Part one in that seminar. At the end of today's talk, we'll give you an address that you can write to for more information about these spoken word lecturers of Alan Watts. Now, part one in the seminar, Self-Awakening. So, as you know, this seminar is concerned mainly with what we call the practice of meditation. Although as meditation is understood in Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions, it bears very little assumptions to the meaning which is normally attached to the word in the English language. In English, when we say someone is meditating, it usually means that he's pondering, that he's thinking something out, and therefore When we hear that an Oriental practices meditation, we normally ask the question, what are you meditating on?

[01:03]

And he finds that a very funny question. He is apt to say, I'm not meditating on anything, I'm just meditating. That is to say, I'm in a particular state of consciousness. Because the word that we translate meditation from Sanskrit, jnana, or in Chinese Chang, or in Japanese Zen, has really no equivalent in any Western language. It is a state of consciousness. It is in some sense also a discipline. Now it's not a discipline as we understand disciplines. And to introduce you to this, then, I have to expose you to some extremely dangerous ideas. And I warn you, don't take me too literally. Take me with a certain grain of salt.

[02:05]

Don't jump to conclusions, but wait until, in course of time, the whole thing is explained. Now you see, when we engage upon any kind of psychological therapy, spiritual discipline, moral enterprise, we always have in our minds the motivation of making things better. going towards the light rather than the darkness, going towards the good rather than the evil. And we think of all these things as methods of self-improvement or of world improvement. To understand, however, what meditation is, you must completely abandon these five ideas and begin at rock bottom,

[03:10]

in accordance with my favorite Turkish proverb, that he who sleeps on the floor cannot fall out dead. The first thing absolutely to be understood for anybody who is interested in understanding what meditation really means is A, that you cannot improve yourself. B, that you cannot improve the world. This is, however, not to say that you cannot grow and that the world cannot evolve. But the growth of yourself and the evolution of the world will be hindered rather than helped by making efforts in that direction from the center which you call your will

[04:12]

your ego, your conscious intention. For us, the proverb says, well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And all of the troublemakers in the world today are, by and large, reclamers, moralists. Whether they belong to the political right or the political left, it makes not the slightest They are all acting in the name of high ideals as they perceive them and are making an immense amount of trouble. Because, you see, the simple reason for all this is that it is physically impossible to raise yourself up the floor by pulling at your own bootstraps. And if you engage in that sort of activity, you are very simply stupid. because you are wasting an enormous amount of physical and emotional energy in attempting to do something that cannot be done.

[05:19]

Likewise, a person who thinks that he can take himself in charge and by some sort of force, spiritual force if you want, willpower, fundamentally transform himself into a selfless, loving, creative being is under the greatest delusion, for the simple reason that what is called the ego has only the same order of reality as a line of longitude, or a pound, or a second, or an inch, or indeed a because all these things are abstract and symbolic. Your ego is conceived by and large as some sort of center of control that exists about halfway between your ears and a little way behind your eyes, which inhabits the body in somewhat the same way as a chauffeur operates an automobile.

[06:41]

And which is I in charge of me. And they say, well, I have to control myself. I have to discipline myself. I have to do this, that, and the other to myself. And if I can't do that, I'm going to seek out a psychologist or a guru who can help me to do it and show me the right way. But all this is such a fundamental mistake that we have to almost abolish our current common sense in order to understand what a mistake it is. Because this abstract ego, which is really nothing more than your idea of yourself, given to you mostly by other people. See, when you were a little child, all your aunts and uncles and parents brothers, sisters, and other children conspired unwittingly to tell you who you are.

[07:50]

They played around with you until they established what you call your role or character in life. And there are a choice of acceptable roles that you may play in the current WASC culture of the United States. Now, the main thing that they told me was that you are a separate, free, responsible agent, an independent first cause of thoughts, words, and deeds, for which you are to be held responsible, trades if they are acceptable, and gains if they are unacceptable. Now, as a little baby, you could not possibly resist this indoctrination, this brainwashing. You believed it. And do you see the paradox involved in it from the very beginning?

