Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
And they are nothing but that. In the same way, we are evolved from lower orders of animals, and I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmo globule—Poobah says. And, you know, that’s what you really are.
You’re only a complicated protoplasmo globule. Now, do you see the intent behind this mythology? The intent is to deprecate.
The intent is, as we say now, to put down the human being because the human being felt that, hitherto, he had been put up too far in the wrong way. You are a child of God, and the Lord loves you very dearly, but… you know? That’s just insufferable, to be put up in that way.
You have an immortal soul. Your life is endless, but it can very well turn out to be a life of endless agony when you fry in hell. And that was a very serious threat to both the Protestants and Catholics.
And so it’s much better, much more comfortable, to have a dead universe than a living universe so everlastingly threatening. So, then, the mythology of the 19th century, under which most of us still operate—we operate under it because it has become so plausible. The science out of which this mythology arose has been so effective, it has produced such a marvelous splash of technological marvels, that the point of view of those scientists who started the whole thing going has become amazingly persuasive and convincing.
After all, if I can reach into your brain with a very, very subtle instrument, and I can poke about inside and press there, and suddenly, on a certain point, when I press it, a world of memory comes to life so vividly that you see it before your very eyes. I remove the instrument, it vanishes. I touch another place—you experience intense pleasure, absolutely unbelievable pleasure.
I remove it, the sensation vanishes. Every time I touch inside, you get a sensation externally of intense reality. And I say, “After all, I was only just pushing things in your brain.
You see what a push-button thing you are? That’s it. I can just poke around and you can see anything.
But all that’s happening is I’m putting a little electrode or something on parts of your brain. That’s all you are, poor fish! You’re just a kind of a sensitive sponge inside your headbone.” Well, that gets very persuasive, you see?
And people are therefore in a position—they are prejudiced—to favor a mythology that will make out that you are, after all, nothing but something or other. Nothing but a kind of a complicated neurological jello. And that point of view, as I said, has become enormously convincing.
It’s plausible today, whereas the old point of view of God the father and all the angels isn’t plausible. It seems kind of weird in relation to what we know about the state of the universe. Now, what we have to see is that both of these points of view are equally mythological.
And there’s no more reason to take one than the other. And that what these points of view reflect are nothing other than certain attitudes to living, Now, you see, if you want to live in a way that always is saying, “I think that life is disgusting”—supposing you want to deny being—then you can always describe it in ways that are offensive. You could always say playing the violin is just scraping cat’s entrails with horse hair.
That puts it down. And you say people who play golf, they’re a bunch of idiots who go out, take a walk, and hit a stupid little ball with sticks. People who like music are just a bunch of idiots who sit around and go out of their minds listening to a lot of complicated noises.
See, there’s always a way of talking about something to make it sound terrible. Equally, there’s a way of talking about something to make it sound great. Now, what do you want to do?
Do you want to live your life in such a way that you’re always saying to it, “Eeeh, bwuuh, bleeeaaaah!” You know? Do you want—is that a good way to conduct things? Or do you want to live your life in such a way that you say, “Come on!
Let’s go!” You see? “Let’s swing this thing!” On the one hand, you see, you’re always intentioned against it. Do you remember—I pointed out to you this morning that the person who’s constantly anxious is a person who is resisting the flip-floppability of things?
Life is vibrating. It’s going bllwwp, bllwwp, bllwwp, bllwwp, bllwwp all the time, and the anxious person says, “God’s sake, don’t do that!” Because, you know, you might do it too much! “I don’t want to bllwwp like this.
Makes me feel nervous! Stoppit!” And so, as he puts his weight on this bllwwp, bllwwp, he goes bllwbllwbllwbllwbllwbllw, like this, you see? He gets trembling.
So instead of him saying, “C’mon, let’s bllwwp! Let’s go and do this thing,” so, in exactly the same way, the person who wants to say, “Well, you’re nothing but some kind of chemicals. And they’re just a lot of… you’re a bag of pus and blood, basically, with a few bones inside.” And that person is doing the same thing, you see, as the person who’s putting pressure on the flip-floppability of things, and so he gets anxious.
