionable that this is the way the world works. In
academic circles, no other theory of the world than the
fully automatic model is respectable. Because if you're
an academic person, you've got to be an intellectually
tough person, you've got to be prickly. There are
basically two kinds of philosophy. One's called prickles,
the other's called goo. And prickly people are precise,
rigorous, logical. They like everything chopped up and
clear. Goo people like it vague. For example, in physics,
prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of
matter are particles. Goo people believe it's waves. And
in philosophy, prickly people are logical positivists, and
goo people are idealists. And they're always arguing
with each other, but what they don't realize is neither
one can take his position without the other person.
Because you wouldn't know you advocated prickles
unless there was someone advocating goo. You
wouldn't know what a prickle was unless you knew
what a goo was. Because life isn't either prickles or goo,
it's either gooey prickles or prickly goo. They go
together like back and front, male and female. And
that's the answer to philosophy. You see, I'm a
philosopher, and I'm not going to argue very much,
because if you don't argue with me, I don't know what I
think. So if we argue, I say 'Thank you,' because owing
to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I
understand what I mean. So I can't get rid of you.

But however, you see, this whole idea that the universe
is nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around
and not even enjoying it is a putdown theory of the
world. People who had an advantage to make, a game
to play by putting it down, and making out that because
they put the world down they were a superior kind of
people. So that just won't do. We've had it. Because if
you seriously go along with this idea of the world,
you're what is technically called alienated. You feel
hostile to the world. You feel that the world is a trap. It
is a mechanism, it is electronic and neurological
mechanisms into which you somehow got caught. And
you, poor thing, have to put up with being put into a
body that's falling apart, that gets cancer, that gets the
great Siberian itch, and is just terrible. And these
mechanics--doctors--are trying to help you out, but they
really can't succeed in the end, and you're just going to
fall apart, and it's a grim business, and it's just too bad.
So if you think that's the way things are, you might as
well commit suicide right now. Unless you say, 'Well,
I'm damned. Because there might really be after all
eternal damnation. Or I identify with my children, and I
think of them going on without me and nobody to
support them. Because if I do go on in this frame of
mind and continue to support them, I shall teach them
to be like I am, and they'll go on, dragging it out to
support their children, and they won't enjoy it. They'll
be afraid to commit suicide, and so will their children.
They'll all learn the same lessons.'

So you see, all I'm trying to say is that the basic

common sense about the nature of the world that is
influencing most people in the United States today is
simply a myth. If you want to say that the idea of God
the father with his white beard on the golden throne is a
myth, in a bad sense of the word 'myth,' so is this other
one. It is just as phony and has just as little to support
it as being the true state of affairs. Why? Let's get this
clear. If there is any such thing at all as intelligence and
love and beauty, well you've found it in other people. In
other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I
said, if it is there, in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme
of things. We are as symptomatic of the scheme of
things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree
or the rose of the rose bush. The Earth is not a big rock
infested with living organisms any more than your
skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is
geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people,
and our existence on the Earth is a symptom of this
other system, and its balances, as much as the solar
system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our
galaxy in its turn is a symptom of a whole company of
other galaxies. Goodness only knows what that's in.

But you see, when, as a scientist, you describe the

behavior of a living organism, you try to say what a
person does, it's the only way in which you can describe
what a person is, describe what they do. Then you find
out that in making this description, you cannot confine
yourself to what happens inside the skin. In other
words, you cannot talk about a person walking unless
you start describing the floor, because when I walk, I
don't just dangle my legs in empty space. I move in
relationship to a room. So in order to describe what I'm
doing when I'm walking, I have to describe the room; I
have to describe the territory. So in describing my
talking at the moment, I can't describe it as just a thing
in itself, because I'm talking to you. And so what I'm
doing at the moment is not completely described unless
your being here is described also. So if that is
necessary, in other words, in order to describe MY
behavior, I have to describe YOUR behavior and the
behavior of the environment, it means that we've really
got one system of behavior. Your skin doesn't separate
you from the world; it's a bridge through which the
external world flows into you, and you flow into it.

Just, for example, as a whirlpool in water, you could say

because you have a skin you have a definite shape you
have a definite form. All right? Here is a flow of water,
and suddenly it does a whirlpool, and it goes on. The
whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it.
The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and
exactly the same way, the whole universe is doing each
one of us, and I see each one of you today and I
recognize you tomorrow, just as I would recognize a
whirlpool in a stream. I'd say 'Oh yes, I've seen that
whirlpool before, it's just near so-and-so's house on the
edge of the river, and it's always there.' So in the same
way when I meet you tomorrow, I recognize you, you're
the same whirlpool you were yesterday. But you're
moving. The whole world is moving through you, all the
cosmic rays, all the food you're eating, the stream of
steaks and milk and eggs and everything is just flowing
right through you. When you're wiggling the same way,
the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you.

But the problem is, you see, we haven't been taught to

feel that way. The myths underlying our culture and
underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel
identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in
it, only confronting it--aliens. And we are, I think, quite
urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the
eternal universe, each one of us. Otherwise we're going
to go out of our heads. We're going to commit suicide,
collectively, courtesy of H-bombs. And, all right,
supposing we do, well that will be that, then there will
be life making experiments on other galaxies. Maybe
they'll find a better game.
------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- ALAN WATTS: THE NATURE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS, part 2 of 3 -------------------------------
------------------------------------------------- Well now, in
the first session this afternoon, I was discussing two of
the great myths or models of the universe, which lie in
the intellictual and psychological background of all of
us. The myth of the world as a political, monarchial
state in which we are all here on sufferance as subject
to God. In which we are MADE artifacts, who do not
exist in our own right. God alone, in the first myth,
exists in his own right, and you exist as a favor, and you
ought to be grateful. Like your parents come on and say
to you, 'Look at all the things we've done for you, all the
money we spent to send you to college, and you turn
out to be a beatnik. You're a wretched, ungrateful child.'
And you're supposed to say, 'Sorry, I really am.' But
you're definitely in the position of being on probation.
This arises out of our whole attitude towards children,
whereby we don't really acknowledge that they're
human. Instead, when a child comes into the world, and
as soon as it can communicate in any way, talk
language, you should say to a child, 'How do you do?
Welcome to the human race. Now my dear, we are
playing a very complicated game, and we're going to
explain the rules of it to you. And when you have
learned these rules and understand what they are, you
may be able to invent better ones. But in the meantime,
this is the thing we're doing.' Instead of that, we either
treat a child with a kind of with a kind of 'blah-blah-
blah' attitude, or 'coochy-coochy-coochie,' y'know? and
don't treat the thing as a human being at all--as a kind
of doll. Or else as a nusiance. And so all of us, having
been treated that way, carry over into adult life the
sense of being on probation here. Either the god is
somebody who says to us 'coochy- coochy-coochie,' or
'blah-blah-blah.' And that's the feeling we carry over. So
that idea of the royal god, the king of kings and the lord
of lords which we inherit from the political structures of
the Tigres-Euphrates cultures, and from Egypt. The
Pharoah, Amenhotep IV is probably, as Freud
suggested, the original author of Moses' monotheism,
and certainly the Jewish law code comes from
Hammarabi in Chaldea. And these men lived in a culture
where the pyramid and the ziggurat--the ziggurat is the
Chaldean version of the pyramid, indicating somehow a
hierarchy of power, from the boss on down. And God, in
this first myth that we've been discussing, the ceramic
myth is the boss, and the idea of God is that the
universe is governed from above.

But do you see, this parallels--goes hand in hand with

the idea that you govern your own body. That the ego,
which lies somewhere between the ears and behind the
eyes in the brain, is the governer of the body. And so we
can't understand a system of order, a system of life, in
which there isn't a governer. 'O Lord, our governor, how
excellent is thy name in all the world.'

But supposing, on the contrary, there could be a system

which doesn't have a governor. That's what we are
supposed to have in this society. We are supposed to be
a democracy and a republic. And we are supposed to
govern ourselves. As I said, it's so funny that Americans
can be politically republican--I don't mean republican in
the party sense--and yet religiously monarchial. It's a
real strange contradiction.

So what is this universe? Is it a monarchy? Is it a

republic? Is it a mechanism? Or an organism? Becuase
you see, if it's a mechanism, either it's a mere
mechanism, as in the fully automatic model, or else it's
a mechanism under the control of a driver. A mechanic.
If it's not that, it's an organism, and an organism is a
thing that governs itself. In your body there is no boss.
You could argue, for example, that the brain is a gadget
evolved by the stomach, in order to serve the stomach
for the purposes of getting food. Or you can argue that
the stomach is a gadget evolved by the brain to feed it
and keep it alive. Whose game is this? Is it the brain's
game, or the stomach's game? They're mutual. The
brain implies the stomach and the stomach implies the
brain, and neither of them is the boss.

