I've never heard a preacher, to this day, give a sermon on the passage of the Sermon on the Mount, which begins, be not anxious for the morrow. They do occasionally refer to it and say, oh, that's all very well to Jesus. But in the actual putting into practice of this, nobody would agree with it. They say it's not practical. to work, not give a damn about how we're going to provide for the next day's meals and all that sort of thing. But it is practical. It's much more practical than what we're doing. If you mean by practical because it has survival value. Only I want to point out that this is a kind of a two-step way You see, the first step is not being anxious for the morrow, not dreaming for one moment that you could change anything or improve anything.

[01:14]

Which of you, by being anxious, can add one cubit to his stature, you see? But this, just like the belief in predestination, has an unexpected consequence, namely the making of the energy available. So that, in fact, you can take care of the morrow. But for the simple reason that you're no longer worrying about it. Unless it comes about that people who do not live for the morrow have some reason to make plans. But those who live for the morrow have no reason to make plans for anything because they never catch up with the morrow. Because they don't live in the present. They live for a future which never arrives.

[02:18]

And that is very stupid. But you see, all this is said in quite another spirit than the spirit of sermonizing. I'm not talking at all about something you should do All I'm doing is explaining the situation, and you could do anything you want about it. Actually, you know, you cannot lift yourself up by your own meat straps, however hard you try. And I'm merely pointing out that it can't be done. I'm not saying that you shouldn't try, because it may be your lifestyle. to be constantly attempting to do things that can't be done. I do this in a way, and that's all Cullit's doing. But Cullit is always trying to describe what cannot be said. And he gets caused, you know? He often really gives the illusion that he's made it. And that's a great thing, to be able to say what can't be said.

[03:24]

I'm trying to say, to express the mystical experience, And it just cannot be earned. And therefore everything I'm saying to you is a very elaborate deception. I'm weaving all kinds of intricate nonsense down, which sound as if they were about to make sense. And they don't really. But you see, we can take that to another level and say, well, that's just life. Once I was talking with Fritz Perls at the Essling Institute, and he said, the trouble with you is your old words. Why don't you practice what you preach?

[04:26]

So I said, I don't preach. And furthermore, don't put words down because the patterns that people make with words are just like the patterns of ferns or of the marks on seashells. They are a dance and they're just as much a legitimate form of life as flowers. He said, you're impossible. But you see, that's very important, and that is why in such the forms of methods of meditating and religious rituals, we use words in a way that is not ordinarily in accord with the use of words. Words are normally used to convey information. But in religious rituals, words are not used to convey connection.

[05:28]

Words are used musically for the sake of sound. And this is a method of liberating oneself from enthrallment with words. When you say any ordinary word, just take a word like body, see? And you say it once, and it seems to be quite sensible. But say it four or five times. Body, body, [...] body. And you think, what if I do it? Isn't that cute? Or Apple Duncan. Apple Duncan. That's a nice sound. Apple Duncan. And so in one of the great methods of meditation, which is called Moksha Yoga, the use of sound for liberating consciousness is precisely that.

[06:33]

You take all sorts of nonsense and chant it. And you concentrate on these sounds, apart from anything that they may mean. See, this is why the Catholic Church has made a ghastly mistake in having Mass celebrated in the vernacular. Everybody knows what it means, and it clearly wasn't so hard after all. Whereas, why it was an entombment was completely incomprehensible. It had this sense of mystery to it. And furthermore, if you knew how to use it as a sadhana, a method of meditation, you could do very well. All monks were trained when they recited the Divine Artists they would explain to a novice don't think about the meaning of the words just say the words with your mouth and keep your consciousness on the presence of God and he used it that way so it's a very good thing then to use words in this way

[07:52]

it will become savoury to words I've just written a book of nonsense ditties which are to be used in this way to get the rhythm going which is an incantation which is a way of Getting beyond the bondage of thought. Because you see, you cannot think without words. You can use numbers and few things like that, but if you preoccupy your consciousness with meaningless words, that very simply stops you from thinking. And then you dig the sound. Do you know what it is to dig the sound of anything? Anybody who's had a psychedelic experience knows exactly what this means. That you... I can only call it you go down into sound and you listen to that vibration and you go into it and into it and into it and you suddenly realize that that vibration that you're listening to or singing is what there is.