[08:57]

That you believed that you were a free and independent agent because you were incapable of believing anything else because that was the idea foisted upon you. In other words, you believed in your freedom because you weren't free at that time. And so everybody grows up with this nonsense breaking in the backs of their brains, and therefore everybody feels vaguely frustrated. And because of this vague sense of chronic frustration, one goes around in various teachers, religions, psychological systems and perhaps many of you came to a gathering such as this some of you may have come out of a simple curiosity others to be entertained and you will understand me much easier than those of you who came to be enlightened For you see you are

[10:09]

at least your entire physical organism. But very few people admit this. They disown their own organisms. People don't say, I am a body. They say, I have a body. They don't say, I beat my heart. They say, my heart beats. What about breathing? Do you breathe? Yes. You can experience breathing as a voluntary action in the same sense as walking. And yet you can't stop breathing. It goes on when you're not thinking about it. And then it brings you, or seems to. When you make a decision, such as to open your hand, You say, I know how to work on my own.

[11:12]

Do you? I've got criteria that you can do it. But you don't know how you do it. You just do it. It's the same when you make a decision. You just make it. But you don't know how. It's the same when you think you're conscious. You are conscious. But you don't understand that you need psychic and neurological processes which underlie consciousness. So, is your whole organism, all the processes of your physical body, something which happens to you, of which you are a more or less passive puppet with some small degree of control? Or, on the other hand, are you In the truest and deepest sense, that means to your own body.

[12:13]

Now, a lot of people don't know how to be their bodies. Because they watch bodies. And they see that they get decrepit and diseased. That they grow old and decay and eventually die. And they think to themselves, well, I don't want to be identified with that kind of mass. So I am not my body. I am something spiritual. I am my appearance. These ideas will live forever because I can put them in writing. They will survive long after the body dies. All types of ideas exist. I'm finally playing a vibration that my thought structure will live forever on this particular level of vibration long after my body has decayed. Now, we cannot simply dismiss that idea. Except I only want to point out that it is used or misused by people who don't have that sort of opinion because they are afraid of their own bodies.

[13:24]

And that's quite the wrong reason for holiness. It may very well be that we live on all kinds of levels. But if you disown your own organism, You're like a drink made of pure alcohol instead of a good wine which has body and taste as well as a certain alcoholic content. Beware of excessively hysterical people. Because the splendor of man is that he is a marvellous marriage of angel and animal. And there is no really great mystic who is not also a sensuous. And there is no really great sensuous who is not also a mystic. The whole meaning of being human is to make these two aspects of life one.

[14:35]

So, if I say, You cannot improve yourself, and you cannot improve the world. It is first of all because the you that would improve yourself is obviously the same yourself as fancy-needed improvement. So what is your way out? The kind being, however, that will fully understand that you are not going to be able to improve yourself, and you are not going to be able to reform the world. When that is thoroughly grasped, a whole lot of purely wasted psychic and physical energy will be released from the impossible task.

[15:39]

and can therefore be redirected to things that can be done. For after all, one can plant seeds and reap the crops. One can build houses, sail boats, make all kinds of machines, cuddle, nibble and yawn, talk to one another. All these things can be done. But they're all rather particular and specific things. But once you get hung up on the idea of becoming better, you are taking away energy from all the things that can be done.

[16:41]

as long as it can be. So then, to release that energy for the things that can be done, one has to understand that you, as you are now, are the tool, the instrument, which is going to function in this life. I always advise people who are about to get married that instead of thinking what potentialities there are in this man or this woman and how I could bring them up to take a completely cynical view you say how will it be to live with this person when they've fallen apart a bit when they've grown older and uglier when they get sucked in their ways when they have generally deteriorated by the process of aging.

[17:42]

Would you like to live with them then? If so, marry. But don't expect any improvement. But you see, this apparently negative, apparently cynical way of looking at things is extremely creative. Because, first of all, it relieves you entirely of a sense of guilt. And more energy is wasted in punishing one another or supposing errors with a sense of guilt than anything else in the world. Guilt never transforms anyone into anything except a hypocrite. Because you cannot love anyone out of a sense of guilt. If, for example, you are married to somebody whom you've learned to love, as one psychologist recently said, with whom are you in love again?

[18:45]

You feel then, out of a sense of guilt, that you really ought to do your very best to be a good wife or a good husband. But this motivation simply cannot be conceived. The other one knows it, just like the child always knows what is your motivation, although the child cannot articulate it. And the moment you start to be a fraud and say, I love you, I love you, I love you, I'm most devoted to you, when you're not, then you're only saying it out of a sense of beauty. Everybody sees right through you, even though they won't admit it to themselves. They nevertheless see it. It's what the Germans call an intergedantos, a little thought far, far in the back of the head. Everybody knows it. And therefore, the only thing that comes out of love, fake love, delivered out of a sense of guilt, is mutual hostility. I hate you because you're loving me out of a sense of guilt.

