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Watts

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It’s vanished! It never was there. And when that happens, you see, you can play any life game you want to.
Link the past and the present and the future together. Play roles. But you know; you’ve seen through this great—they call it the great social lie: that one accumulates (owns) experiences, memories, sights, sounds, and from that other people, possessions, so on.
Building up always this idea of one’s self as the haver of all of this. If you think that you’ve been had. This is Alan Watts speaking, and I’m—this evening, on my ferryboat—the host to a fascinating party sponsored by the San Francisco Oracle, which is our new underground paper, far-outer than any far out that has yet been seen.
And we have here Allen Cohen representing the paper, The Oracle. We have Allen Ginsberg: poet and rabbinic sādhu. We have Timothy Leary, about whom nothing needs to be said.
And Gary Snyder: also poet, Zen monk, and old friend of many years. Everybody is all bugged because they think, one: the drop-out thing really doesn’t mean anything. That what you’re gonna cultivate is a lot of freak-out hippies goofing around and throwing bottles through windows when they flip out on LSD.
That’s their stereotype vision. Obviously stereotype. Sounds like bullshitting.
These are the old, menopausal minds. There was a psychiatrist named Adler in San Francisco whose interpretation of the group Be-In was that this is the basis for a new fascism: when a leader comes along. And I sense in the activist movement the cry for a leader, the cry for organization.
Yeah, but they’re just as intelligent as you are on this fact. They know about what happened in Russia. That’s the reason that they haven’t got a big, active organization.
It’s because they, too, are stumped by: How do you have a community, and a community movement, and cooperation within the community to make life more pleasing for everybody—including the end of the Vietnam War—how do you have such a situation organized, or disorganized, just so long as it’s effective, without a fascist leadership? Because they don’t want to be that either. See, they are conscious of the fact that they don’t want to be messiahs; political messiahs.
At least, Savio in particular. Yesterday he was weeping, saying he wanted to go out and live in nature. Beautiful.
So, I mean he’s like basically where we are: stoned. Well, I think that—thus far—the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership. The Western world has labored for many, many centuries under a monarchical conception of the universe where God is the boss, and political systems and all kinds of law have been based on this model of the universe that nature is run by a boss.
Whereas the… if you take the Chinese view of the world—which is organic—they would say, for example, that the human body is an organization in which there is no boss. It is a situation of order resulting from mutual interrelationship of all the parts. And what we need to realize is that there can be—shall we say—a movement, a stirring, among people which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
It has no boss, and yet all the parts recognize each other in the same way as the cells of the body all cooperate together. Yes, it’s a new social structure. Yes.
It’s a new social structure which follows certain kinds of historically known tribal models. Exactly, yeah! My historical reading of the situation is that these great, monolithic empires that developed in history—Rome, Turkey, and so forth—always break down when enough people (and it’s always the young, the creative, and the minority groups) drop out and go back to a tribal form.
And I agree with what I’ve heard you say in the past, Gary, that the basic unit is tribal. What I envision is thousands of small groups throughout the United States and Western Europe, and eventually the world, as dropping out. What happened when Rome fell?
What happened when Jerusalem fell? Little groups went off together. Precisely what do you mean by drop out, then?
You dropped out of your job as a psychology teacher in Harvard. Now, what you’ve dropped into is, one: a highly complicated series of arrangements for lecturing and for putting on the festival— Well, I’m dropped out of that. No, but you’re not dropped out of the very highly complicated legal constitutional appeals, which you feel a sentimental regard for, as I do.
You haven’t dropped out of being the financial provider for Millbrook, and you haven’t dropped out of planning and conducting community organization and participating in it. And that community organization is related to the national community, too. Either through the Supreme Court, or through the very existence of the dollar that is exchanged for you to pay your lawyers, or to take money to pay your lawyers in the theatre.
