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Now let’s re-spell the word eye. When I talk about “to eye something,” it means to look at something, to be aware of something. So we’ll change the spelling and we’ll say the universe eye-s; it becomes aware of itself in each one of us.
And it keeps on eye-ing and every time it eye-s, every one of us in whom it eye-s feels that he is the center of the whole thing. And that I know that you feel that you are I in just the same way that I feel that I am I. And we all have the same background of nothing.
We don’t remember having done it before, and yet it has been done before. Again, and again, and again, not only before in time, but all around us everywhere else in space is everybody; is the universe I-ing Now look, let me try and make this clearer in this way: when I say “It’s the universe I-ing,” who is I-ing? What do you mean by ‘I?’ Well, there are two things you can mean by it.
On the one hand, you can mean what’s called your ego, your personality. But that’s not your real I-ing because your personality is your idea of yourself; it’s your image of yourself. And that’s made up of how you feel yourself, how you think about yourself, thrown in with what all your friends and relations have told you about yourself.
So your image of yourself—however obviously—isn’t you anymore than your photograph is you or anymore than the image of anything is it. All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures. They contain no information, for most of us, on how we grow our brains, how we work our nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape our bones.
That isn’t contained in the sensation, or the image, which we call the ego. So obviously, then, the ego-image is not my self. So my self contains all these factors that, we could say, the body is doing: the circulation of the blood, the breathing, the electrical activity of the nerves—all this is me, but I don’t know anything about it.
i don’t know how it came together, I don’t know how it’s constructed. And yet I do all that, if it is true, also, to say “I breathe. I walk.
I think. I am conscious.” I don’t know how I manage to be, but I do it in the same way as I grow my hair. So I must, therefore, locate the center of me—my I-ing—at a deeper level than my ego, which is my image or idea of myself.
But how deep do we go? We can say the body is the I, but the body comes out of the rest of the universe, comes out of all its energy. So it’s the universe that’s I-ing.
The universe I-s in the same way that a tree apples or that a star shines. And the center of the apple-ing is the tree, the center of the shining is the star, and so the basic center—or Self—of the I-ing—which is called in this case Alan Watts, which is only a name for this particular physical organism; flowering from, shining out of this particular environment—makes the center of all this I-ing the eternal universe. Oh, eternal—the thing has existed for ten thousand million years and will probably go on for at least that much more, so we won’t worry about how long it goes on.
But—repeatedly—it I-s, so that it seems to me absolutely reasonable to assume that when I die and this physical body evaporates, and the whole memory system with it, then it will be all over once again the awareness that I had before—not exactly the same way—but of a baby being born. There will, of course, be myriads of babies born, not only baby human beings but baby frogs, baby rabbits, baby fruit flies, baby viruses, baby bacteria, and which one of them am I going to be? Only one of them, and yet every one of them.
Because this experience comes always in the singular, one at a time. But, certainly, one of them. Actually, it doesn’t make much difference.
Because if I were born again as a fruit fly I would think that being a fruit fly was the normal, ordinary course of events. And naturally I would think that I was an important person—a highly cultured being—because fruit flies obviously have a high culture. We don’t even know how to look for it but, probably, they have all sorts of symphonies, and music, and artistic performances in the way light is reflected on their wings in different ways, the way they dance in the air, and they say, “Oh, look at her!
She has real style! Look how the sunlight comes off her wings!” And they, in their world, they’re as important and as civilized as we do in our world, so that if I were to wake up as a fruit fly I wouldn’t feel any different (as it were) than I do when I wake up as a human being. I would be used to it.
“Well,” you say, though, “it wouldn’t be me! Because if it would be me again I would have to remember how I was before.” Alright, but you don’t—now—remember how you were before, and yet you’re content enough to be the me that you are. In fact, it’s a thoroughly good arrangement in this world that we don’t remember what it was before.
Why? Because variety is the spice of life, and if we remembered, remembered, remembered having done this again, and again, and again, and again, we should get bored. And just as a memory is a beautiful thing to have to remember, without memory we can’t be intelligent.