And a person who does this “Aaaaah,” he wants to say—look, think about your friends and the people who are philosophical and enthusiastic materialists. They’re always going to pose themselves as a certain kind of hero. After all, you’re just a dreamer.
But I face facts. See? I’m a hard-headed realist, and as a matter of fact I’m an intellectual porcupine.
I have my prickles out all over the place because I’m the kind of person who—in the academic world, at any rate—is full of rigor. I ask: “What, precisely, is the evidence about this?” And I’m analytical. And I don’t like woolly and vague thinking.
I like it clearcut. And you can see that porcupine’s bristle going krrrrr-ck right through like that. See?
All this is a personality type who wants to play that role, whose message in saying all this jazz is, “I’m the kind of person who is all dry as a bone, but I believe that that is strength and that’s reality.” And another kind of person says to him, “Oh, you are intolerable! You’re so dry, you’re so dull! You rattle!
You don’t have any juice in you, and what we need is juice. And we need flow. We need lilt and rhythm and gaiety,” you see?
So that’s an opposed mythology. And that’s another character part you’re going to play. So we’ve got to consider: these are games.
You see? As I tried to show you earlier. That the kind of roles we play are the kind of games we play.
But the question is: which is the optimal game? Certainly, we can’t do without some prickly people because life is prickles and goo, and it’s basically gooey prickles and prickly goo. But the gooey people are always trying to make out that it’s only goo, and the prickly people are always trying to make out that it’s only prickles.
Now, we do need both, see? But the question is, fundamentally: which game works better? The game that resists the vibration, the flip-flop, or the game that goes with it.
Obviously, the game that goes with it, that cooperates with the general scene, will be a longer game and a more amusing game than one that totally resists it. I said “totally” advisedly, because it’s great fun to resist it at times. See?
It’s just like when somebody massages you, you know? And they’re really experts. And those fingers are just vibrating like this on your back.
You can give and just go fwooof. But it’s also fun, sometimes, to tighten your muscles against it so as to feel the full impact of this thing, you see? But the real point I want to get across is that what seems to us the hard boiled common sense of a mechanistic view of the universe is nothing other than a myth.
You don’t have to be taken in by this, because there is no more solid argument that that is the way things are than any other argument about any other way things might be. Now, it goes like this, you see: again, think of the idea of limits. We’ll take different limits this time.
We’ll take one limit, on the right hand here, as consciousness. Extreme, lively sensitivity. And on the other hand we’ll take the opposite limit, which is geological—the stone, the blind energy, the electrical force without any consciousness whatsoever.
These are observable things. We see the living human being on one extreme and we see the stone or the fire on the other. Now, our 19th century mythologist wants to describe this limit in terms of this one.
He wants to say that consciousness is nothing but a very complicated form of minerals. Why can’t you go the other way and just as easily say minerals are a very simple form of consciousness? That works, doesn’t it?
I mean, after all, here is this mineral. [Gong strike] I knock it, and it says that to me. This is a rudimentary form of consciousness.
This thing inside is not making a noise to itself because that requires ears. But in some way this thing is going yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee-yoee to itself; it’s shaking like that. And that’s its consciousness, its response, its resonance.
It isn’t totally unconscious. But its consciousness is extremely simple. Now, you may think I’m spinning fairy stories.
But is that any more of a fairy story than to say that your consciousness is nothing but chemistry? I mean, you think you’re conscious and that you have this high and mighty state of affairs, but actually, of course, if we look at this very realistically, all this is just colloidal substances wobbling around. You see?
Both that story and the other story can be made to seem equally fanciful. But the question is this: if I say about the gong, “Look, my friend, I respect you because you are a little bit conscious.” See? “You relate to me; you’re kind of a younger brother.” And, you know, then there’s something endearing and warm about this attitude to things.
Whereas if I say, “Pfft, you’re just a piece of metal. And as a matter of fact, I’m just a piece of metal, too.” That’s a kind of insult. The people who believe that are really suicidal maniacs.
They want to put themselves down. They are against their own life and they take a great pride in being that way, and they call it being realistic. And I’m only saying it’s a better gamble to take it the other way and say the best thing you can say about it: that this is a living being, but not so much of a living being as a snail or something that actually wanders along and wiggles.