You know that story about all the limbs of the body. The
hand said 'We do all our work,' the feet said 'We do our
work,' the mouth said 'We do all the chewing, and
here's this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn't
do a thing. He didn't do any work, so let's go on strike.'
And the hands refused to carry, the feet refused to
walk, the teeth refused to chew, and said 'Now we're on
strike against the stomach.' But after a while, all of
them found themselves getting weaker and weaker and
weaker, because they didn't realize that the stomach
fed them.

So there is the possibility then that we are not in the

kind of system that these two myths delineate. That we
are not living in a world where we ourselves, in the
deepest sense of self, are outside reality, and somehow
in a position that we have to bow down to it and say 'As
a great favor, please preserve us in existence.' Nor are
we in a system which is merely mechanical, and which
we are nothing but flukes, trapped in the electrical
wiring of a nervous system which is fundamentally
rather inefficiently arranged. What's the alternative?
Well, we could put the alternative in another image
altogether, and I'll call this not the ceramic image, not
the fully automatic image, but the dramatic image.
Consider the world as a drama. What's the basis of all
drama? The basis of all stories, of all plots, of all
happenings--is the game of hide and seek. You get a
baby, what's the fundamental first game you play with a
baby? You put a book in front of your face, and you peek
at the baby. The baby starts giggling. Because the baby
is close to the origins of life; it comes from the womb
really knowing what it's all about, but it can't put it into
words. See, what every child psychologist really wants
to know is to get a baby to talk psychological jargon,
and explain how it feels. But the baby knows; you do
this, this, this and this, and the baby starts laughing,
because the baby is a recent incarnation of God. And the
baby knows, therefore, that hide and seek is the basic
game.

See, when we were children, we were taught '1, 2, 3,'

and 'A, B, C,' but we weren't set down on our mothers'
knees and taught the game of black and white. That's
the thing that was left out of all our educations, the
game that I was trying to explain with these wave
diagrams. That life is not a conflict between opposites,
but a polarity. The difference bewteen a conflict and a
polarity is simply--when you think about opposite
things, we sometimes use the expression, 'These two
things are the poles apart.' You say, for example, about
someone with whom you totally disagree, 'I am the
poles apart from this person.' But your very saying that
gives the show away. Poles. Poles are the opposite ends
of one magnet. And if you take a magnet, say you have
a magnetized bar, there's a north pole and a south pole.
Okay, chop off the south pole, move it away. The piece
you've got left creates a new south pole. You never get
rid of the south pole. So the point about a magnet is,
things may be the poles apart, but they go together. You
can't have the one without the other. We are imagining
a diagram of the universe in which the idea of polarity is
the opposite ends of the diameter, north and south, you
see? That's the basic idea of polarity, but what we're
trying to imagine is the encounter of forces that come
from absolutely opposed realms, that have nothing in
common. When we say of two personality types that
they're the poles apart. We are trying to think
eccentrically, instead of concentrically. And so in this
way, we haven't realized that life and death, black and
white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from
the same center. They imply each other, so that you
wouldn't know the one without the other.

Now I'm not saying that that's bad, that's fun. You're
playing the game that you don't know that black and
white imply each other. Therefore you think that black
possibly might win, that the light might go out, that the
sound might never be heard again. That there could be
the possibility of a universe of pure tragedy, of endless,
endless darkness. Wouldn't that be awful? Only you
wouldn't know it was awful, if that's what happened.
The point that we all forget is that the black and the
white go together, and there isn't the one without the
other. At the same time, you see, we forget, in the same
way as we forget that these two go together.

The other thing we forget, is that self and other go

together, in just the same way as the two poles of a
magnet. You say 'I, myself; I am me; I am this
individual; I am this particular, unique instance.' What
is other is everything else. All of you, all of the stars, all
of the galaxies, way, way out into infinite space, that's
other. But in the same way as black implies white, self
implies other. And you don't exist without all that, so
that where you get these polarities, you get this sort of
difference, that what we call explicitly, or exoterically,
they're different. But implicitely, esoterically, they're
one. Since you can't have the one without the other,
that shows there's a kind of inner conspiracy bewteen
all pairs of opposites, which is not in the open, but it's
tacit. It's like you say 'Well, there are all sorts of things
that we understand among each other tacitly, that we
don't want to admit, but we do recognize tacity there's
a kind of secret between us boys and girls,' or whatever
it may be. And we recognize that. So, tacitly, all of you
really inwardly know--although you won't admit it
because your culture has trained you in a contrary
direction--all of you really inwardly know that you as an
individual self are inseparable from everything else that
exists, that you are a special case in the universe. But
the whole game, especially of Western culture, is to
coneal that from ourselves, so that when anybody in our
culture slips into the state of consciousness where they
suddenly find this to be true, and they come on and say
'I'm God,' we say 'You're insane.'

Now, it's very difficult--you can very easily slip into the
state of consciousness where you feel you're God; it can
happen to anyone. Just in the same way as you can get
the flu, or measles, or something like that, you can slip
into this state of consciousness. And when you get it, it
depends upon your background and your training as to
how you're going to interpret it. If you've got the idea
of god that comes from popular Christianity, God as the
governor, the political head of the world, and you think
you're God, then you say to everybody, 'You should bow
down and worship me.' But if you're a member of Hindu
culture, and you suddenly tell all your friends 'I'm God,'
instead of saying 'You're insane,' they say
'Congratulations! At last, you found out.' Becuase their
idea of god is not the autocratic governor. When they
make images of Shiva, he has ten arms. How would you
use ten arms? It's hard enough to use two. You know, if
you play the organ, you've got to use your two feet and
your two hands, and you play different rhythms with
each member. It's kind of tricky. But actually we're all
masters at this, because how do you grow each hair
without having to think about it? Each nerve? How do
you beat your heart and digest with your stomach at the
same time? You don't have to think about it. In your
very body, you are omnipotent in the true sense of
omnipotence, which is that you are able to be omni-
potent; you are able to do all these things without
having to think about it.

When I was a child, I used to ask my mother all sorts of

ridiculous questions, which of course every child asks,
and when she got bored with my questions, she said
'Darling, there are just some things which we are not
meant to know.' I said 'Will we ever know?' She said
'Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven, God will
make everything plain.' So I used to imagine on wet
afternoons in heaven, we'd all sit around the throne of
grace and say to God, 'Well why did you do this, and
why did you do that?' and he would explain it to us.
'Heavenly father, why are the leaves green?' and he
would say 'Because of the chlorophyll,' and we'd say
'Oh.' But in he Hindu universe, you would say to God,
'How did you make the mountains?' and he would say
'Well, I just did it. Because when you're asking me how
did I make the mountains, you're asking me to describe
in words how I made the mountains, and there are no
words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I
made the mountains any more than I can drink the
ocean with a fork. A fork may be useful for sticking into
a piece of something and eating it, but it's of no use for
imbibing the ocean. It would take millions of years. In
other words, it would take millions of years, and you
would be bored with my description, long before I got
through it, if I put it to you in words, because I didn't
create the mountains with words, I just did it. Like you
open and close your hand. You know how you do this,
but can you describe in words how you do it? Even a
very good physiologist can't describe it in words. But
you do it. You're conscious, aren't you. Don't you know
how you manage to be conscious? Do you know how
you beat your heart? Can you say in words, explain
correctly how this is done? You do it, but you can't put it
into words, because words are too clumsy, yet you
manage this expertly for as long as you're able to do it.'

But you see, we are playing a game. The game runs like
this: the only thing you really know is what you can put
into words. Let's suppose I love some girl, rapturously,
and somebody says to me, 'Do you REALLY love her?'
Well, how am I going to prove this? They'll say, 'Write
poetry. Tell us all how much you love her. Then we'll
believe you.' So if I'm an artist, and can put this into
words, and can convince everybody I've written the
most ecstatic love letter ever written, they say 'All right,
ok, we admit it, you really do love her.' But supposing
you're not very articulate, are we going to tell you you
DON'T love her? Surely not. You don't have to be
Heloise and Abyla to be in love. But the whole game that
our culture is playing is that nothing really happens
unless it's in the newspaper. So when we're at a party,
and it's a great party, somebody says 'Too bad we didn't
bring a camera. Too bad there wasn't a tape recorder.
And so our children begin to feel that they don't exist
authentically unless they get their names in the papers,
and the fastest way to get your name in the paper is to
commit a crime. Then you'll be photographed, and you'll
appear in court, and everybody will notice you. And
you're THERE. So you're not there unless you're
recorded. It really happened if it was recorded. In other
words, if you shout, and it doesn't come back and echo,
it didn't happen. Well that's a real hangup. It's true, the
fun with echos; we all like singing in the bathtub,
because there's more resonance there. And when we
play a musical instrument, like a violin or a cello, it has
a sounding box, because that gives resonance to the
sound. And in the same way, the cortex of the human
brain enables us when we're happy to know that we're
happy, and that gives a certain resonance to it. If you're
happy, and you don't know you're happy, there's
nobody home.

But this is the whole problem for us. Several thousand

years ago, human beings devolved the system of self-
consciousness, and they knew, they knew.
There was a young man who said 'though It seems that
I know that I know, What I would like to see Is the I
that sees me When I know that I know that I know.'