[09:14]

That's the energy of the cosmos. That's what's going on. And everything that's going on is a kind of a... pulsation of energy, which in Buddhism is called suchness or thatness. And that's what we're all doing. Only we live around, you know, we all are, we're people, we've got faces on, and we talk, and we're supposed to be making sense. But actually, we're just going da-da-da, [...] in a very complicated way, you see. I'm going to train this life game. And the thing is, if we don't get with it, it passes us by. That's all right. You could miss the bus.

[10:18]

It's your privilege. You see? But it really is a great deal more fun to go with the Dharma and know that that's what you're doing. Instead of agonizing about the whole thing, See, that's one thing why we cannot really defeat those funny little yellow people in Vietnam. It's like trying to shoot mosquitoes with machine guns. If you watch those faces and you see that they are much more They're much more like flowers or animals than we are.

[11:20]

In the sense that light is transient. Nobody ever expected to be anything else. Light for years and years and years and years can nothing but warp. So what? That's the way it goes. And therefore they don't have this tremendous hang-up on survival as such. They, when we think that that's sort of inhuman, that that's a kind of depersonalization, you find us also among Chinese people. When I, I had a friend who used to go out to hunt in the war, and he used to carry laborers who worked on the Burma Road from central China to Don. And they used to play a gambling game in which the loser would jump off the plane.

[12:27]

They thought that was great fun. And we think that that is dehumanizing in some way because it shows a lack of respect for life. It doesn't show a lack of respect for life. It shows a great respect for life because the whole thrill of the game was that it would kill someone. Someone would lose life. That was what made the game exciting. But they feel, you see, that night is something that simply keeps happening. You know, it isn't just, yes, I know, and you are, we are all very unique. There's nothing else like us. But don't forget, we keep coming back. It's as you concentrate, and you look too closely, you get myopic about the uniqueness of each individual. Then you say, well, listen, that's never going to happen again. Too bad. You look at it and you have never seen human beings before.

[13:33]

If you were from Mars, if you came here, everybody would look identical. You wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between men and women. And so they would say, well, this is something that keeps happening. So it depends not on the level of magnification you're looking at, where you're putting your value. So if you start giving yourself a name, as all holy men do, you know, we give up your name and you become a holy man. And they give you some comic name, because, uh, Miletus, you could come. Dr. Peter or something. Or Domananda, you know, means the bliss of God. Or, uh, You give up your learning and you simply become this particular form of human jazz which reficts itself again and again forever.

[14:50]

You've been listening to Alan Walks with Part 2 from a seminar entitled Veil of Thoughts. If you'd like to hear this particular lecture again or play it for a friend, you can have a cassette copy by sending $9 to this address, MEA Box 303, Sausalito, California, 94965. Be sure to specify, Nail of Thoughts, Part 2. And the address again, MEA Box 303, and the zip code, 94965. Another way is to have it happen. by the grace of the good Lord.

[16:03]

I meet an English girl. She's American. She's an English citizen. And I know American guys that meet in America. It is similar to people coming to the United States. It's difficult to get the work, what do they call it? Work permit. Work permit, yeah. But if you're a citizen, there's a problem. And one way to be, okay, so you can either get work permit by working for a company that has offices there. You can marry someone who is English and become a citizen by marriage. Or go over there and buy a business or buy something. buy our livelihood and start doing it. You can't do that. A lot of Americans have. They've gone over there, they've bought houses, they've bought hotels, they've bought bed and breakfast. But you know what it's like back there? You can't do it. Well, there's a lot of Americans at home that isn't down there, but they can do it from the front.

[17:05]

Well, my friends went down and had their baby there on purpose, so they could start their business down there. Well, that's pretty boring. So you've got three options. You can go through a corporation. You could... to go over there and find something you wouldn't dare, which is no other issue. And the third way would be to actually buy the business as much as possible, which means the amount of capital. Yeah. Any other questions? Go over there and talk to the people that I know, that I'm friends with over there, and see if something could be drummed up. So something could be contacted. By mail, of course. Right then. It's an expensive trick to go over the critique. Oh, it is. It could do with the way I feel. I have good general administrative skills. And in some ways, that isn't a marketable quantity over there because there are people that are locals, nationals, English nationals who have the same good skills.