But just as I have explained that in order to see the figure you have to have the background, in order that a memory be valuable you’ve also got to have a forgettery. That’s why we sleep every night to refresh ourselves: we go into the unconscious so that coming back to the conscious is, again, a great experience. Well, when that’s gone on long enough—when, day after day, we remember the days that have gone before (even though there’s the interval of sleep)—there comes a point when, really, if we consider what is to our true liking, we will want to forget everything that went before so that we can have the extraordinary experience of seeing the world once again through the eyes of a baby—whatever kind of baby.
So that it’s completely new and we have all the startling wonder that a child has; all the vividness of perception, which we can’t have if we remember everything for ever. So do you see what happens? The universe is a system which not only forgets itself, and then again remembers anew so that there’s always this constant change and constant variety in the span of time, but it also does it in the span of space by looking at itself through every different living organism to give, as it were, an all-round view—you know, that’s a way of getting rid of prejudice: getting rid of a one-sided view.
So death, in that sense, is a tremendous release from monotony. It puts an interval of total forgetting in a rhythmic process of on and off, on and off so that you can begin all over again and never be bored. But the point is that if you fantasize the idea of being nothing for always, and always, and always, what you’re really saying is: “After I’m dead the universe stops.” And what I’m saying is: no, it goes on just as it did when you were born.
You see, you may say that you think it incredible that you have more than one life. But I say, first of all, isn’t it incredible that you have this one? Isn’t it incredible that, out of the nothing that is your past, here you are?
Why, it’s astonishing. So if that’s astonishing it can always happen again, and again, and again. Now what this is saying, then, is that just as you don’t know how you manage to be conscious, how you manage to grow and shape this body of yours, that doesn’t mean to say that you’re not doing it.
Equally, you don’t know how the universe shines the stars, constellates the constellations, and galactifies the galaxies—you don’t know. But that doesn’t mean to say that you aren’t doing it in just the same way as you’re breathing without knowing how you breathe. If I say, “Really and truly, I am this whole universe,” or—put it in another way—“This particular organism is an I-ing being done by the whole universe,” and somebody could say to me “Well who the hell do you think you are?
Are you God? Do you warm up the galaxies? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or loosen the bonds of Orion?” And I’d reply to that: “Who the hell do you think you are?
Can you tell me how you grow your brain, how you shape your eyeballs, and how you manage to see? Well, if you can’t tell me that, I can’t tell you how I warm up the galaxy.” Only: I’ve located the center of myself at a deeper and a more universal level than we are, in our culture, accustomed to do. So then, if that universal energy is the real me—the real Self which I-s as all these different organisms spread out in different spaces, or places, and happening again, and again, and again at different times—we’ve got a marvelous system going in which you can be eternally surprised.
The universe is really a system which keeps on surprising itself. The ambition that many of us have (especially in an age of technological competence) to have everything under our control is a false ambition because you’ve only got to think for one moment: what would it be like if you did really know and control everything? Supposing we had a supercolossal technology which could go to our wildest dreams of technological competence so that everything that is going to happen would be foreknown, predicted, and everything would be under our control?
Why, you know, it would be like making love to a plastic woman. There would be no surprise in it, no sudden answering touch—as when we touch another human being, it’s not like touching something made of plastic. There comes out a response, something unexpected.
And that’s what we really want when we want to relate to the other. You see, you can’t experience the feeling you call ‘self’ unless it’s in contrast with the feeling of ‘other.’ It’s like known and unknown, light and dark, positive and negative. Other is necessary in order for you to feel self.
So then, isn’t that the arrangement you want? And so, in the same way, couldn’t you say the arrangement you want is not to remember—memory is always, remember, a form of control: I’ve got it in mind, I remember it, I know your number. You’re under control.
Now, if you go on remembering, and remembering, and remembering, it’s like writing on a piece of paper and going on writing, and writing, and writing until there’s no white space left on the paper. Your memory is filled up, and so you need to wipe it all clean so that you have a white paper all over again and can begin to write on it once more. So that’s what death does for us: it wipes the slate clean and also—looking at it from the point of view of population and the human organism on the planet—it keeps cleaning us out.
And the idea of a technology which would enable each one of us to be immortal would be something that would progressively crowd the planet with people with hopelessly crowded memories. They would, as it were, be like people living in a house where they’d’ve accumulated so much property, so many books, so many vases, so many sets of knives and forks, so many tables and chairs, so many newspapers—there wouldn’t be any room to move around! To live we need space.