And this is the human problem: we know that we know.

And so, there came a point in our evolution where we
didn't guide life by distrusting our instincts. Suppose
that you could live absolutely spontaneously. You don't
make any plans, you just live like you feel like it. And
you say 'What a gas that is, I don't have to make any
plans, anything. I don't worry; I just do what comes
naturally.' The way the animals live, everybody envies
them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever
see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see
a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged?
When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did
it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in
what we do, we make mistakes. And we're worried
about that. So there came this point in human evolution
when we lost our innocence. When we lost this thing
that the cats and the flowers have, and had to think
about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline
and push our lives around in accordance with foresight
and words and systems of symbols, accountancy,
calculation and so on, and then we worry. Once you
start thinking about things, you worry as to if you
thought enough. Did you really take all the details into
consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And
by jove, the more you think about it, the more you
realize you really couldn't take everything into
consideration, becauase all the variables in every
decision are incalculable, so you get anxiety. And this,
though, also, is the price you pay for knowing that you
know. For being able to think about thinking, being able
to feel about feeling. And so you're in this funny
position.

Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an

advantage and a terrible disadvantage? What has
happened here is that by having a certain kind of
consciousness, a certain kind of reflexive
consciousness--being aware of being aware. Being able
to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a
system of symbols, such as words, such as numbers.
You put, as it were, two lives together at once, one
representing the other. The symbols representing the
reality, the money representing the wealth, and if you
don't realize that the symbol is really secondary, it
doesn't have the same value. People go to the
supermarket, and they get a whole cartload of goodies
and they drive it through, then the clerk fixes up the
counter and this long tape comes out, and he'll say '$30,
please,' and everybody feels depressed, because they
give away $30 worth of paper, but they've got a
cartload of goodies. They don't think about that, they
think they've just lost $30. But you've got the real
wealth in the cart, all you've parted with is the paper.
Because the paper in our system becomes more
valuable than the wealth. It represents power,
potentiality, whereas the wealth, you think oh well,
that's just necessary; you've got to eat. That's to be
really mixed up.

So then. If you awaken from this illusion, and you

understand that black implies white, self implies other,
life implies death--or shall I say, death implies life--you
can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but FEEL yourself,
not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on
sufferance, on probation, not as something that has
arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your
own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are
basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the
fabric and structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu
mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God.
God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white
beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives.
God in Indian mythology is the self, 'Satchitananda.'
Which means 'sat,' that which is, 'chit,' that which is
consciousness; that which is 'ananda' is bliss. In other
words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the
fullness of total joy. Wowee! And all those stars, if you
look out in the sky, is a firework display like you see on
the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for
celebration; the universe is a celebration, it is a
fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee.
And then they say, 'But, however, there's no point in
just sustaining bliss.' Let's suppose you were able,
every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream,
and that you could for example have the power to
dream in one night 75 years worth of time. Or any
length of time you wanted to have. And you would,
naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams,
fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of
pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of
75 years of total pleasure each, you would say 'Well,
that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise.
Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where
something is going to happen to me that I don't know
what it's going to be.' And you would dig that, and come
out of it and say 'That was a close shave, now wasn't
it?' Then you would get more and more adventurous,
and you would make further and further gambles as to
what you would dream, and finally you would dream
where you are now. You would dream the dream of the
life that you are actually living today. That would be
within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would
have. Of playing that you weren't God. Because the
whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is
to play that he's not. The first thing that he says to
himself is 'Man, get lost,' because he gives himself
away. The nature of love is self-abandonment, not
clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, for instance
as in basketball; you're always getting rid of the ball.
You say to the other fellow 'Have a ball.' See? And that
keeps things moving. That's the nature of life.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the

ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense,
but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down
basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're
pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend
you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the
whole notion of drama. When you come into the theater,
there is an arch, and a stage, and down there is the
audience. Everybody assumes their seats in the theater,
gone to see a comedy, a tragedy, a thriller, whatever it
is, and they all know as they come in and pay their
admissions, that what is going to happen on the stage is
not for real. But the actors have a conspiracy against
this, because they're going to try and persuade the
audience that what is happening on the stage IS for
real. They want to get everybody sitting on the edge of
their chairs, they want you terrified, or crying, or
laughing. Absolutely captivated by the drama. And if a
skillful human actor can take in an audience and make
people cry, think what the cosmic actor can do. Why he
can take himself in completely. He can play so much for
real that he thinks he really is. Like you sitting in this
room, you think you're really here. Well, you've
persuaded yourself that way. You've acted it so damn
well that you KNOW that this is the real world. But
you're playing it. As well, the audience and the actor as
one. Because behind the stage is the green room,
offscene, where the actors take off their masks. Do you
know that the word 'person' means 'mask'? The
'persona' which is the mask worn by actors in Greco-
Roman drama, because it has a megaphone-type mouth
which throws the sound out in an open-air theater. So
the 'per'--through--'sona'--what the sound comes
through--that's the mask. How to be a real person. How
to be a genuine fake. So the 'dramatis persona' at the
beginning of a play is the list of masks that the actors
will wear. And so in the course of forgetting that this
world is a drama, the word for the role, the word for the
mask has come to mean who you are genuinely. The
person. The proper person. Incidentally, the word
'parson' is derived from the word 'person.' The 'person'
of the village. The 'person' around town, the parson.

So anyway, then, this is a drama, and what I want you

to is-- I'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense
of converting you to it; I want you to play with it. I want
you to think of its possibilities. I'm not trying to prove
it, I'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to
think about. So then, this means that you're not victims
of a scheme of things, of a mechanical world, or of an
autocratic god. The life you're living is what YOU have
put yourself into. Only you don't admit it, because you
want to play the game that it's happened to you. In
other words, I got mixed up in this world; I had a father
who got hot pants over a girl, and she was my mother,
and because he was just a horny old man, and as a
result of that, I got born, and I blame him for it and say
'Well that's your fault; you've got to look after me,' and
he says 'I don't see why I should look after you; you're
just a result.' But let's suppose we admit that I really
wanted to get born, and that I WAS the ugly gleam in
my father's eye when he approached my mother. That
was me. I was desire. And I deliberately got involved in
this thing. Look at it that way instead. And that really,
even if I got myself into an awful mess, and I got born
with syphilis, and the great Siberian itch, and
tuberculosis in a Nazi concentration camp, nevertheless
this was a game, which was a very far out play. It was a
kind of cosmic masochism. But I did it.

Isn't that an optimal game rule for life? Because if you

play life on the supposition that you're a helpless little
puppet that got involved. Or you played on the
supposition that it's a frightful, serious risk, and that we
really ought to do something about it, and so on, it's a
drag. There's no point in going on living unless we make
the assumption that the situation of life is optimal. That
really and truly we're all in a state of total bliss and
delight, but we're going to pretend we aren't just for
kicks. In other words, you play non-bliss in order to be
able to experience bliss. And you can go as far out in
non-bliss as you want to go. And when you wake up, it'll
be great. You know, you can slam yourself on the head
with a hammer because it's so nice when you stop. And
it makes you realize how great things are when you
forget that's the way it is. And that's just like black and
white: you don't know black unless you know white; you
don't know white unless you know black. This is simply
fundamental.

So then, here's the drama. My metaphysics, let me be

perfectly frank with you, are that there the central self,
you can call it God, you can call it anything you like, and
it's all of us. It's playing all the parts of all being
whatsoever everywhere and anywhere. And it's playing
the game of hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it
gets involved in the farthest-out adventures, but in the
end it always wakes up and comes back to itself. And
when you're ready to wake up, you're going to wake up,
and if you're not ready you're going to stay pretending
that you're just a 'poor little me.' And since you're all
here and engaged in this sort of enquiry and listening to
this sort of lecture, I assume you're all in the process of
waking up. Or else you're pleasing yourselves with
some kind of flirtation with waking up which you're not
serious about. But I assume that you are maybe not
serious, but sincere, that you are ready to wake up.

So then, when you're in the way of waking up, and

finding out who you are, you meet a character called a
guru, as the Hindus say 'the teacher,' 'the awakener.'
And what is the function of a guru? He's the man that
looks you in the eye and says 'Oh come off it. I know
who you are.' You come to the guru and say 'Sir, I have
a problem. I'm unhappy, and I want to get one up on
the universe. I want to become enlightened. I want
spiritual wisdom.' The guru looks at you adn says 'Who
are you?' You know Sri-Ramana-Maharshi, that great
Hindu sage of modern times? People used to come to
him and say 'Master, who was I in my last incarnation?'
As if that mattered. And he would say 'Who is asking the
question?' And he'd look at you and say, go right down
to it, 'You're looking at me, you're looking out, and
you're unaware of what's behind your eyes. Go back in
and find out who you are, where the question comes
from, why you ask.' And if you've looked at a
photograph of that man--I have a gorgeous photograph
of him; I look by it every time I go out the front door.
And I look at those eyes, and the humor in them; the
lilting laugh that says 'Oh come off it. Shiva, I recognize
you. When you come to my door and say `I'm so-and-
so,' I say `Ha-ha, what a funny way God has come on
today.''