[19:51]

And I hate myself because you are so bound to me. And because I love you out of a sense of guilt, I despise your attract. So nothing comes up except child apostolic. But you see, our entire culture works on this system. And everybody is politicking at this point and saying they all know, everybody knows, on whatever side of politics you may be, what you're against. And absolutely nobody at the plenteous notion of what they're for, except in very, very You know, we'd like to get rid of poverty and war and arms and all that kind of thing, but nobody has the faint, concrete, realistic vision of exactly how to do it. Because everybody wants, thinks that they will solve these problems if they get rid of those bastards over there.

[20:52]

It's not that. Now then, there's the next secret to all this, with an equally concrete common sense. that is this what happens in the world outside you from right here in this room to the most remote galaxies is all your own doing in other words you are God not however in the Judeo-Christian sense of God who is the cosmic boss who is personally in charge of everything and who knows and is informed in cyclophility of all that he takes but rather in the sense of the divinity of God who plays all the parts that are being played why?

[22:00]

because like itself is essentially a game of hide-and-seek, or now you see it, now you don't. The universe is a system which creeps up on itself and suddenly shouts, boom! And then roars with laughter at its own advantage. And it eternally thinks about new ways of doing that. But every time, boom is a big surprise. Now, that's the kind of thing we're involved in. And therefore, you all know this. Every single one of you knows it. But lots of you will put up amazing arguments to defend yourselves against the Buddha. But you all, again, you all know this to be true. But I could expect many great fights to resist the Buddha. Talk.

[23:02]

If you are truly beating your own heart, you do it, but you don't know how you do it. That means to say the process is too complicated to describe in words, because words are very clumsy. It takes a long time to describe anything and a very short time to do it. So you are beating your heart. Now, if you are beating your heart, If you are constructed out of some strange neurological wisdom, the marvel of your eye, the most beautiful jewel in the world is the human eye. It is incomparable. You can look into human eyes and it's interesting that in our culture there's little problem to look too long in anybody's eyes unless you're deeply in love with them. And even then, There's something about it that is awesome. Because when you look into that magnificent jewel, you can look through and down and in and in and in until you reach the heart of the universe.

[24:12]

And you could see that looking out at you from another person. Although the expression on the face may be saying, what, me? But I don't understand. I'm just little me. And if I just give the lie to the state, because there's nothing more beautiful in the world, isn't it? I don't know if there's a blind person in this room. But you can also look in the ears, if you ever spotted that marvelous thing, the murmuring shell of time. That is equally gorgeous. And it also leads, by sound, into the heart of things. For everybody really is the heart. You see, in a universe which is a co-of-space-time continuum, let's imagine, although this isn't quite accurate, that the whole universe is spread out on the surface of the sphere.

[25:24]

This is one of the models that astronomers use when they try to talk to Ling. Now, any point of the surface of the sphere can be regarded as the center of the whole surface. You see? Any way you turn the sphere, any point on it, you can look at it as the center of it is. See? Center of the whole surface. So every point in the universe is the center of the universe, and you all feel that you're at the center. And you are. And every living creature that exists feels that way. Even the most minute little fly knows that it's human, that it's civilized, that it's a person, that it has dignity, and it has all its friends and relations. And we say that it's only a fly, which means that we have not yet deigned to understand its culture. Those little flies, look at our human beings, they say, did you ever see such kakras, whose civilization depends on their acquiring enormous apparatus external to their organisms?

[26:42]

Houses, temples, cities, books, records, instruments, and all the junk they surround themselves with. Whereas these flies, look at that wing. I can just turn it this way or that way and it reflects the light in infinitely many radios. And every little fly does it in a different way that wants a different personality. And they all dig that, see? It's a very high order of civilization. Every picture does that. Down to the very barest of things. And they mean there are ways in which stones have some form of primordial consciousness. And everything that is knows it's the center. And it is the center. So that whatever is going on in this whole cosmos is you're doing it in the same way that you're beating him up and not assuming any responsibility for it. So it happens to me.

