Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
What is this, going on? I mean, does it have a purpose? Goldfish, you know, they eat and they absorb things in, and make more goldfish, and they go on making goldfish, and more goldfish, and we don’t even eat them!
Maybe something does that we, finally, eat. But fundamentally, what’s the point of a goldfish? Isn’t going anywhere at all!
It’s just going as children like to go “Bwee-bdwee-bwee-bdoo-bwee-bdwee-bdwee-bdoo-boo-bee-bwup!” Or “fill jomble, fill jumble, fill rumble-come-tumble, that doubtful old man of Spithead.” That’s what’s happening. And so (in very profound theological ideas) it is said, you see, that when we finally go to heaven and we join the choirs of the angels—what are the choirs of angels doing? Well, they’re sitting around in heaven—or actually, dancing—singing “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” You know?
When you sing on Easter “Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!” what is this Alleluia? Well, I must assure you, it doesn’t mean anything. It is a sound of delight, but of no other meaning.
It is an expression like “whoopee!” You know? When somebody’s riding a surfboard and they’re going down, “heeeeeooooooowww!” It’s just like that, you see? Well, what’s the point of that?
The point of it is itself! It has no point beyond itself. It’s there.
It’s arrived. It’s in a complete present, it is here and now. And that’s what it’s all about.
We say to “swing it.” “Get with it.” And that is, of course, what all those angels are doing. The beatific vision—that means, the word beatus in Latin, we translate it ‘blessed,’ but that’s a rather pious word. It really means ‘happy,’ ‘joyous.’ Beatus And so all those angels—as Dante describes it in the Paradiso, when he first hears the song of the angels—he says it sounded as if it were the laughter of the universe.
And what? No laughter in church? Well, we’re supposed to be a small replica of the beatific vision, and of the angels gathered around heaven, represented by the altar—you know, the throne of God.
Why associate all this with solemnity? You see, Sunday is a very interesting institution. It’s a kind of modification of the Jewish idea that, after the six days of creation when God was working, he took a day off.
Holy day. That was, as it were, the culmination of the six days of work. In Christianity, of course, the Sunday is the first day of the week and not the seventh day, the Sabbath.
But the same idea is involved: that once in every six pulses there is a seventh pulse which is a little space of time to take off. Now, six days of your life—say you’re working, and you’re being responsible, and you’re earning a living, and you’re being serious. If you do that all the time you’re going to go quite mad.
You’re going to be like a bridge—a steel bridge—which is so rigid that it has no swing in it and, therefore, it will fall apart in a storm. For in order to be sane, every human being must allow himself a little time in life to be insane, to let go, to stop trying to control everything, to stop trying to be God and just go “Bwee-bdwee-bwee-bdoo-bwee-bdwee” in whatever way you want, see? So when you go to church on Sunday, that’s what you’re supposed to do!
You’re supposed to take off from all this thing of laying it on. We’ve made the mistake, when we go to church on Sunday—present company excepted—but most preachers lay it on! They say, “This is what you ought to do!
That’s what you ought to do! You haven’t been conducting this right!” And so on, and so on, and nobody gets a vacation. Nobody gets a holy day, holiday, a Sabbath, time off.
So when you go, the whole idea of church is that this is the place where we can get back to the fundamental sanity of nonsense, and sing Alleluia with the angels around the center of the universe. Which is, actually, manifesting these stars, these galaxies. For what?
It’s a firework display. It’s a celebration. You say, “Today there will be at 11 o’clock on Sunday,” or whatever other time it is, “a celebration of the holy communion.” Do you celebrate?
Or do you comport yourselves as if you were attending a funeral? I used to be a chaplain in a university and I used to say, “There will be a celebration of the holy communion at such-and-such a time on Sunday and, incidentally, if you come here out of a sense of duty we don’t want you.” Better be lying in bed or going swimming, or something. Because what this is is: we are going to have celestial whoopee!