[18:09]

In fact, people that are trying to compete against them. I've thought about it, but after that, it slipped my mind in recent months or so. You have total freedom to do what you want to do. And it's certainly one of the benefits of working for Casey's, lazy if it may be, and not getting the backup that you need, but it gives you free time. The time is your own. You can go in on, well, one day you can call it. You could go in on Tuesday morning to one of those agencies that average lives, buy the Sunday paper, or look at the Yellow Pages and find out which of these agencies does that, and ask Bates. She works for a client agency. Carly knows the client's contact. go in and find out which agencies do that and go in and register.

[19:15]

I don't want to say no, but I think that might be a very first step for you in recognizing. Putting yourself out there and saying, I want to live and work in the United Kingdom. These are my, you know, IBM 17 years. I got the job for you. That's a very good track record, isn't it? You know, with all the skills. Manager. And you want to, you know, or specifically where you want to work. I'd like to be up and around work and workshop. Up that way, which is more central. Other cities. Oh, yeah. Other than that, Southwest, yeah. I mean, these are people who make their living by placing you there. So they'll be glad to see you.

[20:17]

They'll be anxious to place you. That's their job. You'll be able to step towards freedom and towards earning your money, your first chakra stuff, in a way that makes you happy. Thank you. Do you think that you're ready to do something else? I'll try it. No, I don't want to say that. Yeah, I think if for all the reasons I just practiced, start. And if there are two or three places that can't let you do this work, it will be advertised in Sunday what-ifs. The reason I know about this is I know many people who've worked in the medical field, who've been to Saudi Arabia, who've been to Ethiopia, and who've been to unusual places because of their occupation. not through the Peace Corps, but just living around here for a while.

[21:18]

I think I'd like to see the world. I think I've got a job with France, and they've just gone to these agencies. No fee. The companies pay the fee. So what I would suggest to you is to make the GPS. There are three of these agencies, and you know one of them is a big one that's going to do the job for you. Go to one of those first. Practice. You know that. I need, well, I need to, as I said, I discovered recently, it came up, life is practice. That's right. That's all it is. That's right, it always is. And you never stop practicing until you die. That's right. I didn't know that there's game and there's play. I didn't really separate the two. Game is a dirty word to me. It is to me, too. That's interesting. It is to me, too. I don't like the word game. Playing, I like. Playing soccer. This is the one thing, this is the thought I've had a long time.

[22:20]

What spoils it for me, you get together and you play the game of soccer. As soon as you assign the word game to it, it has to be done. As soon as you assign the word game As soon as you assign the word game to it, or assign it a structure that it has to be played this way, that goal in mind. But you can play it, though. Yeah. As long as you don't make it a game. Do you know the difference between connotation and denotation? Connotate. Connote and denote.

[23:23]

I have to say I don't. It's a very fine distinction, but I think it's important. The denotation is the actual literal meaning of the word. It's entomological. This denotes that. Black denotes white. Connotation is what it is. So connotation of gay. Gay, the denotation of the word gay is totally without charge. Gay. But there are connotations that you have that are negative about it. It doesn't have to be. And it might help you somewhere down the line to say, oh, it's just a game. Well, this is what a couple of people with cases who are trying to help them, but working with me on it, you and I are saying, you can't do this.

[24:30]

Everybody knows this person has the problem. Well, you know, I look at people like that too recently. And actually, there's a sense of play. Oh, of course. The highest spiritual leaders. Yeah, my heroes are her, Alan Watts. Alan Watts, Paolo Soretti. This is architecture. I've always thought of this. People say, oh, he's not very good. I say, thank God. He's a beautiful guy. He's the architecture that plays.