So, you see, the pressure upon us of the whole mythology of the 19th century—the whole attitude of putting down the universe because the previous myth had been too uncomfortably alive—is simply a way of looking at things. Let me give another illustration of the same thing. If you study the various forms of life from the standpoint of natural selection, you may come up with a rationalization for everything.
Somebody wants to know: “Why do butterflies have eyes on their wings?” Some butterflies. Well, somebody scratches his head and says, “Oh, well, there must be an explanation for that.” There’s an explanation for everything. Why is there an explanation for everything?
Because the universe is really a tight engineering job. So why do some butterflies have eyes? Well, it so happened that some fluke of a butterfly got an eye on its wing, and birds would avoid it because that eye looked at them and it was just too much.
So those butterflies that had eyes on their wings bred, whereas the butterflies that didn’t have eyes got eaten up more easily. Although some of them had other alternatives, because of not having eyes, they were invisible and the birds couldn’t see them. And so more of that kind survived, although those with the terrifying eyes survived, and so they didn’t get eaten up either.
So those tended to multiply. So this is a perfectly easy, simple explanation of why butterflies have eyes on their wings. Or some other things—some birds with extraordinary plumages which look so obvious that anybody could catch them; any cat, any hunter.
No, they survive because they were so attractive to their females. And so they bred very well—as a matter of fact, this isn’t true. They didn’t.
And, you know: any explanation will do—provided it seems to explain. Now, that is one way of looking at things. You can make an extremely consistent theory for the different kind of species of flowers and birds and insects, and all their markings and so on; just why they have them.
But, on the other hand, you can equally well explain it in a completely different way. You can say it would be exceedingly dreary if there were nothing but one uniform type of life. Supposing there’d never been anything but amoebas.
And they were just globules. And they divided, and then they divided again, and then they divided again. You know, that could’ve gone on and could’ve been terribly efficient, because the minute you went to hit an amoeba you would strike it but suddenly find you’d killed only one of them because it split just before you hit.
That’s a marvelous arrangement. And they could split very fast. You could suddenly go at another with two hammers, hoping to catch both amoebas, but suddenly they split, split, split, split, and there were eight of them before you knew where you were.
That would be fine. But actually, or the reason why there is all this colossal variety and all these patterns on butterflies’ wings is that nature is a poet and is simply having a wonderful time making all this variety, and doing all these various things. And that explanation is just as plausible as the efficient explanation.
You see, the philosophy is to a large extent to a matter of taste. What sort of explanations suit your personality? If you’re an anal-retentive type and rather tight, then you like the efficient explanation.
On the other hand, if you’re an effusive type you like the poetic explanation. But there are, though—beyond this—certain considerations of which of these explanations affords better games. And the economic, anal-retentive explanation can give good games up to a point.
Because there’s all the thrill of working out the chains of interconnection, all the reasoning whereby, finally, you go through all sorts of rational connections and explain why the butterfly has a big eye on its wing. Fine. But where do you end up?
You end up in a mechanical straightjacket. You’ve got to be careful along the other line approach that you just don’t end up in a morass. You could do that.
So you look for a middle way. But the point that emerges from all this is: don’t be bamboozled into fearing that the black will win because the white is the only thing there is. And the black, the nothing that surrounds it, will eventually engulf it.
All these are, as it were, nursery stories to terrify children. You live in a cosmos where the light of consciousness and the darkness of unconsciousness go back and forth just as the crests and the troughs of the waves. And this situation of yang and yin, positive and negative, is exceedingly productive.
It’s like a male and a female who become the parents of all sorts of children. And out of yang and yin, black and white, come all these adventures through the original stratagem of pretending that the one is and the other isn’t, that yang is and that yin isn’t. Both have equally good arguments on their side, and one now wins, and the other now wins.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. But don’t be deceived. The two are always together.
And the thing that you most fear—the awful, awful thing that could happen—think it through: what could that be? What could the very end be? What is it that you dread?
And you’ll find out that if you go down, down, down, down, down, down, down into what you dread—to be swallowed up, to be annihilated, let the horrible scorpion-spider mother, the octopus thing catch you and take you down into its inmost guts—what will it do with you? Why, it’ll transform you into itself. And then, when you are it—as I said, every creature feels like it’s a human being.