And space is a kind of nothingness. And death is a kind of nothingness. It’s all the same principle.
And by putting blocks, as it were, or spaces of nothingness—spaces of space—in between spaces of something we get life properly spaced out. To use the German word: Lebensraum, ‘room for living.’ That’s what space gives us, and that’s what death gives us. Now look: notice that in everything I’ve said about death I haven’t brought in anything that I could call spookery.
I haven’t brought in any information about anything that you don’t already know. I haven’t invoked any mysterious knowledge about souls, memory of former lives, anything like that. I’ve just talked about it in terms that we already know.
So then, if you say, “All this idea that people have of life beyond the grave is just wishful thinking,” I say, “Okay. I’ll grant that.” Let’s assume that is wishful thinking and that when we’re dead there just won’t be anything, see? Let’s face that fact: that’ll be the end.
Now notice, first of all, that’s the worst thing you’ve got to fear. Does it frighten you? Who’s going to be afraid?
Supposing it ends? No more problems! But then you will see that this nothingness—if you followed my argument—is something, as it were, you bounce off from again just as you bounced in the first place when you were born: you bounced out of nothingness.
Nothingness is a kind of bounce because it implies—the nothing implies something. So you bounce back. All new, all different, nothing to compare it with before, a refreshing experience.
And if, therefore, you get this sense—just like you’ve got the sense of nothing behind your eyes—get the sense of nothingness (very powerful, frisky nothingness) underlying your whole being, and there’s nothing in that nothing to be afraid of, then—with that sense—you can come on like a person for whom the rest of life is gravy because you’re already dead. You know you’re going to die. We say there’s one thing certain, which is death and taxes.
And the death of each one of us, now, is as certain as it would be if we were going to die five minutes from now. So where’s your anxiety, where’s your hangup? Regard yourself as dead already so that you have nothing to lose.
A Turkish proverb says, “He who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed.” So, in the same way, the person who regards himself as already dead, who—therefore, you are virtually nothing. A hundred years from now you’ll be a handful of dust. That’ll be for real.
Alright. Act on that reality, and out of that nothing you will suddenly surprise yourself: that the more you know you’re nothing, the more you’ll amount to something. Tonight I want to tell you three fantasies, all of which have something in common.
The first fantasy is about reproduction. We use the word reproduction in two principal ways: when we talk about the biological reproduction of the species and when we talk about making a good reproduction of something in terms of a painting, a photograph, or a recording, or a video tape. Now, what is all this about reproduction in that direction?
Hundreds of years ago, kings of Europe who wanted to form feudal alliances by marrying the princesses of far-off states would have painters send portraits of the lady in question to see if his majesty approved of her before he got her. And there’s a famous story in which Henry VIII of England was badly cheated in this respect by a too-flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves. And therefore, there grew up a kind of morale among artists in the European tradition to make faithful reproductions of people.
And they perfected their technique, beginning with the marvelous work of the Renaissance painters and the Flemish painters, and going on, finally, to what was called art officiel in the 19th century, we got what we now call photographic realism. But then they said, “Isn’t there some more scientific way of doing this?” And so they discovered the camera. And, first of all, there were—remember—there was brownish daguerreotypes and people said, “Well, that is pretty—it really looks like grandpa, doesn’t it?” And then they said, “But something’s—several things are missing.
It isn’t colored.” So first of all, they tinted them. And then they said, “Ah, that’s real lifelike.” But then they went on to say, “But, you know, there are some people whose whole style of life, whose personality is in the way they move. And if you just take a static shot like that the personality isn’t there.
It’s the way they go. So we’ve got to have some way of making people move.” So they invented the movies. And I remember when the first movies came out: they were all going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da; everybody was going, you know, in a jerky way.
Then they smoothed it out and they said, “Ah, that’s real lifelike!” But they said, then, “There’s another thing about reproducing people, which is that they talk, and a whole lot of their personality is in the voice. So can’t we have them talking at the same time that they move?” So they invented the talkies. And then, to get it more lifelike still, they colored them.