And we’re going to enjoy it! That’s what you’re supposed to do instead of coming in and saying “Ungh!” You know, you’re going to go to this thing and you’re going to feel how awful you are, how undutiful you’ve been, how absolutely terrible you’ve been. And however can you expect to be anything more than terrible if you don’t really enjoy your religion?
That’s what’s going to give you the strength and the power to be something other than terrible. But if you just go in and make your religion an occasion of saying, “Oh, we’ve been terrible and we’re awful sick, and we need help, and here’s the holy communion which is your medicine, and I hope it tastes nasty,” you know? That’s awful.
It doesn’t get to the center of the thing, you see, which is: Chesterton put it in another poem where he said—it’s called The Song of the Children—and it says of Jesus that he taught to the adults: Because that’s the sense of the thing, fundamentally. That everything that’s going on is a sort of jazz. A “ba-doo-ja-daa, ba-hoo-da-daa, je-doo-be-dah, de-bup-ah, de-dup-ah, de-dup-ah,” and everything in the world—the flowers, the trees, the mountains—all going “ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo, ga-joo-de-doo.” And we have piped you and you have not danced.
We have mourned you and you have not wept. You won’t join the game because you human beings think you’re so special, and so serious, and you’ve got to make sense of it all. There isn’t any sense to it!
Just join in, come on! Make “ba-joo-dee-dah, ba-joo-dee-dah, ba-joo-dee-dah” with the whole thing. And finally, you’ll be singing Alleluia with the angels.
Somebody raised the question at the end of this morning’s session about instinct, and the instinct for survival, the instinct for procreation, so on. This is fascinating, because we’ve changed recently in academically respectable psychological circles, and they no longer use the word “instinct,” they prefer the word “drive.” And this is highly significant. First of all, there was a critique of the whole notion of instinct, in that it was some mysterious force brought in to explain things that we didn’t understand.
We do this in very, very funny ways. The prime historical joke about this is that there was a time when a physician observed something irregular that he didn’t understand, some symptom beyond his comprehension, he would say very learnedly, “Well, that’s illusus naturae.” And everybody said, “It’s illusus naturae. He knows what he’s talking about.” Which means, simply, a “game of nature.” So, in the same way, when something is done all the time, we feel it has to be explained.
People actually go on surviving until they don’t. And during the period between when they start and when they stop, it’s rather difficult to stop them surviving, because the strength of life is so powerful. So somebody says, “Well, why is it that people have this power?” And so somebody says, “Well, it’s an instinct.” And this doesn’t explain anything at all!
Now, why has it been changed to “drive?” Because—there’s a double reason for this. Instinct goes with a school of thought where human characteristics are hereditary. And for a long time heredity has been unfashionable.
It’s coming back with genetics. But there was, for a while, a long period in which behavioral psychology in particular put down the whole notion of instinct and said our conditioning is rather social and environmental. And so then they picked up drives.
But the very word is significant, because drives—if you ascribe your sexual urges and your wish to survive and your wish to eat to drives—you are assuming no responsibility for them. You are describing yourself as a driven person. And this I find gloomy.
I will not acknowledge that my sexual instincts are drives, because I fully approve of them. I’m not being driven, this is the way I want to go! And so, also, if I have a gusto for life, I’m not going to say that I have a pitiful urge to survive, that I am a poor fellow that would live.
Watch out! You know? I’m sure going to live if I can manage it!
And so what has happened here is a sense of irresponsibility for one’s own emotions. All of it is the result of a division. I mean, you can work along one of two tacks: “I am nothing but nothing, and it all works by itself,” but that is really the same thing as saying, “Well, I do it all.” They’re just two ways of looking at the same thing; of a holistic view of your life.
It all happens to me—I do it all. That’s two fours and four twos. So if you, however, are determined to take a disgruntled attitude to the world, and to say to your ancestors, “God damnit, it’s your fault that I was put in this ridiculous situation,” and to say, you know, to your father, “Well, you were a bungler.