[25:33]

You like cameras? I found your back. I got into architecture that much. You know, you and I talked about that. You said you've seen me at a drafting board. I wanted to be an architect. I think about Michelle O'Brien, the French musician. I've tried to explain to people how fascinating I find, and I don't like what I find, that you take a given culture, you take its popular music, you take its prevalent form of architecture, like downtown, skyscrapers, you take its fashion, It's all the same. One denotes the other.

[26:34]

You look at the music, it's not much different. It's not rock and roll yet. I have a client who's a music critic, and I want to make sure I learn just in the last couple of months the correct terminology. New wave, not rock and roll, but what you're describing, the downtown skyscrapers are part of the same cultural factors. Not rock and roll. Rock and roll is the hippie, go back to the country, you know, good vibes, that kind of stuff. That's not downtown skyscrapers. But anyway, no. New wave or heavy metal. Heavy metal. Language, use. It's all very fast today. I find it fascinating.

[27:44]

You can't look at the fluidity of the Balinese living structures. We'll drop that. First shot. Time to go. We need to stop. I mean, there's all these things I want and I need to do for myself. Do at least one of these by the next time I see you. At the very least, go into an agency for two or three people at a time. I think that what they need is to give you that... I'm just going to have to fudge with my time card because they don't trust me. Your time card has to Give them extra time somewhere. You're not going to cheat them. You're going to give them extra time somewhere. I know you. Yeah, I make work an overtime job and say, OK, don't pay me. Just give me the time. You don't have to actually account for your time by being in the office. You could go out and do the estimates. It's going to take you an hour. That's all. Do it in the lunch hour.

[28:45]

and work on your wheelchair, you can figure it out. But I would like you to try that. I would like you to go in and apply and see what the options are and start that process. Because I think it will free up some of that first chakra stuff. What's the point of the session? What do you want to do? Say that, yeah. Ordinarily, Tuesday nights are pretty good. But this coming Tuesday, because the Memorial Day weekend is coming up, and I'm seeing my Monday clients on Tuesday. But next Thursday at 8 o'clock would be. I still find the Casey job. As you said, constantly give up, breathing.

[29:47]

But that's getting worse. I was kind of terrified. I sat in the chair about two minutes. I think it's important to do that. I went into sleep to ask if it was that kind of going into sleep, watching. That altered space. Like we were talking about last night, there's so many different levels of consciousness that we don't even have names for. And I want to work on this. You and I talked about it early on about this. I feel that he has a psychic philosophy. That's what the class is about. Being a professional. And you still feel that way? Because I have some confusion about it. Because I don't recognize it. I'm not sure that you want to be a professional. That doesn't seem to me. I don't see my own. It doesn't seem to me. That's clairvoyant. Part two of the seminar entitled Nail of Thoughts. The end of today's podcast will give you an address you can write to for more information about this program or lectures with Alan Watts.

[30:49]

Here's what to avail thoughts with Alan Watts. By now, in the first talk, I was explaining that the theme of this seminar was the problem of how thoughts protect us from truth. what to do about it. We've been showing various ways in which the symbolizing process, that which we call thinking, the use of signs, words, symbols, numbers, to represent what's going on in the external world or the world of nature. It leads us into a curious confusion that we confuse the symbolic process with the actual world. And the temptation to do this arises from the extraordinary relative success that we have had in controlling the world of nature with the power of thought.

[32:00]

Well, I don't know if it's ever stopped you, but we really don't know whether we have successfully controlled it or not. it could be argued that a very strong case could be made that the entire intellectual venture of civilization has been a ghastly mistake and that we are now on a collision course and that all the vaunted benefits of intelligence technology and all that is simply going to draw the human race to an extremely swift conclusion Of course, that might not be a bad thing. I've sometimes speculated on the idea that all stars have been created out of planets, and that these planets developed high civilizations, which eventually understood the secrets of nuclear energy and naturally built themselves up.

[33:06]

And in the process, these stars gone out, lumps of rock as they go up, which eventually spun around them and became planets all over again. And that this is the actual inventive genesis of the universe, which would call, of course, to the Hindu cosmology, where ages were time and the events in time. are invariably looked upon as a process of progressive deterioration through the cycles of each counter in which things get worse and worse as time goes on until it can't stand itself anymore and it blows up and after a period of rest and recuperation begins all over again. Why do we somehow have a mistake for a theory of time which runs in that direction?