So eventually--there are all sorts of tricks of course that

gurus play. They say 'Well, we're going to put you
through the mill.' And the reason they do that is simply
that you won't wake up until you feel you've paid a
price for it. In other words, the sense of guilt that one
has. Or the sense of anxiety. It's simply the way one
experiences keeping the game of disguise going on. Do
you see that? Supposing you say 'I feel guilty.'
Christianity makes you feel guilty for existing. That
somehow the very fact that you exist is an affront. You
are a fallen human being. I remember as a child when
we went to the serves of the church on Good Friday.
They gave us each a colored postcard with Jesus
crucified on it, and it said underneath 'This I have done
for thee. What doest thou for me?' You felt awful. YOU
had nailed that man to the cross. Because you eat steak,
you have crucified Christ. Mythra. It's the same
mystery. And what are you going to do about that? 'This
I have done for thee, what doest thou for me?' You feel
awful that you exist at all. But that sense of guilt is the
veil across the sanctuary. 'Don't you DARE come in!' In
all mysteries, when you are going to be initiated, there's
somebody saying 'Ah-ah-ah, don't you come in. You've
got to fulfill this requirement and that requirement,
THEN we'll let you in.' And so you go through the mill.
Why? Because you're saying to yourself 'I won't wake
up until I deserve it. I won't wake up until I've made it
difficult for me to wake up. So I invent for myself an
eleborate sytem of delaying my waking up. I put myself
through this test and that test, and when I convince
myself it's sufficiently arduous, THEN I at last admit to
myself who I really am, and draw aside the veil and
realize that after all, when all is said and done, I am
that I am, which is the name of god.'

------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- ALAN WATTS: THE NATURE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS, pt 3 of 3 ---------------------------------
----------------------------------------------- In last night's
session, I was discussing an alternative myth to the
Ceramic and Fully Automatic models of the universe, I'll
call the Dramatic Myth. The idea that life as we
experience it is a big act, and that behind this big act is
the player, and the player, or the self, as it's called in
Hindu philosophy, the _atman_, is you. Only you are
playing hide and seek, since that is the essential game
that is going on. The game of games. The basis of all
games, hide and seek. And since you're playing hide &
seek, you are deliberately, although you can't admit
this--or won't admit it--you are deliberately forgetting
who you really are, or what you really are. And the
knowledge that your essential self is the foundation of
the universe, the 'ground of being' as Tillich calls it, is
something you have that the Germans call a
_hintengedanka_[?] A _hintengedanka_ is a thought
way, way, way in the back of your mind. Something that
you know deep down but can't admit. So, in a way,
then, in order to bring this to the front, in order to know
that is the case, you have to be kidded out of your
game. And so what I want to discuss this morning is
how this happens. Although before doing so, I must go
a little bit further into the whole nature of this problem.

You see, the problem is this. We identify in our

exerience a differentiation between what we do and
what happens to us. We have a certain number of
actions that we define as voluntary, and we feel in
control of those. And then over against that, there is all
those things that are involuntary. But the dividing line
between these two is very inarbitrary. Because for
example, when you move your hand, you feel that you
decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask
yourself how do you decide? When you decide to open
your hand, do you first decide to decide? You don't, do
you? You just decide, and how do you do that? And if
you don't know how to do it, is it voluntary or
involuntary? Let's consider breathing. You can feel that
you breath deliberately; you don't control your breath.
But when you don't think about it, it goes on. Is it
voluntary or involuntary?

So, we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self.

That much of my activity which I feel I do. And that
then doesn't include breathing most of the time; it
doesn't include the heartbeats; it doesn't include the
activity of the glands; it doesn't include digestion; it
doesn't include how you shape your bones; circulate
your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now
if you get with yourself and you find out you are all of
yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find out that
your body knows that you are one with the universe. In
other words, the so-called involuntary circulation of
your blood is one continuous process with the stars
shining. If you find out it's YOU who circulates your
blood, you will at the same moment find out that you
are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is
one continous process with everything else that's going
on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean.
Your body is continuous with the total energy system of
the cosmos, and it's all you. Only you're playing the
game that you're only this bit of it. But as I tried to
explain, there are in physical reality no such thing as
separate events.

So then. Remember also when I tried to work towards a

definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not knowing
how everything is done; it's just doing it. You don't have
to translate it into language. Supposing that when you
got up in the morning, you had to switch your brain on.
And you had to think and do as a deliberate process
waking up all the circuits that you need for active life
during hte day. Why, you'd never get done! Because you
have to do all those things at once. That's why the
Buddhists and Hindus represent their gods as many-
armed. How could you use so many arms at once? How
could a centipede control a hundred legs at once?
Because it doesn't think about it. In the same way, you
are unconsciously performing all the various activities
of your organism. Only unconsciously isn't a good word,
because it sounds sort of dead. Superconsciously would
be better. Give it a plus rather than a minus.

Because what consciousness is is a rather specialized

form of awareness. When you look around the room,
you are conscious of as much as you can notice, and you
see an enormous number of things which you do not
notice. For example, I look at a girl here and somebody
asks me later 'What was she wearing?' I may not know,
although I've seen, because I didn't attend. But I was
aware. You see? And perhaps if I could under hypnosis
be asked this question, where I would get my conscious
attention out of the way by being in the hypnotic state,
I could recall what dress she was wearing.

So then, just in the same way as you don't know--you

don't focus your attention--on how you make your
thyroid gland function, so in the same way, you don't
have any attention focused on how you shine the sun.
So then, let me connect this with the problem of birth
and death, which puzzles people enormously of course.
Because, in order to understand what the self is, you
have to remember that it doesn't need to remember
anything,just as you don't need to know how you work
your thyroid gland.

So then, when you die, you're not going to have to put

up with everlasting non-existance, because that's not
an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they
die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room
forever, and sort of undergo that. But one of the
interesting things in the world is--this is a yoga, this is a
realization--try and imagine what it will be like to go to
sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children
think about it. It's one of the great wonders of life.
What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up?
And if you think long enough about that, something will
happen to you. You will find out, among other things, it
will pose the next question to you. What was it like to
wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was
when you were born. You see, you can't have an
experience of nothing; nature abhorres a vacuum. So
after you're dead, the only thing that can happen is the
same experience, or the same sort of experience as
when you were born. In other words, we all know very
well that after other people die, other people are born.
And they're all you, only you can only experience it one
at a time. Everybody is I, you all know you're you, and
wheresoever all being exist throughout all galaxies, it
doesn't make any difference. You are all of them. And
when they come into being, that's you coming into
being.

You know that very well, only you don't have to

remember the past in the same way you don't have to
think about how you work your thyroid gland, or
whatever else it is in your organism. You don't have to
know how to shine the sun. You just do it, like you
breath. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this
fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all
this and you never had any education in how to do it?
Never learned, but you're this miracle? The point of it is,
from a strictly physical, scientific standpoint, this
organism is a continuous energy with everything else
that's going on. And if I am my foot, I am the sun. Only
we've got this little partial view. We've got the idea that
'No, I'm something IN this body.' The ego. That's a joke.
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious
attention. It's like the radar on a ship. The radar on a
ship is a troubleshooter. Is there anything in the way?
And conscious attention is a designed function of the
brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and
note for any troublemaking changes. But if you identify
yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you
define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
And the moment we cease to identify with the ego and
become aware that we are the whole organism, we
realize first thing how harmonious it all is. Because your
organism is a miracle of harmony. All these things
functioning together. Even those creatures that are
fighting each other in the blood stream and eating each
other up. If they weren't doing that, you wouldn't be
healthy.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony

at another level. And you begin to realize that, and you
begin to be aware too, that the discords of your life and
the discords of people's lives, which are a discord at one
level, at a higher level of the universe are healthy and
harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything
you are and do is at that level as magnificent and as
free of any blemish as the patterns in waves. The
markings in marble. The way a cat moves. And that this
world is really OK. Can't be anything else, because
otherwise it couldn't exist. And I don't mean this in a
kind of Pollyanna Christian Science sense. I don't know
what it is or why it is about Christian Science, but it's
prissy. It's got kind of a funny feeling to it; came from
New England.

But the reality underneath physical existence, or which

really is physical existence--because in my philosophy
there is no difference between the physical and the
spiritual. These are absolutely out-of-date catagories.
It's all process; it isn't 'stuff' on the one hand and 'form'
on the other. It's just pattern-- life is pattern. It is a
dance of energy. And so I will never invoke spooky
knowledge. That is, that I've had a private revelation or
that I have sensory vibrations going on a plane which
you don't have. Everything is standing right out in the
open, it's just a question of how you look at it. So you
do discover when you realize this, the most
extraordinary thing that I never cease to be
flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some
people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God
to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only
somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as
you look around you. So far so good. But the truth is
funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the
brilliant light now that the experience you are having
that you call ordinary everyday consciousness--
pretending you're not it--that experience is exactly the
same thing as 'it.' There's no difference at all. And when
you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the
great discovery.