So you can’t drop out, like drop out, ’cause you haven’t. Well, let me explain. And so they think you mean like, drop out, like go live on Haight-Ashbury Street and do nothing at all.
Even if you can do something like build furniture and sell it, or give it away and barter with somebody else. You have to drop out in a group. You drop out in a small tribal group.
Well, you drop out one by one, but you know, like, you can join the sub-culture. Maybe it’s: “Drop out of what?” Gary, I think that you have something to say here because you, to me, are one of the most fantastically capable drop-out people I have ever met. I think that, at this point, you should say a word or two about your own experience of how to live on nothing.
How to get by in life economically. And this is the nitty-gritty; this is where it really comes down to in many people’s minds: where’s the bread going to come from if everybody drops out? Exactly.
Now, you know expertly where it’s gonna come from—living a life of integrity and not being involved in a commute-necktie-strangle scene. Well this isn’t news to anybody, but ten, fifteen years ago when we dropped out, there wasn’t a community, and there wasn’t anybody who was going to take care of you at all. You were really completely on your own.
What it meant was: cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum, and it also meant: don’t be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living. That meant doing any kind of work. Strawberry picking, carpenter, laborer, longshore—Well, longshore is hard to get into; it paid very well—shipping out… that also pays very well.
But at least in my time it meant being willing to do any goddam kind of labor that came your way, and not being fussy about it. And it meant cultivating the virtue of patience—the patience of sticking with a shitty job long enough to win the bread that you needed to have some more leisure, which meant more freedom to do more things that you wanted to do. And mastering all kinds of techniques of living really cheap, like getting free rice off the docks because the loading trucks sometimes fork the rice sacks and spill little piles of rice on the docks, which are usually thrown away.
But I had it worked out with some of the guards down on the docks that they would gather 15, 25 pounds of rice for me, and also tea. And I’d pick it up once a week off the docks, and then I’d take it around and give it to friends. And this was rice that was going to be thrown away otherwise, you know?
Techniques like that. Second day vegetables from the supermarket. Yeah, we used to go around at one or two in the morning, around the Safeways and Piggly Wigglies in Berkeley with a shopping bag and hit the garbage cans out in the back.
And we’d get Chinese cabbage, cabbage, broccoli—lots of broccoli and artichokes that were thrown out because they didn’t look sellable any more. So I never bought any vegetables for the three years I was a graduate student at Berkeley. When I ate meat, it was usually horse meat from the pet store because they don’t have a law that permits them to sell horse meat for human consumption in California like they do in Oregon.
You did make delicious horse meat sukiyaki. Well, I want to add to this, Gary, that during the time that you were living this way I visited you on occasion, and you had a little hut way up on the hillside on Homestead Valley in Mill Valley. And I want to say, for the record, that this was one of the most beautiful pads I ever saw.
It was sweet and clean, and it had a very, very good smell to the whole thing. And you were living what I consider to be a very noble life. Now, then, the question that next arises: if this is the way of being a successful drop-out—which I think is true—can you have a wife and child under such circumstances?
Yeah, I think you can. Sure. What about when the state forces you to send the child to school?
You send it to school. Oh no. Come on, I don’t see this as drop-out at all.
That—no, I want to finish what I was going to say. That’s the way it was ten years ago. Today there is a community, a huge community which, when you drop out—when any kid drops out today, he’s got a subculture to go fall into.
He’s got a place to go where there will be friends, and people that will put him up, and people that will feed him, at least for a while, and keep feeding him indefinitely if he moves around from pad to pad. But that’s just stage one. Stage one?
The value of the Lower East Side—or of the district in Seattle, or the Haight-Ashbury—is that it provides a first launching pad. But that must be seen, clearly, as a way station. I don’t think the Haight-Ashbury district is a place—any city, for that matter—is a place where the new tribal individual… I agree with you.
…is going to live. So, I mean drop out! And I don’t want to be misinterpreted.