They said, “Wow! Now we’re really getting somewhere!” Then, to make it even more real, they put it in 3D and you had to wear, sort of, spectacles over your face to see it that way. But then they went on to say, “Why is it that every time we want to see one of these things we have to go down to the center of town?
Can’t we have it all at home?” And so television came on. And in television they first of all started out with black and white, and it was kind of like Robert Benchley once described: the cuts in French newspapers were all looking as if they’d been made on bread. Well, that was television at a certain period.
And then they improved it, and then they colored it. And that’s where we are now. Not quite.
Because somebody has come out with a thing that we shall all be seeing soon, which is the hologram. A television image produced by laser beams where you see a three-dimensional figure out in the air in front of you. They’ll say, “Isn’t that marvelous!
Whew!” And then—but of course, when you go up to it and you put your hand on it, your hand goes right through it. You can’t touch it. And, you see, that was always the trouble with television.
Because you look at whatever you’re seeing behind the screen. It’s intangible, it doesn’t smell, and it won’t relate to you. So these are further problems to be solved in the techniques of electronic reproduction.
And they’ll do it! They’ll, first of all, manage a way in which the electronic emission sources can solidify and make the air vibrate, so that you go up and you’ll touch the figure, and you won’t be able to push your hand through it. Because the air will be going faster than your hand.
Imagine that! You can actually—if there’s a beautiful dancer on the television—you’ll be able to go up and embrace her, but she won’t know you’re there and she won’t respond to you. And you’ll say, “Well, that’s not very lifelike!” Just as they once said, “If the photograph doesn’t move it’s not very lifelike, if it doesn’t talk it’s not very lifelike.” They’ll next say, “If the reproduction in three-dimension-solid doesn’t respond, it’s not very lifelike.” So they’ll have to figure out a technique for doing that.
What will they do? Well, I’ll tell you. Sitting in your home, where you’re watching the scene on a kind of stage now—not on a screen—there’ll be a TV camera observing you.
And that TV camera will report back everything you do into a computer, and the computer will so manage each bit of information—that’s to say, each tiny little granule, unit, of information going into the image that you’re looking at—that it will immediately decide what is the appropriate response to the approach that you are making to the image. Won’t that be crazy? You know, she may slap you in the face, she may kiss you.
You don’t know. But then they say, “Now, this is still not really the kind of reproduction we wanted.” What we wanted when we looked at this scene is to be able to identify with one of the characters. We wanted to not just watch the drama that’s being performed on the stage in front of us, but actually get into it.
And so we want to be wired in with electrodes on the brain so that we will actually feel the emotions of the people acting on the stage. And so, eventually, we will get absolutely perfect reproduction and we will be able to see that image so vividly that we shall become it. And so the question arises: could that be where we are already?
Are we a reproduction which, over the centuries of evolution, has worked out to be a replica of something else that was going on and we are where we always were? Now, the next fantasy concerns the idea that every living being thinks it’s human. And that means a plant, a worm, a virus, a bacterium, a fruit fly, a hippopotamus, a giraffe, a rabbit.
That all these beings—wherever they feel out from, as we feel out from our bodies—feel that they’re in the middle. That is to say, wherever you look, you turn your head around and you feel you’re in the middle of the world, you feel you’re the center. And a rabbit—or a fruit fly—feels that it is a center, and it has around it a company of associates who look like it.
And therefore, this creature knows that these are the right people, just as we know—when we look at human beings—they’re the right people, they’re one of us. Only, of course, we have to make distinctions because you never really know that you are you and you are really in the right place, unless you can contrast yourself with some other people who are, after all, not quite in the right place and some other people who are very much in the wrong place. And through having this succession of comparisons you know that you’re okay.
Well, the inset has exactly the same arrangement. Well, you say, “Well, insects and things like fishes… uh, they don’t have any culture. What do you mean, fishes being civilized and being entitled to consider themselves as humans?” Well, let me put the argument from the fishes’ point of view.
Fishes say, “Human beings are a mess! Look what they do. They can’t exist without cluttering themselves and carrying around all kinds of things outside their bodies.
They have to have houses, and automobiles, and books—books!—and records, and television, and hi-fi equipment, and stuff—endless stuff! And they litter the earth with rubbish.” Think of a dolphin—he isn’t really a fish because a dolphin’s a mammal—but a dolphin’s point of view towards the human race. Dolphins spend most of their time playing.