[34:12]

I mean, would you rather have a rhythm that goes , or the one that goes , I mean, which is it? or you want one that's going up always you see, always getting better you can't even imagine such a thing because you know of its relative as you succeed in life you simply well, there was a communist a Russian and a communist, a Russian in Africa who were accused of communism in their various five-year plans and progressive notions, wherein people were always preparing for tomorrow, as converting all human beings into charioteers. Now, we would have a charioteer as a pillar, shaped in that human form, which purports a roof.

[35:20]

And he said, you are turning all men into charioteers, because the thought was paid upon which others were done. They were taught, even though they never will, You have one row of characters supporting the floor. Very soon your children are the next row of characters supporting another floor. So it gets higher and higher. But we don't really know where we began. And we're always at the same place. Always hoping, always thinking that the next time will be it. And this, of course, is an eternal illusion. It's much better. Actually, one would be much happier to think that the future is to be deteriorating. I can explain that very simply. Human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible.

[36:25]

You know, as the proverb says, you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. But recently, I've heard a lot of references in just general reading and listening, where people say, we've got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. And you can't. And you can struggle and tug and pull till you're blue in the face, and nothing happens except that you've exalted yourself. All sensible people work or begin in life with two fundamental presuppositions. You are not going to improve the world and you are not going to improve yourself. You are just what you are. And once you have accepted that situation, you have an enormous amount of energy available to do things that can't be done. And everybody else looking at you from an external point of view will say, my God, how much so-and-so has improved.

[37:30]

But I know, I mean, hundreds of my friends have worked on enterprises to improve themselves. by one religion or another, one therapy or another, this system, that system, and I'm desperately trying to free people from it. And I suppose that makes me in the style of some guy. But the thing is that you can't do it. One very simple reason, which I think most of you are by now familiar with, is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved. In other words, there isn't any real distinction between bad me and good I, between the higher self, which is spiritual, and the lower self, which is animal.

[38:35]

It's all of a piece. You are this organism, this integrated, fascinating energy power. And as Archimedes said, give me a falcon and I will move the earth to build one. It's like, you know, betting on the teacher of the human race. If I were really smart, I would lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 2000. Because in practical politics, one realizes that nothing is going to work out right. No candidate I've ever voted for ever won the election. So the trouble is there's no way to place the debt. And so since I can't place the debt anywhere, I'm involved in the world and must, of course, try to see that it doesn't let itself to Jesus. But the thing that I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the caps of the atomic bomb.

[39:41]

Now everybody should immediately spring into action and abolish it. But she was getting so furious about it that I said to her, you know, you scare me because I think you're the kind of person who will push the button. in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first. And she told me that I had no love for my future generations, no responsibility for my children, and I was the only Swami who believed in retreating from fact. But I maintained my position. Robert Oppenheimer, a little while before he died, said that it's perfectly obvious that the whole world was going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so. Because you see, all the troubles going on in the world now are being supervised by people with very good intentions.

[40:55]

Their attempt to keep things in order, to keep things up. to forget this and prevent that possible horrendous damage. And the more we try, you see, to put everything to rights, the more we make that catastrophe. And it gets worse. And maybe that's the way it's got to be. Maybe I shouldn't say anything at all about the fathering of trying to put things to rights. but simply on the principle of let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise. This is an argument against all kinds of doodling. In other words, it's simply, it's the, what I'm saying is, don't take me too seriously. I'm pitching a case for the fact that the civilization has been a mistake

[41:56]

that it would be much better to leave everything alone. That the wild animals are wiser than we, in that they, putting it in our cruel and not very exact language, they just follow their instincts. And if a moth mistakes a flame for the signal on which it gets a mating call, and flies into the flame. So what? That just keeps the moth population down. And the moth doesn't worry. You know, it doesn't go buzzing around in a state of anxiety, wondering whether this sex call is the real thing or just the flame. It doesn't think consciously about the future. At least we suppose this is so. Maybe it does, but we suppose that it doesn't. And therefore it isn't troubled. But the species of moth goes on and on and on.