You got me into this world simply because of bad rubber goods, or because you were a lustful man.” But then you fail to acknowledge that you were the evil gleam in your father’s eye when he pursued your mother. That, in other words, the continuity of our biological heritage going backwards is as—we are the branches, and there is a trunk, and there’s one sap going through the whole thing—right back to the big bang with which the whole universe started. You did that, but you won’t admit it because you say, “Oh no!
We’re just poor helpless little things out here, way out on the edge. We can’t help being what we are. We were driven by the big bang.” It pushed us.
You pushed me! So that’s the story of the Garden of Eden. Because when the lord God said to Adam, “Hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” And instead of saying, “Yeah, boss,” he said, “This woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me, and I did eat.” And he looked at Eve and said, “Hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” And she said, “The serpent beguiled me and tempted me, and I did eat.” She passed the buck.
And God looked at the serpent. And the serpent—he ain’t say nothin’. Because the serpent is the left hand of God; mustn’t let your right hand know what your left is doing.
And that’s why the role of the serpent in the divine comedy is not acknowledged. It’s sub rosa. But, of course, before the whole thing started, God and Lucifer got together and said, “Now look: we’re going to arrange a drama on the most fantastic scale.
But we must not let ever out the secret that we agreed about it. It must seem an implacable hostility. It must seem to be that I, God the father, am the good guy.
And you, Lucifer, the bad, bad guy. You’ve got to make this a real tragedy. You’ve got to be a real good villain,” see?
And so they worked the whole thing out. But, you see, that’s esoteric. That’s secret.
And if you let that muse out, that’s giving the show away. So going back, then, we speak of drives and feel no real identification with these immensely powerful so-called urges which really are ourselves. Nothing is—if the desire to live, go on living, is the most powerful feeling you have, that simply means that you’ve made contact with the most authentic center of your own existence.
And it’s not something to which you are pitifully subject, but it’s fully what you are. And so don’t say, “Excuse me, I have these needs.” I remember, once, a psychologist who was trying to seduce one of my students at Northwestern, and was complaining at her that she was denying him fulfillment of his biological needs. Whew!
You know, have pity on me! I have these things, and I’m sorry, I apologize, but…. She didn’t know, no.
It was the wrong approach. But this, you see, goes hand in hand with the view of Man (or any organism in this world) as the victim of a system. And in the most ghastly super-paranoid views of the world I’ve known cases quite intimately of people who really felt that the world was a sinister trap, a torture machine which thrived off other living beings, and it played cat-and-mouse with them.
It chewed them up and beat on them, and then after a while relented so they would recover. Then dangle a few hopes in front of them. And they can recover a little more and stronger, juicier, so as to squeeze them again between its teeth.
And the whole thing in this, as it were, diabolical mystical vision appears as this ghastly conspiracy to egg you on only to chew you up. And in this vision everything suddenly becomes mechanical. People look as if they were mockeries of people.
Flesh looks as if it were patent leather. Everything looks like enameled tin, plastic; a great mock-up of life. But all it is, really, is a completely cold, heartless, calculating system.
Krrck! You see, that is carrying the alienation thing, the split between Man and universe, to an extreme limit. They aren’t sick, no.
They are one end of a great spectrum. You see, this thing which diversifies itself—look at your own body: you are a kind of Rorschach blot with a spinal column as the center, with a few irregularities, such as the hear swings over to one side, and there’s a spleen here and a liver there, and things like that. But, by and large, we’ve got two corresponding sides of the brain with crossing nerves operating the opposite sides of the rest of the body.
And as they approach that spinal column the duality finds its center. That’s why all yoga symbolism is connected with a mystery going on along the spinal column. But then, as we get far out on either side, to the left and to the right, we get further and further and further out in such a way as to create a field of force which is going to tear the center away from itself; tear everything away from the center.
Because life is going to go in every direction as far out as it can get. It’s going to experience the garden of paradisal delights and the screaming meemies. The bottomless abysses of all imaginable hells.
And do that until it is discovered that the extremes meet. And when that’s discovered, then you’ve got a circle on whose circumference every point may be considered as the center. What?
Yeah. Yes. Because that—you see, it’s the great ancient symbol of the snake Ouroboros that devours its own tail.