They don’t work. Because the grocery is right there, in the ocean; whatever they need. And so, a dolphin will catch up with a sea-going liner, and it’ll get on the wake of the liner and put its tail at an exact angle of 26 degrees.
And, in so doing, the liner will carry the dolphin along. The dolphin will make circles around the liner just for fun, playing, all its life, in the water. And we know that a dolphin’s brain is as big, if not bigger, than ours, that it’s incredibly intelligent, that it has a language which we can’t decipher.
And the person who knows most about dolphins in the United States—Dr. John Lilly, he’s a friend of mine—and he said he came to the conclusion that dolphins were too smart to tell us their language. So he abandoned this project.
He said he would no longer keep such a highly civilized being in the concentration camp of a zoo, and that it should go back to the ocean. So the point is, though, that every—not only dolphins—but every organism that has any sensitivity whatsoever considers itself to be the center of the universe. Now, it has its problems.
There’s a Zen poem which says, In other words, an hour is a long life to a morning glory. A thousand years is a long life to a pine. And our four-score years in ten—or, as the insurance company’s actuarial tables put it: somewhere between 65 and 70 years is an average human life—seems about the right length of life.
I mean, there are people who want to go on and on and are in quest of immortality, and have their bodies frozen in case there should develop in the future some technique by which they could be revived. But I really don’t go for that idea because nature has mercifully arranged the principle of forgettery as well as the principle of memory. If you always, and always, and always remembered everything, you see, you would be like a piece of paper which had been painted over, and painted over, and painted over, until there was no space left and you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between one thing and another.
It’s like when a whole bunch of people start to scream and make noises, and outscream each other, and soon you can hear nobody. So, in that way, one’s memories become screams, and nature mercifully arranges that the whole thing be erased and you begin again. Do you see?
It doesn’t matter in what form you begin. Whether you begin again as a human being, or as a fruit fly, butterfly, or a beetle, or a bird. It feels the same way that you feel now.
So we’re really all in the same place, and we all have, above us, things much higher than ourselves. And we all have, below us, things that we feel are much lower than ourselves, just as there are things out there on the left and things out there on the right, and things in front and things behind. Because you’re the middle.
You’re the middle everywhere, always. Now, my third fantasy. Nobody has, it seems to me, really seriously asked the question, “How do stars begin?” Why?
How, out of space, do these enormous radioactive centers arise? Well, I’m going to solve this problem on the principle of the egg and the hen, because it is said a chicken is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs. And if you’ve understood my second fantasy you will see how that could be true.
Now, let’s suppose, then, that a planet is one star’s way of becoming another star. You know, stars—when they explode—they send a lot of goo out into space, and some of this goo solidifies into balls which get in orbit and spin around the star. And in one chance in a thousand, maybe, one of those balls will become like the planet Earth, and slowly upon it will arise what some people might call a disease called the bacteria of intelligent life.
And they have a notion, these things that we call alive, that they ought to go on. You know, they have a fixed idea in their heads that they should keep on doing whatever it is they’re doing. And they should always be doing it better.
So they divide themselves into different species, and these species compete with each other in order to, as it were, flex their muscles and get better and better at whatever it is they are. And they go on doing this until one species really establishes itself as top species in the particular area on the particular planet as we human beings, homo sapiens, have established ourselves as top species on Earth. Whatever ‘top’ means.
Well then, when we have a little leisure and don’t have to spend all our time finding food to put into our mouths, we start asking questions. And we look around at each other and everything and say, “What is this?” I mean, what’s going on here? Well, some people say that’s a stupid question to ask.
Why don’t you just go on doing your work? Go hunting, go farming, go… doing your business. They say, “No, there are higher things!” And so they create a special class of people who are, in India, called Brahmins; among us, philosophers, scientists, theologians, thinkers.
And they go into this question, and they’re allowed to stop farming, to stop hunting, to stop mining, to stop scrubbing floors, and to go to very special places called universities where they can sit around and think about what is going on. Well, they think about this. First of all, they do what they call philosophy.