Because, after all, that’s “I.” So fish, when they’ve eaten up something, and that thing has become them. You know? And then the fish looks around and says, “Gee, that was a good dinner.” And it feels human.
And the fish looks around and it sees things that aren’t fish, and they look like cows. And human beings wandering around there, they look like predatory monsters of some kind; awful looking things, ghastly teeth and weird inhumane arms and legs on them. Not nice, orderly fins and tails, and beautiful scales on the side like a really good person should look.
See? So, you know, this thing of death and of being transformed is where our life reaches a certain point where it has to go bllwwp. And in the moment you go bllwwp, you forget.
You lose control, you see? That’s the sensation. When control is going, just on the verge of the crisis where it’s going to bllwwp—and you say, “Well, where was I?
Gee, this is strange. I’m alive. I don’t remember where I was before.” That’s the sensation of coming to birth.
And you grow and grow, and you become more familiar with this and more familiar. When you’re completely familiar it goes bllwwp, and you’re new all over again. See?
It’s quite different. We can never believe, you see, when it gets to the point where we know it’s about to go bllwwp, you never believe that it will go into life. We always think it’s going to go into something dreadful.
But, you see, once you know it’s going to keep flipping, and it’s going to keep flipping, and it’s going to keep flipping, and the only thing is to go with that flip. See? Get ready to go.
Are you ready? BLLWWP! Then you can laugh—because you know there’s no way out.
Now, I would like to try, this evening, a sort of experiment with you. Let us try the experiment of a game, and the game consists in thinking out the limits of our most wishful thinking. That is to say: we’re living in a world where we suffer and we have all kinds of problems, and let us feel free to speculate as to what would be the most delightful interpretation of all these problems that we could possibly invent.
In other words, what I’m saying is this: here we are, threatened with the annihilation of the human race—not only through atomic bombs, but through overpopulation, lack of proper soil conservation, everything you can imagine. Everything my friend Aldous Huxley can think up as a terrible threat to the future of the race. We’re confronted with this very, very seriously.
And supposing, for the sake of argument, that the very worst is going to happen: we’re all going to be annihilated and the human race has no future, and everything is as black as it could possibly be. Let’s take this as a point of departure and then ask the question: if that is true—in other words, if the worst that could happen is going to happen—is there anything that would make up for it? Not necessarily, I’m not asking whether there really is anything that would make up with it, but supposing we could think up something that might, how would we think?
Now, it’s not entirely trivial and silly to ask such a question, because very many important discoveries that emerge in the arts and the sciences are the result of people playing quite freely with fantasies. In other words, not so long ago at MIT, one of the professors proposed to his students that they should invent a kind of being which had, say, three fingers instead of five, or could only act with its nose, which had wings and claws and no fingers—or something. He invented all kinds of strange organic creatures and then said: how would you construct machines and furniture and knives and forks and all ordinary everyday appliances for these creatures?
And as a result of this pure fantasy, several important discoveries emerged. And so, in the same way, what I want to do is to suggest the possibility of inventing a cosmology not as a work of philosophy, but as a work of art. The intention of it is—let me repeat this—could we think up something, an explanation of human life and of the universe, which would justify all the problems, all the agonies from which we suffer and make them seem infinitely worthwhile?
Could we invent out of thin air an explanation of the universe that would do this? And let us say this simply as a work of art, without asking at first whether it’s true or anything of that kind. You see, people often accuse religionists of wishful thinking.
And when I think over the religions of the world and I hear them accused of being wishful thinking, I really don’t think they’re very wishful. Think of what is promised you if you live a very good life as a good Christian. How are you going to end up?
You do the very best, you’re going to go to heaven. And think of the images of heaven which the human imagination has thus far produced. Who wants to go there?
Nobody does. It’s infinitely boring. Even the Islamic people, who have a little less inhibition, have thought up their idea of heaven, and it’s really rather dull.
Sickeningly blissful forever. And in our kind of half-baked view of what the Hindus and the Buddhists teach, if you get the state of nirvāṇa, you’ll be sort of blissfully suspended in a thin gas forever. It doesn’t sound terribly interesting.