Obviously it doesn’t start eating its tail except on the assumption that that’s something else. It’s good to eat. My, it tastes good!
But why do I hurt? You see? Now, when the snake discovers that its tail is itself, it stops chasing it.
But then, after a while, says, “Gee, we had fun back then.” And so the split in the circle occurs again, which is the hide moment and when you forget, you see, that your end is your beginning. And then the thing goes on. Yes?
Yes, of course. “I forgot” is always an admissible excuse. I forgot.
Now, everybody knows that it’s only an excuse. You didn’t really forget, and none of us have actually really forgotten that each one of us is an aspect of the ground of being. Everybody knows this, but very few can get up the nerve to admit it.
Because there’s always the question, you see: if I am the ground of being, will I be able to get away with the challenges that may be presented to me? Supposing I know I’m the ground of being, and yet something comes up that I really can’t take. And then, if I can’t take it, they’ll say: ha!
You didn’t really know you were the ground of being. You just pretended. You just were comforting yourself to this, because here comes something you can’t take.
Well, you know, this is like the problem of what they call living Buddhas and stone Buddhas. A stone Buddha is a word used in Zen for a man without feelings. You can hit him as hard as you like and he’ll never scream.
And all that proves is that he’s no better than a piece of stone. On the other hand, everybody wants to test out a Zen master. Let’s see how much trouble we can put on him and see how long he can take it.
And so people always are looking for an opportunity to bang away. See? How much can you take?
How much of a man are you? How tough are you? When will you start crying?
See? But what does this prove? It never proved anything.
So there are all sorts of stories about the stone Buddha and the living Buddha. There was once a monk whose mother died, and he got a letter at the monastery. And he wept.
And another monk said, “How should you, a Zen monk who’s supposed to be detached from worldly things, be weeping at the death of your mother?” And he replied, “Don’t be stupid. I’m weeping because I want to.” And here, in this sense, he wouldn’t say it was a drive; “I can’t help it.” Of your drives it may be said: if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. And that’s what I was trying to demonstrate this morning, where you see, on the one hand, that you can’t help being what you are.
But that includes a resentment of being what you are. Because it makes no sense to say you are what you are unless there is the possibility that you might be something else. But these are simply two sides.
Like the two sides of the human being on the one central spinal column; of a situation that’s really all of a piece. So we learn the balancing trick of coming to center. But the center is not in a fixed position.
The center isn’t something you can go to, because it’s always where you are. You’ve shifted off to the left, but the center has moved. So long as you think the center is a different place from your center, then you can feel off balance.
But whenever you turn into the direction you’ve fallen—that is to say, you again identify that with your center—and you come upright. Yes? This may be carrying the analogy too far!
What you’re really asking me—aren’t you really asking me about death? Well, this is really a very simple problem. Only, in order to understand it you have to go back to the problem of the relationship between space and solid.
If you can see that problem—if you can see that space is an effective reality—then you can understand the life and death relationship. Because we don’t need any more information about this problem than we already have. When we watch sparrows, this year’s sparrows really seem the same sparrows as last year’s sparrows coming back again.
Because we don’t pay much attention to the unique individuality of each particular sparrow. And so it’s like the story of the fisherman in Germany—kind of German humor—and he was fishing, and somebody came up to him and said, “Isn’t it a terribly cruel thing? How can you do it?
To put those poor little worms on hooks?” And he said, “But they are used to it.” Now, we are looking at our own lives from the standpoint of the very high level of magnification in which we are enormously preoccupied with the uniqueness of each life. Somebody else at another level of magnification, who would be just as right a point of view as ours, would say, “But after all, these human beings are just different ways of repeating the same event.” In other words, whether you call her Jane or Joan or Jean, it’s always the same girl coming back—with slight variations. You know, there always have to be slight variations.
No two things are quite the same. As it is said in Pali, nacca so, nacca hani [? ]: “each incarnation is not the same, yet not another.” So when you die—think about it: what it’ll be like to go to sleep and never wake up again?