[27:48]

It occurs. I just did that. I couldn't help it. So in the same way, when a juvenile delinquent who's learned a little bit of Freud is called before the court, He says, well, I couldn't help it because my mother gave me trauma. It's no, they say, all the mothering to call. Why did you bring up this child so bad? Why is the father irresponsible? He's not beaten this child enough or something. I'm not saying this is a good example. When the father and father say together, we couldn't help it because our parents didn't bring us up properly either. They were fudgy victorians. They repressed all our healthy natural instincts. And therefore, we're men. And so since grandfather and grandmother are dead and can't be altered for the court, the court doesn't know what to do. Well, everybody's passing a doctor. Saying, well, it was my parents' fault that I got born. It was the defective rubber goods. Or my father was a lusty man and I'm not responsible for his filthy ideas.

[28:54]

And so on and so on and so on. So by an accident I arrived in this world. Now, is there any more miserable approach to life than that? Not to admit with delight that you were the evil demon your father's eye when he went after your mother. You were there in a certain sense. That, as a matter of fact, if those theorists are married up to cosmos, then everything began with a glorious explosion, which won out all the galaxies in space. That was you. Only the way you find yourself now is on the fringes of this explosion. You know how it is when you throw a bottle of ink against a white wall, and it splashes, and I'll figure it out. There's a big central cloud, and then as it gets to the periphery, it's all more individualized, big, little drops, you see, gathering around.

[29:56]

And you are now, you think of yourself, you identify yourself with just one little drop. and fake it a big bang in the center. Well that happened. I didn't do that. You, Stuart did. That does your throwing the bottle at the wall. In the beginning of time. Before all worlds. You did. So let's admit that. So what do we find? We find a situation that's rather paradoxical. or panicked about that, that we are thinking of ourselves, each one of us, as separate entities, trapped, caught, thrown into a world, a huge, colossal environment which we don't understand, and which we deal with profoundly other than us. And in our intense hostility against this situation, we're fighting it.

[31:05]

We believe that we're really achieving a complex of nature, which is a hotbed of death and of birth. So, in what point of our day are we involved? The power we have, our only answer. Increasingly. I want mindless technology, senseless technology instead of a mindless. Now we know, something's got to be done about it. We cannot go on with it. We've got to, it's really very terribly necessary. that we make care of this with our physical environment, that we realize that the world outside our skin is just the same as the world inside our skin. It's all us. The universe is a multi-centered being.

[32:07]

And that we will only make a great and lovely Italian to ourselves by that kind of cooperation, the intelligent cooperation, with the patterns of nature. But how on earth are we to do it if we can't do anything about it? If it is impossible for me, by my will, by my force of ego, to transform either myself or the external world, what on earth is one meant to do? Now that's the wrong question. You could say it's there. How is the situation going to grow? Not, what am I going to do about it? How is the situation going to grow?

[33:14]

How is it going to evolve? Instead of asking, what am I going to do about it? Because the minute you ask, what am I going to do about it? You get the situation that is so common in politics, you know. Not everybody, the properties of the world are so complex. And the pilots and the vested interests and everything else are so enormous that the individual is helpless. Now, the individual is helpless. So how else do you think that he is a hero? he identifies himself with an abstraction, which is just his idea of himself, his role, his mind, his personality. But the individual as a biological organism, as a psychological organism, is a deep part. Because that individual is inseparable from the whole universe and operates through the power of the whole universe.

[34:19]

just as deep as a heart beating, because it's miraculous. And it's brain is even more miraculous. So, what metacognition is a transition of our sensational thought. To people at a step in our center of gravity, from being this familiar officer in charge of processing, operate between the ears. the being, our whole physical organism, and so the moral of the physical organism knows very well that it is as inseparable from all other energy components in the cosmos as any whirlpool is inseparable from the movement of a river. So that if you can get a sense that What goes on outside you is what you are doing in the same sense that the beating of your heart is what you are doing, the growing of your hair is what you are doing, the coloration of your eyes is what you are doing, and so in the same way everything else that's going on outside you is what you are doing.

[35:41]

You are in a position then to begin to feel, and therefore think intelligently, about the tactical everyday problems of our relationship to the world. So when you ask, how would I do that? I would say, don't ask any questions. Why? Because in order to understand what I'm talking about, in a gutsy way, as distinct from a merely cerebral way, you have to stop thinking. You have to stop verbalizing. Because it is thoughts and words which fragment the physical universe into bits, which we call things separate things and separate events. This is a very useful calculus, provided it's your servant and not your master.