In other words, when you really start to see things, and

you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature
of what it is to see what vision is, or what smell is, or
what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper
cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be
brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only
they're hidden in the sense that all the points of the
infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup
they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all
light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world,
the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on
a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun
shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating
on a skinless drum. No light. YOU evoke light out of the
universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a
soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only
hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that
evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism,
call into being this whole universe of light and color and
hardness and heaviness and everything.

But in the mythology that we sold ourselves on at the

end of the 19th century, when people discovered how
big the universe was, and that we live on a little planet
in a solar system on the edge of the galaxy, which is a
minor galaxy, everybody thought, 'Uuuuugh, we're
really unimportant after all. God isn't there and doesn't
love us, and nature doesn't give a damn.' And we put
ourselves down. But actually, it's this funny little
microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that's
way out somewhere, who has the ingenuity, by nature
of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the
whole universe out of what otherwise would be mere
quanta. There's jazz going on. But you see, this
ingenious little organism is not merely some stranger in
this. This little organism, on this little planet, is what
the whole show is growing there, and so realizing it's
own presence. Does it through you, and you're it.

When you put a chicken's beak on a chalk line, it gets

stuck; it's hypnotized. So in the same way, when you
learn to pay attention, and as children you know how all
the teachers were in class: 'Pay attention!!' And all the
kids stare at the teacher. And we've got to pay
attention. That's putting your nose on the chalk line.
And you got stuck with the idea of attention, and you
thought attention was Me, the ego, attention. So if you
start attending to attention, you realize what the hoax
is. That's why in Aldous Huxley's book 'Island,' the
Roger had trained the myna birds on the island to say
'Attention! Here and now, boys!' See? Realize who you
are. Come to, wake up!

Well, here's the problem: if this is the state of affairs

which is so, and if the conscious state you're in this
moment is the same thing as what we might call the
Divine State. If you do anything to make it different, it
shows that you don't understand that it's so. So the
moment you start practicing yoga, or praying or
meditating, or indulging in some sort of spiritual
cultivation, you are getting in your own way.

Now this is the Buddhist trick: the buddha said 'We

suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you
won't suffer.' But he didn't say that as the last word; he
said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if
you say that to someone, they're going to come back
after a while and say 'Yes, but now I'm desiring not to
desire.' And so the buddha will answer, 'Well at last
you're beginning to understand the point.' Because you
can't give up desire. Why would you try to do that? It's
already desire. So in the same way you say 'You ought
to be unselfish' or to give up you ego. Let go, relax. Why
do you want to do that? Just because it's another way of
beating the game, isn't it? The moment you hypothesize
that you are different from the universe, you want to
get one up on it. But if you try to get one up on the
universe, and you're in competition with it, that means
you don't understand you ARE it. You think there's a
real difference between 'self' and 'other.' But 'self,'
what you call yourself, and what you call 'other' are
mutually necessary to each other like back and front.
They're really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself
at north and south, but it's all one magnet, so
experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all
one. If you try to make the south pole defeat the north
pole, or get the mastery of it, you show you don't know
what's going on.

So there are two ways of playing the game. The first

way, which is the usual way, is that a guru or teacher
who wants to get this across to somebody because he
knows it himself, and when you know it you'd like
others to see it, too. So what he does is, he gets you
into being ridiculous harder and more assiduously than
usual. In other words, if you are in a contest with the
universe, he's going to stir up that contest until it
becomes ridiculous. And so he sets you such tasks as
saying-- Now of course, in order to be a true person,
you must give up yourself, be unselfish. So the lord
steps down out of heaven and says 'The first and great
commandment is `Thou shalt love the lord thy god.' You
must love me.' Well that's a double-bind. You can't love
on purpose. You can't be sincere purposely. It's like
trying not to think of a green elephant while taking
medicine.

But if a person really tries to do it--and this is the way

Christianity is rigged--you should be very sorry for your
sins. And though everybody knows they're not, but they
think they ought to be, they go around trying to be
penetant. Or trying to be humble. And they know the
more assiduously they practice it, the phonier and
phonier the whole thing gets. So in Zen Buddhism,
exactly the same thing happens. The Zen master
challenges you to be spontaneous. 'Show me the real
you.' One way they do this getting you to shout. Shout
the word 'moo.' And he says 'I want to hear YOU in that
shout. I want to hear your whole being in it.' And you
yell your lungs out and he says 'Pfft. That's no good.
That's just a fake shout. Now I want to hear absolutely
the whole of your being, right from the heart of the
universe, come through in this shout.' And these guys
scream themselves hoarse. Nothing happens. Until one
day they get so desperate they give up trying and they
manage to get that shout through, when they weren't
trying to be genuine. Because there was nothing else to
do, you just had to yell.

And so in this way--it's called the technique of reductio

ad absurdum. If you think you have a problem, and
you're an ego and you're in difficulty, the answer the
Zen master makes to you is 'Show me your ego. I want
to see this thing that has a problem.' When Bodidharma,
the legendary founder of Zen, came to China, a disciple
came to him and said 'I have no peace of mind. Please
pacify my mind.' And Bodhidharma said 'Bring out your
mind here before me and I'll pacify it.' 'Well,' he said,
'when I look for it, I can't find it.' So Bodhidharma said
'There, it's pacified.' See? Becuase when you look for
your own mind, that is to say, your own particularized
center of being which is separate from everything else,
you won't be able to find it. But the only way you'll
know it isn't there is if you look for it hard enough, to
find out that it isn't there. And so everybody says 'All
right, know yourself, look within, find out who you are.'
Because the harder you look, you won't be able to find
it, and then you'll realize it isn't there at all. There isn't
a separate you. You're mind is what there is.
Everything. But the only way to find that out is to
persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible.
That's one way. I haven't said the only way, but it is one
way.

So almost all spiritual disciplines, meditations, prayers,

etc, etc, are ways of persisting in folly. Doing resolutely
and consistently what you're doing already. So if a
person believes that the Earth is flat, you can't talk him
out of that. He knows it's flat. Look out the window and
see; it's obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to
convince him it isn't is to say 'Well let's go and find the
edge.' And in order to find the edge, you've got to be
very careful not to walk in circles, you'll never find it
that way. So we've got to go consistently in a straight
line due west along the same line of latitude, and
eventually when we get back to where we started from,
you've convinced the guy that the world is round. That's
the only way that will teach him. Because people can't
be talked out of illusions.

There is another possibility, however. But this is more

difficult to describe. Let's say we take as the basic
supposition- -which is the thing that one sees in the
experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you
want to call it--that this now moment in which I'm
talking and you're listening, is eternity. That although
we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that
this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very
well, we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and
so on, and that it ought to be changed. This is it. So you
don't need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about
explaining that is that you mustn't try and not do
anything, because that's doing something. It's just the
way it is. In other words, what's required is a sort of act
of super relaxation; it's not ordinary relaxation. It's not
just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and
imagine that you're heavy so you get into a state of
muscular relaxation. It's not like that. It's being with
yourself as you are without altering anything. And how
to explain that? Because there's nothing to explain. It is
the way it is now. See? And if you understand that, it
will automatically wake you up.

So that's why Zen teachers use shock treatment, to

sometimes hit them or shout at them or create a sudden
surprise. Because is is that jolt that suddenly brings you
here. See, there's no road to here, because you're
already there. If you ask me 'How am I going to get
here?' It will be like the famous story of the American
tourist in England. The tourist asked some yokel the
way to Upper Tuttenham, a little village. And the yokel
scratched his head and he said 'Well, sir, I don't know
where it is, but if I were you, I wouldn't start from
here.'

So you see, when you ask 'How to I obtain the

knowledge of God, how do I obtain the knowledge of
liberation?' all I can say is it's the wrong question. Why
do you want to obtain it? Because the very fact that
you're wanting to obtain it is the only thing that
prevents you from getting there. You already have it.
But of course, it's up to you. It's your privilege to
pretend that you don't. That's your game; that's your
life game; that's what makes you think your an ego. And
when you want to wake up, you will, just like that. If
you're not awake, it shows you don't want to. You're
still playing the hide part of the game. You're still, as it
were, the self pretending it's not the self. And that's
what you want to do. So you see, in that way, too,
you're already there.