You can’t think about that, because it isn’t like being shut up in the dark forever, buried alive. It’s like everything you remember about before you were born. Maybe it’s the same place!
Because, after all, what happened once can always happen again. It’s the same problem as the problem of cosmology. If you want to take the big bang theory of the universe, you get this terrific explosion which eventually peters out, and all the energy eventually fails.
And then we return to the way things were before the big bang ever was. Well, what happened once can happen again. So now, you know very well that after you die, and after everybody else that you’ve ever known about died, babies of all kinds—both human, animal, and vegetable—were born.
And each one of them feels that it’s “I” in just exactly the same way that you do; feels that it’s the center of the universe. And therefore, every one of them is you. Only, this situation can only be experienced one at a time.
So, you see: you will die and then someone else will be born. But it will feel like you—you, now. It will be, in other words, “I.” There is only one “I.” But it’s infinitely varied.
So don’t worry. You’re not going to have to sit and wait out eternity in a dark room. Now, supposing I put it in another way.
Let me make two propositions. After I die I shall be reborn as another baby, but I’ll have no memory of my past life—that’s proposition one. Proposition two is: after I die, another baby will be born.
I maintain that they say the same thing. Because if there’s no memory of having lived before, then, effectively, that baby is someone else. But then, wouldn’t you rather be someone else?
Because after a while you’ve accumulated all these memories, and they’re like mystery stories: you’ve got a shelf of mystery stories and you’ve read all of them. You want a surprise! You want a new situation; one where you don’t know what the outcome’s going to be.
It’s part of the game rules thing. When we know the outcome of a game for certain, we cancel it and begin a new one in which the outcome is not certain. That’s what we want.
And therefore we have to have a forgettery as well as a memory, just as well as we have to have a retention aspect of food (the stomach and so on), but also a rejection aspect. We have to have a hole at each end. So it is also with memory.
Otherwise the world becomes cluttered, and that sense of being cluttered, of overfilled and stuffed, is satiation and boredom. So by being able to lose ourselves utterly, everything that you’ve clung to— everything that you’ve built up, all your pride and all this—goes whhzht, to dust, like that. Wowee!
And that’s as good as real now. Everybody here, you see, is under sentence of death. And we’ve no idea how long it’ll take, but we’re as good as dead.
So if you come to face with this, come to terms with it, and regard yourself as a dead man who has nothing to cling to except patterns of smoke in the air—you’re dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping, and there’s nowhere anything to hold on to; you’re as good as dead; give up, because there’s really nothing else to do—then immediately we discover in a mysterious way that this revives us. Through not clinging to your own life you acquire an enormous amount of courage. Because actually, the whole thing’s a dream.
Phantasmagoria. And you are putting it on, and you are goosing yourself with this thing because you’re making it so real. You see, there’s a kind of compromise here—secret conspiracy, rather—between the actor and the audience.
The more beautifully the actor puts it over, the more the audience believes it. And the more the audience believes it, the more the actor believes that he is his part. It’s the way movie stars begin to believe their own publicity.
And this is the way in which all kinds of confidence men, tricksters, magicians, always say people really want to be fooled. So the vivid reality of the other, the thing that stands over against you, the thing that you think’s really going to clobber you—where does its energy come from? Why, from you.
Invest in all that reality in it. About children? Oh dear.
Well, the thing is that I really shouldn’t talk about children, because I’ve never regarded myself as a good father and more of a tomcat. And I lose interest in children when they go to school, because then they’re brought up by other children and they accept the mediocrity. It’s terribly difficult.
You have to start a commune, you have to have your own school in this. You have to have an intentional community with its own built-in school. And it’s practically impossible.
One can only hope that they will be able to recover as well from their childhood as you have from yours. Yes? I really don’t know.
Well, let’s see. I’ve known some very unproblematic families. Just occasionally.
The difficulty is that we have created a class of people called children. And, as a matter of fact, we didn’t start doing this until some point in the nineteenth century, before which there were no children. There were just people.