Which is, they try to say what it means—what does the word ‘be,’ what does the word ‘exist’ mean? What do we mean when we say we’re here? Well, they find they can’t discuss that very far because the word stops meaning anything.
It sort of becomes a noise. They say, “Now, we’re not really getting to the point. What we’ve got to do is, instead of thinking all the time and just theorizing, and talking words about what’s going on, we’ve got to investigate it experimentally.” You’ve somehow got to look into this stuff that we call reality, the material world, and find out what it is.
So they start chopping it up, see? They go into flowers and they chop up the seeds, and they look into the middle of the seeds. They find something there and then they have to get a magnifying glass and look in on that.
Get smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and they reason they must eventually come to some particle called an atom. In Greek, ἄτομος means ‘non-cuttable,’ what you can’t split any further. So they come down to the ἄτομος, that than which there is no whicher—they thought.
But then they found they could split that atom. They could find the electron, the positron, the meson, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, forever. And so they said, “Well, this is… I mean, this is real science,” because we’ve now found out that every ἄτομος of matter contains immense energy, and that we could come to the point where we could release the energy in the atom.
And the trouble with intellectual people is that anything that can be done must be done. And so, eventually, in the necessary course of the development of nature, they found out how to blow the Earth to pieces and turn it into a star. So that may be, you see, how stars originate.
They have planets like chickens have eggs, and the eggs burst and turn into chickens. And planets burst through the agency of intelligent life, and turn into stars which throw out other mud balls, some of which stand a reasonable chance—about as reasonable a chance as, say, any male spermatozoa stands when it enters the female womb of becoming a baby—one in a million. And those spermatozoa are in exactly the same position as the planets in the stars.
Now, I tell you: this is a fantasy. But you may ask me: isn’t it a rather unpleasant fantasy? Aren’t things going the wrong way, the wrong direction?
In other words, if the whole point of life—I mean, this tender, biological substance with all its tubes and filaments and nerves, which is so very sensitive—if all this is to end up in fire, into an absolute blaze of light, don’t we say, “Oh, what a shame.” Is that the way it ends? But so many people say that they want to see the light. They want to be enlightened.
They want to dissolve into the light of God. And then, when they’ve done that all over again the process goes on and it blows out those mud balls, and here are planets, and here once again you’re a baby, you’re a child, the flowers are brilliantly colored, the stars are gorgeous, the smell of the earth, the sound of the rain, everything is marvelous once again. And once again you see the other—the man, the woman—that you love as if it had never happened before.
It all starts over. And as it goes on it gets more and more intense, all the problems get more and more problematic, and you find you’re wrestling with something you can’t control. You’ve got to control it but you absolutely can’t control it, like all the problems of the world at the present time.
The whole scene is completely out of hand. And we feel we’re going to our doom because we are going, once again, towards the birth of a star, which is the more creative thing there is. Now, if you think about this for a while—you see, I’ve put forward three fantasies, all of which have a cyclic quality.
We reproduce not only biologically, but we reproduce artistically, technically. Just for a moment, I want to put in an aside about biological reproduction. See, when I think back to my grandfather—whom I knew fairly well—he was, when I was a little boy, something extraordinarily impressive.
He looked like King Edward VII. He was a very, very elegant man with a little goatee beard. He didn’t have sideburns like this, and he had shorter hair, but he was a very elegant fellow, dressed beautifully.
And I though, you know, he was the very image of God. And now here I am, the same age he was when I first knew him, and I have five grandchildren, and I’m sort of no longer impressed by grandfathers. You know?
Here I am! I’m one of them, too. And this is the same idea, you see, of the round.
That we are almost perpetually in the same place. As the French proverb says, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. Well, that means, then—you see—that existence, the feeling of being, is a sort of spectrum.
Just as light is at one end red and at the other end violet, and you have to have these extremes in order to have color at all, in order to know light. So, you see, likewise, we have to have the experience that there is somebody else, something else going on altogether out of our control in order to have the experience of being me. And so, in order to feel good, to feel that life is worthwhile, that existence is worth going on with—in order to bring out that feeling, just as the red brings out the violet, there has to be in the back of our minds—maybe very far away—the comprehension that there is something that could happen that absolutely mustn’t happen, that is the horrors, that is the screaming meemies at the end of the line.