[36:49]

But the minute it becomes your master, you think the world is really made up of separate bits. And to overcome that illusion, you have to stop thinking. Now when I say stop thinking, I mean very specifically that there have been times in your life when you do not talk to yourself in words or in numbers or in abstract images. When your mind reflects whatever is in your senses as a clear tool, reflects the sky and the stars. And it is that clarification of the mind which is what is understood in yoga, Taoism, Zen, etc., etc., as meditation. Now this may seem at first to many of you to be an anti-intellectual attitude.

[37:54]

It is nothing of the kind. Because the intellect, the scholarly intellect, the scientific intellect, cannot float where the mind is incapable of silence. Why? Because if you think all the time, you have nothing to think about except thought. If I talk all the time and never listen to what anybody else has to say, I have nothing to talk about except my own glovage. And it's exactly the same, you see. If you're always preoccupied with symbolizing inside your head, you have no contact with reality, only with the symbol world. What do I mean by reality? I want to find You know what reality is. You know perfectly well what reality is.

[38:55]

People say, well, do you mean by reality the material world? I will answer, the material world is a ponce there. It is a particular philosophical idea evolved out of 17th, 18th, 19th century thinking. The material world. It's a myth. Do you believe then that reality is the spiritual world? I'll say, that's a concept. It's a lot of symbols and ideas going on inside your head. Abstract calculation. Do you know what the material world is? You know, this. But don't... You don't understand. Do you know the word mystic comes from the Greek word mouin, which means Finger on the lips. Shut up. Be quiet. Look. Listen.

[40:00]

Feel. So then, in the tradition of Zen, the attitude of meditation is called, sometimes, , which means no mind, or , which means no thought. a state of interior silence, which however is not something that could be forced. You cannot make yourself in Buddhist life. Because that involves the idea of an abstraction called the future. Now you all know there isn't any such thing as the future. There is always and only now. And there is no past. There are only present memories that refer to former states of now.

[41:04]

There is actually only now. So if you, in the work of meditation, Ever get away from now, you are not meditating. The point is not what you should become, what you should be, what state of mind you should get into, but simply what's going on. What is it? Now. Because it is this, focused upon now, what is actually happening, as distinct from what is supposed to be happening, what ought to happen, what is described as being happening. Instead, make direct contact with simply the way it is. Now, there are all kinds of techniques and gimmicks which help one, or don't, to be present completely. We can use these gimmicks, but I want to warn you about this.

[42:10]

Whenever you use a meditation gimmick, you might chant a mantra, you might use a koan, you might concentrate on some digital image, whatever you do. Don't do it to get a result. The whole idea of getting a result has to be completely abandoned in order to get into perspective meditation at all. I have to say in English, in order to get into it. That's why so long as I taught, I was only clear and confused. Because once you stop talking, the whole notion of in order to is really impossible. You only have ideas of the future, of getting somewhere, of purpose, of pursuing some weird goal, so long as you're thinking. When you're not thinking, all of that disappears.

[43:15]

But you can't get into the not-thinking state by making the future objective. So then, The next thing, a dangerous idea, that I have to put forward, you're greatly connected with this, is what is my role in talking to your Godness, in your attitude to me, or to anyone else who discusses, or teaches, or has anything to do with such subjectivity? The guru. Now, we are living in an age of gurus. Gurus abound on all sides. Every kind of guru. And in one way or another, people say, this man I have found as my guru, really good.

[44:29]

He's an authority. And I'm putting myself under his discipline. It's a funny thing that people who do that are always trying to persuade their friends to join the same guru. I know a crowd of people, you know, who've been to guru after guru after guru. And each one, they present me with the equivalent enthusiasm. You think it must come to so-and-so's lectures, to courses, meditation practices, so on and so forth. This is the very last thing. And I say, you know, I've had a couple I've met here before. Because what people don't realize is when you select a guru, how do you know he's a guru? If you don't know, you don't get a reason to choose him. If you do know, then why do you need a guru?

[45:31]

You see, the authority which people give to churches, to scriptures, to gurus, is their own authority. Except they can seek it from themselves, just in the same way when we change the time from a fan of times to a day like today. We say, instead of getting up an hour earlier, which would be very simple, without knocking on the clocks, we change the clock. In other words, we change the authority of everybody who hides by the clock. We can feel for ourselves that the authority of the clock is not our own authority, because we have consented socially. Do you agree? Because it's a common measure of time. Common talent. Just like the police. You say, the police are supposed to keep people in order. Who controls the police? Well, nobody does. Watch out. But you're supposed to control the police. And if you know, say, for example, driving on the highway, the simplest thing in the world to solve problems on the highway is to decode it.