So when you understand this, a funny thing happens,

and some people misinterpret it. You'll discover as this
happens that the distinction between voluntary and
involuntary behavior disappears. You will realize that
what you describe as things under your own will feel
exactly the same as things going on outside you. You
watch other people moving, and you know you're doing
that, just like you're breathing or circulating your blood.
And if you don't understand what's going on, you're
liable to get crazy at this point, and to feel that you are
god in the Jehovah sense. To say that you actually have
power over other people, so that you can alter what
you're doing. And that you're omnipotent in a very
crude, literal kind of bible sense. You see? A lot of
people feel that and they go crazy. They put them away.
They think they're Jesus Christ and that everybody
ought to fall down and worship them. That's only they
got their wires crossed. This experience happened to
them, but they don't know how to interpret it. So be
careful of that. Jung calls it inflation. People who get
the Holy Man syndrome, that I suddenly discover that I
am the lord and that I am above good and evil and so
on, and therefore I start giving myself airs and graces.
But the point is, everybody else is, too. If you discover
that you are that, then you ought to know that
everybody else is.
For example, let's see in other ways how you might
realize this. Most people think when they open their
eyes and look around, that what they're seeing is
outside. It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your
eyes, and that behind the eyes there is a blank you can't
see at all. You turn around and there's something else in
front of you. But behind the eyes there seems to be
something that has no color. It isn't dark, is isn't light.
It is there from a tactile standpoint; you can feel it with
your fingers, but you can't get inside it. But what is that
behind your eyes? Well actually, when you look out
there and see all these people and things sitting around,
that's how it feels inside your head. The color of this
room is back here in the nervous system, where the
optical nerves are at the back of the head. It's in there.
It's what you're experiencing. What you see out here is
a neurological experience. Now if that hits you, and you
feel sensuously that that's so, you may feel therefore
that the external world is all inside my skull. You've got
to correct that, with the thought that your skull is also
in the external world. So you suddenly begin to feel
'Wow, what kind of situation is this? It's inside me, and
I'm inside it, and it's inside me, and I'm inside it.' But
that's the way it is.

This is the what you could call transaction, rather than

interaction between the individual and the world. Just
like, for example, in buying and selling. There cannot be
an act of buying unless there is simultaneously an act of
selling, and vice versa. So the relationship between the
environment and the organism is transactional. The
environment grows the organism, and in turn the
organism creates the environment. The organism turns
the sun into light, but it requires there be an
environment containing a sun for there to be an
organism at all. And the answer to it simply is they're all
one process. It isn't that organisms by chance came into
the world. This world is the sort of environment which
grows organisms. It was that way from the beginning.
The organisms may in time have arrived in the scene or
out of the scene later than the beginning of the scene,
but from the moment it went BANG! in the beginning, if
that's the way it started, organisms like us are sitting
here. We're involved in it.
Look here, we take the propogation of an electric
current. I can have an electric current running through
a wire that goes all the way around the Earth. And here
we have a power source, and here we have a switch. A
positive pole, a negative pole. Now, before that switch
closes, the current doesn't exactly behave like water in
a pipe. There isn't current here, waiting, to jump the
gap as soon as the switch is closed. The current doesn't
even start until the switch is closed. It never starts
unless the point of arrival is there. Now, it'll take an
interval for that current to get going in its circuit if it's
going all the way around the Earth. It's a long run. But
the finishing point has to be closed before it will even
start from the beginning. In a similar way, even though
in the development of any physical system there may by
billions of years between the creation of the most
primitive form of energy and then the arrival of
intelligent life, that billions of years is just the same
things as the trip of that current around the wire. Takes
a bit of time. But it's already implied. It takes time for
an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already
implied in the acorn. And so in any lump of rock floating
about in space, there is implicit human intelligence.
Sometime, somehow, somewhere. They all go together.

So don't differentiate yourself and stand off and say 'I

am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead
junk, rocks and stuff.' It all goes together. Those rocks
are just as much you as your fingernails. You need
rocks. What are you going to stand on?

What I think an awakening really involves is a re-

examination of our common sense. We've got all sorts
of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious.
And our speech reflects them; its commonest phrases.
'Face the facts.' As if they were outside you. As if life
were something they simply encountered as a foreigner.
'Face the facts.' Our common sense has been rigged,
you see? So that we feel strangers and aliens in this
world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because this
is what we are used to. That's the only reason. But
when you really start questioning this, say 'Is that the
way I have to assume life is? I know everybody does,
but does that make it true?' It doesn't necessarily. It
ain't necessarily so. So then as you question this basic
assumption that underlies our culture, you find you get
a new kind of common sense. It becomes absolutely
obvious to you that you are continuous with the
universe.

For example, people used to believe that planets were

supported in the sky by being imbedded in crystal
spheres, and everybody knew that. Why, you could see
the crystal spheres there because you could look right
through them. It was obviously made of crystal, and
something had to keep them up there. And then when
the astronomers suggested that there weren't any
crystal spheres, people got terrified, because then they
thought the stars would fall down. Nowadays, it doesn't
bother anybody. They thought, too, when they found out
the Earth was spherical, people who lived in the
antiguities would fall off, and that was scary. But then
somebody sailed around the world, and we all got used
to it, we travel around in jet planes and everything. We
have no problem feeling that the Earth is globular. None
whatever. We got used to it.

So in the same way Einstein's relativity theories--the

curvature of the propogation of light, the idea that time
gets older as light moves away from a source, in other
words, people looking at the world now on Mars, they
would be seeing the state of the world a little earlier
than we are now experiencing it. That began to bother
people when Einstein started talking about that. But
now we're all used to it, and relativity and things like
that are a matter of common sense today. Well, in a few
years, it will be a matter of commons sense to many
people that they're one with the universe. It'll be so
simple. And then maybe if that happens, we shall be in a
position to handle our technology with more sense. With
love instead of with hate for our environment.

Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen by Alan

Watts Orignial version as published the spring 1958
issue of the Chicago
Review http://www.bluesforpeace.com/beat_zen.htm

It is as difficult for Anglo-Saxons as for the Japanese to

absorb anything quite so Chinese as Zen. For though the
word "Zen" is Japanese and though Japan is now its
home, Zen Buddhism is the creation of T'ang dynasty
China. I do not say this as a prelude to harping upon the
ncommunicable subtleties of alien cultures. The point is
simply that people who feel a profound need to justify
themselves have difficulty in understanding the
viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who
created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao-tzu,
who, centures before, said, "Those who justify
themselves do not convince." For the urge to make or
prove oneself right has always jiggled the Chinese sense
of the ludicrous, since as both Confucians and Taoists-
however different these philosophies in other ways-they
have invariably appreciated the man who can "come off
it." To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-
hearted then righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao-
tzu and Chang-tzu, it was obvious that one could not be
right without also being wrong, because the two were
as inseparable as back and front. As Chang-tzu said,
"Those who would have good government without its
correlative misrule, and right without its correlative
wrong, do not understand the principles of the
universe."

To Western ears such words may sound cynical, and the

Confucian admiration of "reasonableness" and
compromise may appear to be a weak-kneed lack of
commitment to principle. Actually they reflect a
marvelous understanding and respect for what we call
the balance of nature, human and otherwise-a universal
vision of life as the Tao or way of nature in which the
good and evil, the creature and the destructive, the wise
and the foolish are the inseparable polarities of
existence. "Tao," said the Chung-yung, "is that from
which one cannot depart. That from which one can
depart is not the Tao." Therefore wisdom did not consist
in trying to wrest the good from the evil but learning to
"ride" them as a cork adapts itself to the crests and
troughs of the waves. At the roots of Chinese life there
is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature
which is pecularly foreign to those brought up with the
chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian
cultures. Yet it was always obvious to the Chinese that a
man who mistrusts himself cannot even trust his
mistrust, and must therefore be hopelessly confused.

For rather different reasons, Japanese people tend to be

as uneasy in themselves as Westerners, having a sense
of social shame quite as acute as our more metaphysical
sense of sin. This was especially true of the class most
attracted to Zen, the samurai. Ruth Benedict, in that
very uneven work hrysanthemum and Sword, was, I
think, perfectly correct in saying that the attraction of
Zen to the samurai class was its power to get rid of an
extremely awkward self-consciousness induced in the
education of the young. Part-and-parcel of this lf-
consciousness is the Japanese compulsion to compete
with oneself-a compulsion which turns every craft and
skill into a marathon of self-discipline. Although the
attraction of Zen lay in the possibility of liberation from
self-consciousness, the Japanese version of Zen fought
fire with fire, overcoming the "self observing the self"
by bringing it to an intensity in which it exploded. How
remote from the regimen of the Japanese Zen
monastery are the words of the great T'ang master Lin-
chi:

In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be

ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your
bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie
down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will
understand.

Yet the spirit of these words is just as remote from a

kind of Western Zen which would employ this
philosophy to justify a very self-defensive Bohemianism.

There is no single reason for the extraordinary growth

of Western interest in Zen during the last twenty years.
The appeal of Zen arts to the "modern" spirit in the
West, the words of Suzuki, the war with Japan, the itchy
fascination of "Zen-stories," and the attraction of a non-
conceptual, experiential philosophy in the climate of
scientific relativism-all these are involved. One might
mention, too, the affinities between Zen and such purely
Western trends as the philosophy of Wittgenstein,
xistentialism, General Semantics, the metalinguistics of
B. L. Whorf, and certain movements in the philosophy of
science and in psychotherapy. Always in the "anti-
naturalness" of both Christianity, with its politically
orderd cosmology, and technology, with its imperialistic
mechanization of a natural world from which man
himself feels strangely alien. For both reflect a
psychology in which man is identified with a conscious
intelligence and will standing apart from nature to
control it, like the architect-God in whose image this
version of man is conceived. This disquiet arises from
the suspicion that our attempt to master the world from
the outside is a vicious circle in which we shall be
condemned to the perpetual insomnia of controlling
controls and supervising supervision ad infinitum.

