alan watts' words

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE5OGBjtTVU

i had been recommending this talk by alan watts to a few key people, then i listened to it again to remind myself of its content, then on my third listen i wrote down the words i found most interesting:

the theme of this seminar is how thoughts protect us from truth, and what to do about it, showing various ways in which the symbolising process which we call thinking, the use of signs, words, symbols, numbers to represent what is going on in the world of nature leads us into a curious confusion - we confuse the symbolic process with the actual world, and the temptation to do this arises from the extraordinary relative success we have had in controlling the world of nature with the power of thought but, a very strong case could be made that the entire intellectual venture of civilisation has been a ghastly mistake, and that we are now on a collision course, and that all the vaunted benefits of intelligence, technology and all that is simply going to draw the human race to an extremely swift conclusion - of course that might not be a bad thing.  i have sometimes speculated on the idea that all stars have been created out of planets, and that these planets developed high civilisations which eventually understood the secrets of nuclear energy and naturally blew themselves up, and in the process these stars flung out lumps of rock as they blew up which eventually spun around them and became planets all over again and that this is the actual method of genesis of the universe . . .

why do we have somehow distaste for a theory of time which runs in the direction of deterioration?

going up always . . . always getting better? you can't even imagine such a state of affairs . . .

one would be must happier to think that the future is simply deteriorating.   human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible.  as the proverb goes - you can't lift yourself up by your own boot straps.  all sensible people begin in life with two fundamental presuppositions; you are not going to improve the world, and you are not going to improve yourself.  you are just what you are.  and once you have accepted that situation you have enormous amounts of energy to do things that can be done.  for one very simple reason, which is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as the part of you which needs to be improved.  in other words there isn't any real distinction between bad me and good I; between the higher self which is spiritual and the lower self which is animal.  its all of a piece. you are this organism, this integrated fascinating energy pattern.  if i were really smart i would lay a bet that the human race will destroy itself because in practical politics one realises that nothing is going to work out right.  i once had a terrible argument with margaret mead.  she was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb.  now everybody should immediately spring into action and abolish it.  but she was getting so furious about it that i said to her "you know you scare me because i think you are the type of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first."  and she told me that i had no love for my future generations, no responsibility for my children, that i was the phony swami who believed in retreating from facts, but i maintain my position.  robert oppenheimer said that it is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell.  the only possible chance that it might not is that we do not prevent it from doing so.  the more we try to put everything to rights the more we make fantastic messes, and it gets worse, and maybe that's the way its got to be, maybe i shouldn't say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right, but simply, on the principle of blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise . . 

- would this be an argument against conservationism? (asks a member of the audience)

this is an argument against all kinds of do-gooding.  what i am saying is - don't take me too seriously - i am pitching the case for the fact that civilisation has been a mistake, that it would be much better to leave everything alone, that the wild animals are wiser than we in that they - putting it in our crude and not very exact language - they just follow their instincts.  and if a moth mistakes a flame for the signal on which it gets a mating call and flies into the flame - so what, that just keeps the moth population down.  and the moth doesn't worry, it doesn't go buzzing around in a state of anxiety . . . it doesn't think consciously about the future . . .and therefore it isn't troubled, but the species of moths goes on and on and on.  they have long since escaped from history.  they live a settled existence. . . they live the same rhythm again and again but because they don't bother to remember it consciously it never gets boring, and because they don't bother to predict they are never in a state of anxiety and yet they survive.  now we who look before and after, as emerson says, and predict and are always concerned whether this generation is going to be better or worse than the one that came before, we are tormented and we just don't realise - because of this tremendous preoccupation with time - we don't realise how beautiful we are, in spite of ourselves.  because you see the conscious radar is a trouble-shooter.  it is always on the watch out for variations in the environment which may bring about disaster and so our consciousness is from one day's end to another entirely preoccupied with time and with planning and with what has been and with what will be and since trouble-shooting is its function we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble and we ignore in this preoccupation with conscious attention how marvellously we get on, how, for most of the time, our physical organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship, how our body relates by all sorts of unconscious responses to the physical environment so that if you became aware of all the adjustment process that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism you would find yourself in the middle of great music, and of course this occasionally happens.  the mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of  your true physical relationship to the universe.  and you are amazed, thunderstruck by the feeling that underneath everything that goes on in this world, the fundamental thing is the state of unbelievable bliss.

we might work on this possibility that civilisation is a mistake and that we have taken completely the wrong track, and should have left things to nature, as it were.  and of course this is the same problem that was brought up in the book of genesis. actually the fall of man in genesis is his venture into technology.  in the bible the hebrew words for the knowledge of good and evil are connected with technics - what is technically expeditious and what is not. when you eat of the tree of knowledge and you become as god it means you think you are going to control your own life, and god says "ok baby, you wanted to become god? you try" but the trouble with you is you got a one track mind.  to be god you got to have an infinitely many-tracked mind.  you can only think of one thing at a time.  you cannot take charge of the universe with that kind of a consciousness . . . too many variables, and our science can take care of a few variables.

there may be nothing wrong with the idea of a world, a civilisation, a culture that lives at a terrific increasing pace of change, and then explodes.  that may be okay.  my point is that if we could reconcile ourselves to the notion that that is perfectly okay, then we would be less inclined to push that button.  

and that's life.  life is simply a way of postponing death

let's say "well civilisation wasn't really a mistake  it was just as natural as anything else.  a being that exists under conditions of illusion, that imagines that its controlling its own destiny, that thinks it's capable of improving itself, and by virtue of this illusion destroys itself rapidly in an interesting way"

i am trying to express the mystical experience, and it just can't be done.  and therefore everything i am saying to you is an elaborate deception.  i am weaving all kinds of intricate nonsense patterns, which sound as if they were about to make sense, and they don't really. . .

i was talking with (somebody) who said "the trouble with you is you are all words,  why don't you practice what you preach?"  and i said "i don't preach, and furthermore don't put words down because the patterns that people make with words are just like the ferns or the patters on seashells.  they are a dance, and they are just as much a legitimate form of life as flowers"

he said, "you're impossible"