[43:01]

And so far as we know, it's been around for an incredibly long time, and maybe even longer than we have. Beans, ants, species of this kind, they have long since escaped from history, so far as we can see. In other words, they live a settled existence, which you might consider rather boring. Because it doesn't have constant change in the way that we do, they live the same rhythm again and again and again and again. But because they don't bother to remember it consciously, it never gets launched. And because they don't bother to predict, they never can escape anxiety. And yet they survive. Now we, who look before and after, as Emerson says, and predict, and are always concerned whether this generation is going to be better or worse than the one that came before, we are tough-headed. And we just don't realize, because of this tremendous preoccupation with time, we don't realize how beautiful we are.

[44:09]

In spite of ourselves. Because you see, the conscious radar is a troubleshooter. It's always on the watch out for variations in the environment which may bring about disaster. And so our consciousness is from one day's end to another entirely preoccupied with time and with planning and with what has been and with what will be. And since troubleshooting is its function, we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble. And we ignore in this preoccupation with consciousness how marvellously we get on, how for most of the time our physical organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship how our body relates by all sorts of unconscious responses to the physical environment so that if you became aware of all the adjustment processes that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism you would find yourself in the middle of great music and of course this occasionally happens

[45:41]

one mystical experience, if nothing other, than becoming aware of your true physical relationship to the universe. And you go amazed, thunderstruck, by the feeling that underneath everything that goes on in this world, the fundamental thing is the state of unbelievable interest. Well, why not? Why else would there be anything happening? Because if the game isn't worth the candle, if the universe is basically nothing but a tormented struggle, why have one? Hasn't it ever struck you that it would be much simpler not to have any existence? It would require no effort? There would be no problems? So why is there anything going on?

[46:44]

Let me say not why, but how is there anything going on? Because if it's all fundamentally a drag, I just don't see any reason for its being. Everything but it committed suicide long ago. And be at rest. So we might work on this possibility, then. That civilization is a mistake, and that we've taken completely the wrong track. and should have left things to nature, as it were. And of course, this is the same problem that is brought up in the book of Genesis. Actually, the fall of man in Genesis is his venture into technology.

[47:54]

Because in the Bible, the Hebrew words for the knowledge of good and evil are connected with techniques. what is technically expeditious and what is not. Words connected with actually metallurgy. And to be as God, you see, when you enter the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you become as God, means you think you're going to control your own life. And God says, okay baby, you wanted to be God, you try it. But you, the trouble with you is you've got a one-track mind. And therefore you can't be God. To be God you have to have an infinitely many-tracked mind, which is, of course, what your brain has, you see. The brain is infinitely many-tracked, but consciousness is not one-tracked. As we say, you can only think of one thing at a time.

[48:58]

And you cannot take charge of the universe with that kind of a consciousness. because there's too much of it as I explained before, too many variables and our science can take care of a few variables or of an enormous number of variables as in quantum mechanics by statistical methods as we can use statistical methods to predict that most people will live to be 65 years old at least But we can't say of any given individual whether he will live to 65 or not. That's what we wanted to know. But the problem is that the variables on each individual are too complicated. And we have not yet, you see, developed a science which can deal with, say, 50 or 100 or 500 variable systems. It's too complicated to think about.

[50:04]

The computers are going to help us. But as yet, we're either on the low number or the extremely high number. And the genes are outside the range of the problems with which we are really concerned. That's why, for example, a lot of people have taken to using the I Ching, because it changes. Because if you're tossing a coin to make your decisions, And everybody does fundamentally make their decision by trusting coins. It's better to have a 64-sided coin than a two-sided coin. The I Ching gives you 64 possibilities of approach to any given decision, instead of just two, yes or no. It's based on yes or no, because it's based on the yang and the yin. But in the same way that computers, digital computers, used a number system which consists only of the figures 0 and 1, out of which you can construct any number.