To the Westerner in search of the reintegration of man

and nature there is an appeal far beyond the merely
sentimental in the naturalism of Zen-in the landscapes
of Ma-yuan and Sesshu, in an art which is
simultaneously spiritual and secular, which conveys the
mystical in terms of the natural, and which, indeed,
never even imagined a break between them. Here is a
view of the world imparting a profoundly refreshing
sense of wholeness to a culture in which the spiritual
and the material, the conscious and the unconscious,
have been cataclysmically split. For this reason the
Chinese humanism and naturalism of Zen intrigue us
much more strongly than Indian Buddhism or Vedanta.
These, too, have their students in the West, but their
followers seem for the most part to be displaced
Christians-people in search of a more plausible
philosophy than Christian supernaturalism to carry on
the essentially Christian search for the miraculous. The
ideal man of Indian Buddhism is clearly a superman, a
yogi with absolute mastery of his own nature, according
perfectly with the science-fiction ideal of "man beyond
mankind." But the Buddha or awakened man of Chinese
Zen is "ordinary and nothing special"; he is humorously
human like the Zen tramps portrayed by Mu-chi and
Liang-k'ai. We like this because here, for the first time,
is a conception of the holy man and sage who is not
impossibly remote, not superhuman but fully human,
and, above all, not a solemn and sexless ascetic.
Furthermore, in Zen the satori experience of awakening
to our "original inseparability" with the universe seems,
however elusive, always just round the corner. One has
even met people to whom it has happened, and they are
no longer mysterious occultist in the Himalayas nor
skinny yogis in cloistered zshrams. They are just like us,
and yet much more at home in the world, floating much
more easily upon the ocean of transience and insecurity.

But the Westerner who is attracted by Zen and who

would understand it deeply must have one
indispensable qualification: he must understand his own
culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its
premises unconsciously. He must really have come to
terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-
Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it
without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to
justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either
"beat" or "square," either a revolt from the culture and
social order or a new form of stuffiness and
respectability. For Zen is above all the Liberation of the
mind from conventional thought, and this is something
utterly different from rebellion against convention, on
the one hand, or adopting foreign conventions, on the
other.

Conventional thought is, in brief, the confusion of the

concrete universe of nature with the conceptual things,
events, and values of linguistic and cultural symbolism.
For in Taoism and Zen the world is seen as an
inseparably interrelated field or continuum, no part of
which can actually be separated from the rest or valued
above or below the rest. It was in this sense that Hui-
neng, the Sixth Patriarch, meant that "fundamentally
not one thing exists," for he realized that things are
terms, not entities. They exist in the abstract world of
thought, but not in the concrete world of nature. Thus
one who actually perceives or feels this to be so no
longer feels that he is an ego, except by definition. He
sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a
somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which
he has been taught to identify himself. (Why, for
example, do we say "I think" but not "I am beating my
heart"?) Having seen this, he continues to play his
social role without being taken by it. He does not
precipitately adopt a new role or play the role of having
no role at all. He plays it cool.

The "beat" mentality as I am thinking of it is something

much more extensive and vague that the hipster life of
New York and San Francisco. It is a younger
generation's nonparticipation in "the American Way of
Life," a revolt which does not seek to change the
existing order but simply turns away from it to find the
significance of life in subjective experience rather then
objective achievement. It contrasts with the "square"
and other-directed mentality of beguilement by social
convention, unaware of the correlativity of right and
wrong, the mutual necessity of capitalism and
communism to each other's existence, of the inner
identity of puritanism and lechery, or of, say, the
alliance of church lobbies and organized crime to
maintain the laws against gambling.

Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a

use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature,
and life to a very forceful social criticism and "digging of
the universe" such as one may find in the poetry of
Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac.
But, as I know it, it is always a share too self-conscious,
too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of
Zen. It is all very well for the philosopher, but when the
poet (Ginsberg) says-

live in the physical world moment to moment

I must write down every recurring thought- stop every

beating second

this is too indirect and didactic for Zen, which would

rather hand you the thing itself without comment.

The sea darkens; The voices of the wild ducks Are

faintly white.

Furthermore, when Kerouac gives his philosophical final

statement, "I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't
make any difference"-the cat is out of the bag, for there
is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-
defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses
convention and its values, it has no need to say "To hell
with it," nor to underline with violence the fact that
anything goes.

Now the underlying protestant lawlessness of beat Zen

disturbs square Zennists very seriously. For square Zen
is the Zen of established tradition in Japan with its
clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its
specific tests of satori. More particularly, it is the kind of
Zen adopted by Westerners studying in Japan, who will
before long be bringing it back home. But there is an
obvious difference between square Zen and the
common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the
Presbyterian Church. It is infinitely more imaginative,
sensitive, and interesting. But it is still square because
it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a
satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approved
and established authority. There will even be
certificates to hang on the wall.

I see no real quarrel in either extreme. There was never

a spiritual movement without its excesses and
distortions. The experience of awakening which truly
constitutes Zen is too timeless and universal to be
injured. The extremes of beat Zen need alarm no one
since, as Blake said, "the fool who persists in his folly
will become wise." As for square Zen, "authoritative"
spiritual experiences have always had a way of wearing
thin, and thus of generating the demand for something
genuine and unique which needs no stamp.

I have known followers of both extremes to come up

with perfectly clear satori experiences, for since there is
no real "way" to satori the way you are following makes
very little difference.

But the quarrel between the extremes is of great

philosophical interest, being a contemporary form of the
ancient dispute between salvation by works and
salvation by faith, or between what the Hindus called
the ways of the monkey and the cat. The cat-
appropriately enough-follows the effortless way, since
the mother cat carries her kittens. The monkey follows
the hard way, since the baby monkey has to hang on to
its mother's hair. Thus for beat Zen there must be no
effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori
or to be anything but what one is. But for square Zen
there can be no true satori without years of meditation-
practice under the stern supervision of a qualified
master. In seventeenth-century Japan these two
attitudes were approximately typified by the great
masters Bankei and Hakuin, and it so happens that the
followers of the latter "won out" and determined the
present-day character of Rinzai Zen.

(Rinzai Zen is the form most widely known in the West.

There is also Soto Zen which differs somewhat in
technique, but is still closer to Hakuin then to Bankei.
However, Bankei should not exactly be idenfitied with
beat Zen as I have described it, for he was certainly no
advocate of the life of undisciplined whimsy despite all
that he said about the importance of the uncalculated
life and the folly of seeking satori.)

Satori can lie along both roads. It is the concomitant of

a "nongrasping" attitude of the senses to experience,
and grasping can be exhausted by the discipline of
directing its utmost intensity to a single, ever-elusive
objective. But what makes the way of effort and will-
power suspect to many Westerners is not so much an
inherent laziness as a thorough familiarity with the
wisdom of our own culture. The square Western
Zennists are often quite naive when it comes to an
understanding of Christain theology or of all that has
been discovered in modern psychiatry, for both have
been long concerned with the fallibility and unconscious
ambivalence of the will. Both have proposed problems
as to the vicious circle of seeking self-surrender or of
"free-associating on purpose" or of accepting one's
conflicts to escape from them, and to anyone who
knows anything about either Christianity or
psychotherapy these are very real problems. The
interest of Chinese Zen and of people like Bankei is that
they deal with these problems in a most direct and
stimulating way, and being to suggest some answers.
But when Herrigel's Japanese archery master was
asked, "How can I give up purpose on purpose?" he
replied that no one had ever asked him that before. He
had no answer except to go on trying blindly, for five
years.

Foreign relations can be immensely attractive and

highly overrated by those who know little of their own,
and especially by those who have not worked through
and grown out of their own. This is why the displaced or
unconscious Christian can so easily use either beat or
square Zen to justify himself. The one wants a
philosophy to justify him in doing what he pleases. The
other wants a more plausible authoratative salvation
than the Church or the psychiatrists seem to be able to
provide. Furthermore the atmosphere of Japanese Zen
is free from all one's unpleasant childhood associations
with God the Father and Jesus Christ-though I know
many young Japanese who feel the same way about
their early training in Buddhism. But the true character
of Zen remains almost incomprehensible to those who
have not surpassed the immaturity of needing to be
justified, whether before the Lord God or before a
paternalistic society.

The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in Taoism.