I would say our religions have not begun to be wishful thinking. Why don’t we really do some wishful thinking? Just as a speculation.
This is a game. What would we really like to be true about this world? Now, first of all, we’ve got to start from one firm premise.
That is, we’ve got to accept the facts of life as they are—in other words: that this world is as beastly as it is. It includes concentration camps, hospitals with people being mercifully tortured to stay alive with incurable cancer, and all these things, you see? It includes all that.
It includes the most ghastly horrible things that actually happen. Now, what I want to suggest first of all is: could I invent out of sheer imagination a justification for a world of this kind? So I could say: however terribly I suffer, and—what is still more difficult—however terribly the people I love suffer, there might be a theory of the world which would make it all more than worthwhile.
There might be some sort of understanding to which I could come, and then in retrospect look back on all the things I had gone through, all the terrors and all the horrors, and say: I’m very happy about the whole thing. It all worked out. It is worthwhile, it is wonderful.
What would such an explanation have to be? So let’s think it out. First of all, I think the first thing we would all agree about is that if the terrible things that can happen to us in life are in some way or other to be justified, we would like to feel that we ourselves were responsible for them.
By that I mean: we’d like to feel that we’re not simply the puppets of somebody else. We’re not suffering because somebody else has been cruel to us. I think we’d all like to feel that if we suffer, we ourselves are responsible for it.
Because the idea of a universe in which somebody else tortures you seems to me more repugnant to our basic emotions than one in which we feel that whatever happens to us happens at our own desire. Of course, this is very difficult to imagine when we are confronted with babies dying of cancer or syphilis, and we would say: how could they possibly be responsible for what’s happening to them? So let us suppose—don’t we have to think this way—that if these two qualifications are to be fulfilled—on the one hand that I am responsible for everything which happens to me, and on the other hand that the worst things that can happen have a justification which make them infinitely worth going through and experiencing?
Then we would have to say, wouldn’t we, that in a way, all the frightening, terrifying things which a human being can undergo are, in a way, a dream. You see, I’m trying to find out what would make it tolerable. What would make it tolerable is the feeling that, somehow, sometime, we could wake up from it.
We can all endure nightmares because we can wake from a nightmare. And suddenly find out: what a relief! It was only a dream after all.
And then, really, we feel rather happy about it. You see, just think of this for a moment: that if you could switch on any dream you liked every night when you went to sleep, and you could control it, and you could exploit all the possibilities of fantasy and imagination in thinking what you would like to dream, you would eventually get bored with being so well-controlled and with being so happy. And you would eventually have to—you would want to—have some dreams which you didn’t control, where you’d be surprised, where you would have adventures, where you didn’t know the outcome.
It’s curious, isn’t it? We thrill ourselves all the time by going to plays and movies and reading novels where there is terrible suspense. And although we know that it’s all going to come out alright in the end, we pretend for a while, sitting in the theater, that it isn’t.
That we don’t know what the issue will be. And how we enjoy that! Do you see how we put ourselves for a while—even though we jolly well know that the author has planned all this to work out alright—that we allow ourselves for a while the illusion of thinking that it might not come out alright?
And herein lies the thrill. Now supposing, in the same way, our whole life was something of this kind: that its anxieties, its tragedies, were the same kind of suspense and thrill that exists in a novel, and that we are undergoing it. What this would mean—wouldn’t it?—would be that we have within us a kind of higher self who is pretending to be the ordinary, everyday person that we are, who is acting it.
That we are, in other words, that our everyday life is a dream from which we have the possibility of waking up. So let’s, for the moment, simply assume this—not as a philosophical or metaphysical truth, but simply as an idea of pure fantasy. Supposing we are all dreaming our everyday life, and that there’s a possibility of waking up from it.
Now let’s go on to explore what kind of a dream this would be. Supposing, you see, you were saying to yourself: I would like to imagine the most fascinating form of life in existence which I could possibly conceive. You would first of all want to feel unfrustrated.
In other words, you would want to feel that all your movements, all your desires, could move in any direction without encountering a block. And what we mean by the sense of being physically frustrated, of the spirit being bound by the hard confines of matter, is the sense of being blocked. The sense of heaviness, the sense of bodily weight.