I’m dropping out, step by step. Millbrook, by the way, is a tribal community. We’re getting closer and closer to the landing.
We’re working out our way of import and export with the planet. We consider ourselves a tribe of mutants. Just like all the little tribes of Indians were.
We happen to have our little area there, and we have to come to terms with the white men around us. Yes! There’s no—we can’t… Now look, your drop-out line is fine for all those other people out there.
You know, that’s what you’ve got to say to them. But I want to hear what you’re building. What are you making?
What are we building? Yeah, what are you building? I want to hear your views on that.
Now, it’s agreed we’re dropping out and there are techniques to do it. Now, what next? Where are we going now?
What kind of society are we going to be in? Well, I’m making the prediction that thousands of groups will just look around the fake prop television set American society, and just open one of those doors. And when you open the doors they don’t lead you in, they lead you out into the garden of Eden, which is this planet.
And then you find yourself a little tribe wandering around. As soon as enough people do this—enough young people do this—it’ll bring about an incredible change in the consciousness of this country, and of the Western world. Well, that is happening, actually.
Yeah. But that garden of Eden is full of old rubber truck tires and tin cans right now, you know? Parts of it are.
Each group that drops out has got to use its two billion years of cellular equipment to answer those questions. Hey, how we gonna eat? Oh, there’s no more paycheck, there’s no more fellowship from the university!
How we gonna eat? How we gonna keep warm? How we gonna defend ourselves?
What is very important here is that people learn the techniques which have been forgotten; that they learn new structures and new techniques. Like, you just can’t go out and grow vegetables, man. You’ve got to learn how to do it.
You know? Like we’ve got to learn to do a lot of things we’ve forgotten to do. I agree.
That is very true, Gary. Our educational system—in its entirety—does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words… Exactly.
…we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman, or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character.
Within the next five years, probably, a modest beginning will be made in sub-culture institutions of higher learning that will informally begin to exist around the country, and will provide this kind of education without being left to the establishment, to big industry, to government. Well, it’s already happening on quite a wide scale. It’s already happening.
I think that there will be a big extension of that, employing a lot of potentially beautiful teachers who are unemployed at the moment. Like, there are gurus who are just waiting to be put to use, and also drawing people who are working in the universities with a bad conscience off to join that. Exactly.
There’s a whole new order of technology that is required for this. A whole new science, actually. A whole new physical science is going to emerge from this.
Because the boundaries of the old physical science are within the boundaries of the Judeo-Christian and Western imperialist boss-sense of the universe that Alan was talking about. In other words, our scientific condition is caught within the limits of that father figure—Jehovah or Roman emperor—model, which limits our scientific objectivity and actually holds us back from exploring areas of science which can be explored. Exactly, Gary.
Exactly. So that, really, you know—like, our new technology goes with this. Exactly!
But it’s like the guy in Los Angeles who had a bad trip on LSD, and turned himself into the police and wrote: “Please help me. Signed, Jehovah.” Beautiful. It’s about time he caught on, huh?
Yes! But here, though, is this thing, you see: we are talking about all this, which is really a rather small movement of people involved in the midst of a fantastic multitude of people who can only continue to survive if automated industry feeds them, clothes them, houses them and transports them by means of the creation of immense quantities of ersatz material: fake bread, fake homes, fake clothes and fake autos. In other words, this thing is going on—you know, these huge, fantastic numbers of people, increasing, increasing, increasing—people think, you know, the population problem’s something that’s going to happen five years from now.
They don’t realize it’s right on us now! People are coming out to the walls! We have to start immediately putting the technology underground.
I can think of different ways we can do this symbolically. The solstice—last April 21st [sic]—a group of us went out in front of the house in Millbrook, and we took a sledgehammer and we spent about an hour breaking through the road, and we had this incredible piece of asphalt and rock—four inches—and then we said: “Hey! Underneath this planet somewhere there’s dirt!” And it was really magical.