[46:48]

Do you realize if you were Earl Curtis on the highway, we wouldn't need an highway to go? Except for someone to run along and see if you look after broken down cars. We could leave all our doors unlocked and so on and everything. It would be much simpler. I've often tried to tell criminals that the criminal way of life is much more typical. It's very hard work to be a criminal. much harder work than to turn one's living in an honest way. You would be amazed at the schemes that people engage in to cheat the income tax by filing all sorts of different returns in different cities and then claiming rebates. And they have to travel around to all these cases. It's a downslope. With very little reward considering where the effort would go. It wouldn't be simple. But the thing is, that we need, as a whole culture, periodic vacations from thinking in order to have something to think about.

[48:04]

Because if there's nothing else, we are an over-symbolic culture. We completely confuse the world of symbols with the world of reality. We think money is wealth. I'm going to give a seminar soon, typically extremely wealthy people entitled, Are You Wealthy in the People? Because if you are, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your money. I'm not going to take it from you. I'm going to show you how to turn it on yourself. This will be an adventure. But you see, there's only a limited way you can do this. You have your story. I'll give you a million dollars if you can spend the whole thing in one day. If you're not both parts of register. Just think of things that you would like.

[49:06]

Spend a million dollars in a day. You can't imagine what you would do. And yet there are people, you see, all wanting this thing, this abstraction, that they are real happy when they got all the paper dollars. even thought about it. It doesn't have any use. They were gold. When gold is lying in a bank vault, it's completely useless. All right, for filling tea, for making jewelry, for putting solid gold on the government capitol in Washington on the 2nd of October. Great. That's all it's good for. People confused the mania with the dinner. Most Americans eat mayonnaise. Look at our bread. It's nothing but, well, kind of a squishy starfish. You'll allegedly trip, you'll trip chemicals in your lip. You taste with what? Nothing whatsoever. That kind of thing.

[50:08]

have them, you know, they feed the raggies, they are not the white goon, they put it in the raggies' mouth and the lady always blips it out. For it tastes like a soon-mixed deluxe. And in so many ways, in other words, we are living for conceptions, for ideas of status, of where they're hypnotized into illusions created by words, and therefore divorced from the concrete real world, so that the process of meditation is to recontact reality. so as to get a better ground from which to construct a civilization and a culture.

[51:18]

Maybe babies have this contact when they are born in terms of what Freud called the oceanic feeling, the feeling of being one with the whole universe. But a baby's oceanic feeling is to the experience of a great mystic as the acorn is to the oak we need, I suppose, to cultivate the oceanic feeling which a baby has and not use education as the means of correcting and forgetting that feeling but a means of amplifying it So that we eventually come to a state in which kind of a curious thing happens.

[52:28]

And how can I illustrate this? When you're steering a car, are you pushing the wheel or pulling it? You're obviously doing both. So in a similar way, you come to feel that everything that's happening in the world, which you thought was pushing you around, you find you're pulling it. And when you push it around, you get the feeling that it's pulling you. That's always mutual. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part one of a seminar entitled Self-Awakening. If you'd like an audio cassette copy of today's talk, Send $5 to this address, NEA Box 303, Sausalito, 91966.

[53:30]

Be sure to specify you want Part 1 from the seminar, Self-Awakening. That address again, NEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94966. Hello, this is Bobbie in McGillicuddy. KPFA's Honor Marathon begins February 8th and runs for two weeks. We've shortened it by one week, but we'd like to make it even shorter. The marathon will stop as soon as we raise our goal of $194.1k. And any money to seek from you, our listeners, even before the marathon begins, will be counted towards that goal and will therefore reduce the number of times that you have to return to us to beg for money. So, if you received our New Year's mailing requesting your subscription, please get it in the mail to us today. But even if you didn't get a letter from us, you can still take out a membership by simply writing out a check for $40 and sending it.

[54:34]

to KPFA, Berkeley, California, 94704. Just make sure to include your name, address, and phone number. And remember, the sooner you send in the money, the sooner we will end our Ryan Marathon. Friends and compañeros, you're listening to the great sound of Conjunto Matica. On Saturday, February 8, the Chicano Moratorium Coalition of San Francisco invites everyone to a great evening celebrating 138 years of Chicano struggle featuring music by Conjunto Matica and other very special guests.

[55:36]

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