[51:15]

And this was invented by Leibniz, who got it from the Book of Changes. It's amazing how this book is somehow always with us. But this then is a way of arriving, of helping your own multivariable brain arrive at decisions, cooperating with your own mind. Because then again, after you've tossed your 64-sided coin, the oracle that you read that explains each particular hexagram in the Book of Changes is a sort of Rorschach plot it is a very laconic remark into which everybody reads just exactly what they want to read but that helps you make a decision by

[52:27]

The fact that you don't really have to accept responsibility for it. See, then you can say, it told me. I consulted the Oracle. Same way when you go to a guru. You say, my guru is very wise and he has instructed me to do this, that and the other. But it was you who decided on this guru. How did you know it was a good one? You see, you gave him this authority because you picked him out. It always comes back to you. But we like to pretend it doesn't. But the thing is that our oneself is certainly not the stream of consciousness. One's self is everything that goes on underneath that.

[53:36]

And that which the stream of consciousness is via what it has about the same relation to one's self as the bookkeeping does to business. And if you're selling grocery, there's very little resemblance between your books and what you move over your shelves and counters. It's just a record of it. And that's what our consciousness keeps. Now supposing then we work with the argument that we've made an awful mistake in bringing out civilization. And we're not going to survive. Now there are various things that can be said about this. Just as I made the joke that all stars used to be planets, one could say, well, is it such a good thing to survive?

[54:46]

You know T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, he says, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but in winter. But some people are rather angry with a bang than a winter. Some people are stingy, and they like to burn up their fire very gradually, conserving the fuel, and just keep enough heat going so that they get a long time. Other people prefer a kind of a potlatch situation, where they have a huge whiz-bang fire that goes out in a hurry. Now, who is bright? Do you want to be a tortoise? You know, the tortoise that lives for hundreds of years, that drags itself around all the time, very slow, slow, slow stalling. Or would you rather be some little hummingbird?

[55:49]

Yeah, yeah, hummingbird, that's the thing. See, that dances and lives at a terrific pace. Well, you can't say one is right and the other is wrong. And so there may be nothing wrong with the idea of a world, a civilization, a culture that lives at a terrific increasing pace of change and then explodes. That may be perfectly okay. My point is that if we could reconcile ourselves to the notion that that is perfectly okay, then we would be less inclined to push that button. It's the anxiety. If you cannot stand anxiety, and if you cannot simply be content for issues to be undecided, you are liable to push the button.

[56:49]

As you say, let's get it over with. People who have trouble with the law and are manipulating the thoughts from one way or another, always learn to delay everything. Put it off. Introduce legal red tape. Manage to, like Ralph Ginstow, who's been in trouble because of the Eros magazine. He's got a very smart attorney. All of the cases down at the Supreme Court, he's simply mumbling away, bringing up all sorts of things, so that he keeps Rafa out of jail. And that's life. And life is simply a way of postponing death. And that's what we have to do. So then, let's say...

[57:50]

Well, civilization wasn't really a mistake. It was just as natural as anything else. A being that exists under conditions of illusion, that imagines that it's controlling its own destiny, that thinks it's capable of improving itself, and by virtue of this illusion, destroys itself rapidly in an interesting way. But suppose that's what we are. But you still come back to the point that you are spending an enormous amount of energy in doing things that can't be done. That is to say, tugging at the bootstraps. And if you find this prostratum, If you really don't like it, you don't have to do it.

[58:56]

You can stop. And the paradox is that when you stop, you become happier and more energetic. People always wondered about the Calvinists, because Calvinists believed that from the beginning of time, God had foreordained who was to be saved and who was going to die. And you have no choice. Predestination. Predestination. Therefore, the logical assumption would be that people who believed in predestination would be And they said, fair, we're just sitting and waiting, there's nothing we can do about it. And Calvinists were quite other than that, they were very energetic people, too energetic.

[59:59]

Very, very vigorously moral, they gave us the Protestant Benedict. They believed in predestination. Because you see, they simply had all the psychic energy which Catholics were getting, were dissipating upon wondering whether they were saved or not. See? And being in a state of fear and trepidation about have I made the right decision? Did I act rightly? And so on. So they didn't have as much energy as the Italians. So then in this day and age, we say in the line of thought of psychiatry or of no schools of psychotherapy, it could taught you.

[61:02]

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