And once you get a little piece taken out—it took about an hour to get one little piece—then you just go underneath it and it begins to crumble. So I think that we should start a movement to—one hour a day or one hour a week—take a little chisel, a little hammer, and put a little hole in some of this plastic, and just see some earth coming up and put a seed there. And then put a little ring of—mandalic ring—of something around it.
I can see the highways, and I can see the subways, and I can see the patios, and so forth: suddenly the highway department comes along, and says, “There’s a rose growing in the middle of Highway 101!” And then—then—the robot power group will have to send a group of the highway department to kill the rose and put the asphalt down on the gentle, naked skin of the soil. Now, when they do that we’re getting to them. There’ll be pictures in the paper.
And consciousness is going to change. Because we’ve got to get to people’s consciousness. We’ve got to let people realize what they’re doing to the earth.
That’s the area of poetry you’re dealing with there. Here we go! I’m the poet and you’re the politician.
I’ve told you that for ten years! Yes, I think he should drop out. And I want to be absolutely clear on that.
And the papers—nobody wants to listen to that simple, two-syllable phrase. It gets jargled and jumbled, and—I mean it. Now, everyone has to decide how he drops out, and when, and he has to time it gracefully, but that’s the goal.
Now, I can foresee that you might work for Sears & Roebuck for six months to get enough money to go to India. But that’s part of your drop out. And what I’m doing today, Allen, is part of my drop out.
I’ve got responsibilities, contracts, and I don’t think that anyone should violate contracts with people that they love. But look at all this— Contract with the university? Ha!
Fine, quit tomorrow. Therefore, I have to detach myself slowly. When I was in India two years ago— India… but look—you know the university is personal relations also.
They’re not in contact with the university, they’re in contact with persons. Yeah. They can’t reject those persons, necessarily.
There might be a Bodhisattva among those persons. You can—as Tim says—you can gracefully drop out— Aesthetically. —at one time or another, which I take to mean— I was teaching at Berkeley last week.
What do you mean, “drop out?” You’ve got to do your yoga as a college professor. It’s part of the thing you’re gonna have to go through, and after you do that then you shudder and run for the door. Surely the fact of the matter is that you can do this on a small scale, as an individual, where just a few people are doing this, as they always have done.
There have always been a kind of elite minority who dropped out; who were the sages in the mountains. You’re talking a drama here. You’re not talking about, you know, anthropological realities.
The anthropological reality is that human beings, in their nature, want to be in touch with what is real in themselves and in the universe. And that, for example, the longshoremen with their automation contract in San Francisco: a certain number of them have been laid off for the rest of their lives with full pay, and some of them have been laid off already for five years, with full pay, by their contract. Now, my brother-in-law is a longshoreman, and he’s been telling me about what’s happening to these guys.
Most of them are pretty illiterate, a large proportion of them are [African Americans]. The first thing they all did was get boats and drive around San Francisco Bay, because they have all this leisure. Then a lot of them got tired of driving around boats that were just like cars, and they started sailing.
Then a few of them started making their own sailboats. They move into and respond to the possibility of challenge. Things become simpler and more complex and more challenging for them.
The same is true of hunting. Some guy says, “I want to go hunting and fishing all the time, when I have my leisure, by God!” And so he goes hunting all the time. Then he says, “I want to do this in a more interesting way,” so he takes up bow hunting.
Yeah. Then the next step is—and this has happened—he says, “I want to try making my own arrowheads.” And he learns how to flake his own arrowheads out. Now, human beings want reality.
That’s, I think, part of human nature. And television, and drinking beer, and watching television, is what the working man laid off does for the first two weeks. But then, in the third week, he begins to get bored, and in the fourth week he wants to do something with his body and his mind and his senses.