They saw nature in its total interrelatedness, and saw
that every creature and every experience is in accord
with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to
accept themselves as they were, moment by moment,
without the least need to justify anything. They didn't
do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse for
getting away with murder. They didn't brag about it and
set themselves apart as rather special. On the contrary,
their Zen was wu-shih, which means approximately
"nothing special" or "no fuss." But Zen is "fuss" when it
is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and "fuss"
when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is
to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special
excercises in the lotus posture five hours a day. And I
will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in
such an article as this, is also fuss-but a little less so.

Having said that, I would like to say something for all

Zen fussers, beat or square. Fuss is all right, too. If you
are hung on Zen, there's no need to try to pretend that
you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a
Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you
shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping
frieght cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free
country.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor

worse;

The flowering branches grow naturally, some long,

some short.

The Complete Alan Watts Bibliography

http://www.alanwatts.net/watts.htm#books

Bibliography:

The Spirit of Zen (1936) The Legacy of Asia and

Western Man (1937) The Meaning of Happiness (1940)
The Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius (1944)
(translation) Behold the Spirit (1948) Easter - Its
Story and Meaning (1950) The Supreme Identity
(1950) The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) Myth and
Ritual in Christianity (1953) The Way of Zen (1957)
 Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) "This Is It" and Other
Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960)
Psychotherapy East and West (1961) The Joyous
Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of
Consciousness (1962) The Two Hands of God - The
Myths of Polarity (1963) Beyond Theology - The Art of
Godmanship (1964) The Book - On the Taboo Against
Knowing Who You Are (1966) Nonsense (1967) Does
It Matter? - Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality
(1970) Erotic Spirituality - The Vision of Konarak
(1971) The Art of Contemplation (1972) In My Own
Way - An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972) Cloud-
hidden, Whereabouts Unknown - A Mountain Journal
(1973) Tao: The Watercourse Way (unfinished at the
time of his death in 1973 - published in 1975) The Early
Writings of Alan Watts (1987) The Modern Mystic: A
New Collection of Early Writings (1990)

In addition, a number of books have been published

since his death that contain transcripts of recorded
lectures and/or articles not included in the above. They
include:

The Essence of Alan Watts (1974) Essential Alan Watts

(1976) Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery
of Life (1978) Om: Creative Meditations (1979) Play to
Live (1982) Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on
the Transformation of the Self (1983) Out of the Trap
(1985) Diamond Web (1986) Talking Zen (1994)
Become Who You Are (1995) Buddhism: The Religion
of No-Religion (1995) The Philosophies of Asia (1995)
The Tao of Philosophy (1995) Myth and Religion
(1996) Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking (1997) Zen and
the Beat Way (1997) Culture of Counterculture (1998)

Sources of Recordings: Recordings of Alan Watts can be

ordered from several sources. Two outlets that
specialize in them are:

Alan Watts Electronic University P.O. Box 2309 San

Anselmo, CA USA 94979 1-415-459-4576 1-415-459-
7670 (fax) 1-800-96-WATTS (toll free) e-mail:
watts@alanwatts.com World Wide Web:
http://www.alanwatts.com
M.E.A. (Mastering Enlightenments Arts) P.O. Box
303 Olema, CA USA 94950 1-800-75-WATTS (toll free
number for placing orders) e-mail:
webmaster@wattstapes.com World Wide Web:
http://www.wattstapes.com

Additional recordings may also be gotten from:

Hartley Film Foundation, Inc. 49 Richmondville Avenue -

- Suite 204 Westport, CT USA 06880 1-203-226-9500 1-
203-227-6938 (fax) 1-800-937-1819 (toll free) e-mail:
CustomerService@HartleyVideos.org World Wide Web:
http://www.hartleyvideos.org

Mystic Fire P.O. Box 422 New York, NY USA 10012-

0008 1-212-941-0999 (general office) 1-212-941-1443
(fax) 1-800-292-9001 (toll free number for consumer
orders) 1-800-999-1319 (toll free number for wholesale
orders) e-mail: mysticfire@echonyc.com World Wide
Web: http://www.mysticfire.com

Pacifica Radio Archive 3729 Cahuenga Boulevard

West North Hollywood, CA USA 91604 1-818-506-
1077 1-800-735-0230 (toll free) e-mail:
ppspacific@pacifica.org World Wide
Web: http://www.igc.org/pacifica http://www.igc.org/
pacifica/radio_archives

Special Interest Book and Video P.O. Box

1818 Sebastopol, CA USA 95473 1-707-823-3063 1-707-
829-9542 (fax) 1-800-9-TANTRA (toll free) e-mail: e-
sensuals@tantra.com World Wide Web:
http://www.tantra.com

Wellspring Media 65 Bleecker Street, 5th Floor New

York, NY 10012 1-212-674-4912 1-212-425-1790
(fax) 1-800-538-5856 (toll free) e-mail:
mail@wellmedia.com

World Wide
Web: http://www.wellmedia.com http://www.wellmed
ia.com/collection/spirit/zen.html http://www.wellmedi
a.com/collection/spirit/wattmed.html http://www.vide
ocollection.com http://www.videocollection.com/mindb
ody/mindbody6.html#zen http://www.videocollection.c
om/mindbody/mindbody15.html#essen

In addition, Alan Watts made at least two record

albums:

Om: The Sound of Hinduism (1967); and Why Not Now:

Dhyana, The Art of Meditation (two record set) (1969)
In 1995, "Om: The Sound of Hinduism" was re-released
on compact disc by Infinite Zero/American Recordings,
however it appears to be unavailable at this time.

Radio Broadcasts: Radio broadcasts featuring

recordings of Alan Watts can be heard in the following
U.S. cities:

City Station Phone Alamosa KRZA (719) 589-9057

Athens (GA) WUOG (706) 542-7100 Austin KAZI (512)
836-9544 Boston WZBC (617) 552-3511 Boulder KGNU
(303) 449-4885 Crested Butte KBUT (303) 349-5225
Detroit WDTR (313) 596-3507 Duluth KUMD (218)
726-7181 Honolulu KIFO (808) 955-8821 Johnson City
(TN) WETS (615) 929-6440 Los Angeles / Santa
Barbara KPFK (818) 985-2711 New York City WFMU
(201) 678-8264 Olympia KAOS (206) 866-6000
Pittsburgh WDUQ (412) 396-6030 Plainfield (VT)
WGDR (802) 454-7762 Plattsburgh (NY) WCFE (518)
563-9770 San Francisco Bay Area KKUP (408) 253-
6000 San Luis Obispo KCBX (805) 544-5229 Scranton
WVSR (717) 941-7648 St. Louis KDHX (314) 664-3955
Tampa WMNF (813) 238-8001 Telluride KOTO (303)
728-3334 Trenton WTSR (609) 771-2554 Tucson KXCI
(602) 623-1000

Watts on the Web: Radio station KPFK-FM, which

broadcasts in the Los Angeles area and airs Alan Watts
tapes twice a week - on Sundays from 8:30 to 9:00 a.m.
and on Thursdays (actually Fridays) from around
Midnight to 1:00 a.m., Pacific Time - also broadcasts
simultaneously on the World Wide Web via RealAudio.
To listen, point your Web browser to KPFK-FM and click
on "Listen Live". On Thursday nights the tapes are
played during the "Something's Happening" show,
which airs Monday-Thursday from Midnight to 5:30 a.m.
To subscribe to the Something's Happening Program
Guide, which is sent out every weekend with program
information for the coming week, go to the Something's
Happening Website and follow the instructions to sign
up.

Radio station WMNF-FM, which broadcasts in the

Tampa, Florida, area and airs Alan Watts tapes on
Wednesdays starting at 11:00 a.m., Eastern Time, also
broadcasts simultaneously on the World Wide Web. To
listen, point your Web browser to:
http://www.wmnf.org

DRCNet's Drug Policy Library contains a number of

Watts' works on the drug issue. The entire text (but not
the photographs) of the 1970 revised edition of "The
Joyous Cosmology..." (in which Watts added several
pages to the Prologue of the original 1962 edition) is at:

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/jccontnt.htm

In addition, two articles by Watts:

Psychedelics and the Religious Experience (from the

book "Does It Matter?..."); and The New Alchemy (from
the book "This Is It...") are at:

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/relmenu.htm
and http://www.psychedelic-library.org/relmenu.htm

Another article by Watts:

A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? (from "LSD,

The Consciousness-Expanding Drug," David Solomon,
Editor, 1964)

is at:

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/watts2.htm
and http://www.psychedelic-library.org/watts2.htm

And an excerpt from "In My Own Way..." is at:

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/wattsbio.htm
and http://www.psychedelic-library.org/wattsbio.htm

An excerpt from a dialogue featuring Alan Watts,

Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg,
originally published in the San Francisco Oracle in 1967,
is at: http://www.sirius.com/~regent/oracle.html

There are two Alan Watts Groups at Yahoo.com. The

URLs are:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alan_watts_abides

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlanWatts

There's also an Alan Watts Group at MSN:

http://www.msnusers.com/TheContinuanceofAlanWatt
sPhilosophy

The Alan Watts Mailing List archives are at:

http://www.alanwatts.net/list