I think that automation in the affluent society, plus psychedelics, plus a—for some curious reason—a whole catalytic, spiritual change or bend of mind that seems to be taking place in the west (today especially) is going to result—can result, ultimately—in a vast leisure society in which people will voluntarily reduce their number, and because human beings want to do that which is real, simplify their lives. Like, the whole problem of consumption and marketing is radically altered if a large number of people voluntarily choose to consume less. And people will voluntarily choose to consume less if their interests are turned in another direction, if what is exciting to them is no longer things but states of mind.
That’s true. Now what is happening: people are becoming interested in states of mind, and things aren’t really substitutes for states of mind. So what I visualize is a very complex and sophisticated cybernetic technology surrounded by thick hedges of trees—somewhere, say, around Chicago—and the rest of the nation a buffalo pasture… That’s very close to what I think.
…with a large number of people going around making their own arrowheads because it’s fun, but they know better. They know they don’t have to make them. Now, this seems like our utopian visions are coming closer together.
I say that the industry should be underground, and you say it should be in Chicago. This interests me. Yes, but that’s the same idea.
Well, those who want to be technological engineers will be respected and are going to do that. And the other thing is, like, you can go out and live close to nature, or you can go back and— But you won’t be allowed to drive a car outside this technological— But you won’t want to! Right.
That’s the difference, baby. It’s not that you won’t be allowed to, it’s that you won’t want to. That’s where it’s got to be at.
Because it’s the same thing when we get down to, say, the fundamental questions of food. More and more one realizes that the mass-produced food is not worth eating and therefore, in order to delight in things to eat, you go back to the most primitive processes of raising and preparing food. Because that has taste in it.
And I see that there will be a sort of flip, that as all the possibilities of technology and automation make it possible for everybody to be assured of having the basic necessities of life, they will then say: “Oh, yes, we have all that. Now we can always rely on that. But now, in the meantime, while we don’t have to work, let’s go back to making arrowheads and to raising the most amazing plants.” Yeah.
It would be so funny! The thing is that they would all get so good at it that the technology center in Chicago would rust away. Right!
Right, right, right! They needed it, even. That’s exactly what’s going to happen.
The psychedelic drop-outs are going to be having so much fun. They’re going to be so much, obviously, healthier. But Tim, do you see any indication among people who are, at present, really turned on that they are cultivating this kind of material competence?
Now, I haven’t seen too much of it yet. I went to— Some of those kids at Big Sur have got it. Yeah, maybe you’re right.
They’re learning. Like, A few years ago they used to go down to Big Sur and they didn’t know how to camp or dig latrines. But, you know, like what Martin has been telling me lately, is that they’re getting very sharp about what to gather that’s edible, how to get sea salt, what are the edible plants and the edible seeds.
And the revolutionary technological book for this… Alright, now. But— …state is A.L. Kroeber’s Handbook of the California Indians, which tells you what’s good to eat and how to prepare it.
Oh, well then, that’s what I wanted you to [???] out. But the thing is this: look, so many people I know— And also what to use for Tampax: milkweed fluff.
Beautiful. And diapers made of shredded cedar bark. The whole thing is all there.
A. L. Kroeber. Handbook of the California Indians. Beautiful!
But the thing that is this: I’ve found so many people who—you know—are of the turned-on type, and the circumstances and surroundings under which they live are just plain cruddy. You would think that people who had seen what you can see with the visions of psychedelics would reflect themselves in forms of life and art that would be like Persian miniatures. Because obviously Persian miniatures, Moorish arabesques are all reflecting the state of mind of people who were turned on.
And they are rich and glorious beyond belief. Majestic. Majestic, yeah!
Well now, why doesn’t it so occur? It is slowly beginning to happen because I’ve noticed that, recently, all turned on people are becoming more colorful. They’re wearing beads and gorgeous clothes and so on and so forth, and it’s gradually coming out because—you remember—the old beatnik days when everybody was in blue jeans and ponytails and no lipstick and drab and crummy.
What? Now something’s beginning to happen! Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but we were mostly concerned with not being consumers then.