You understand Buddhism in any case, you must realize that it is not something like a teaching. As we ordinary understand the system of teaching, it isn't simply a way, as we have in our universities, of a teacher imparting you certain authoritative information, which when you've heard it, you've got the message. It's a dialogue. It's a situation in which the teacher doesn't really have anything to tell you. He's simply reacting to your own bringing up problems. And it's as if people came to the Buddha and said, sir, we suffer terribly. And what are we going to do about that? And he replied, this is not true that you suffer because you desire. They said, well, maybe that makes sense. All right, he said, see if you can do without desire. And all of them didn't go away and see if they can calm their desires.

[01:08]

They come back and say it's pretty difficult because we are animal beings and we have all these appetites to begin with. And then beyond that, we're in the unfortunate position of being aware of time. being aware of the future. And although it's advantageous to know about the future, in the long run it's depressing, because we all know that we come to a bad end, and that everything falls apart in time. That will be especially true if we lived under the influence of Indian cosmology, where the world is regarded as a process that begins beautifully, but as it goes on gets worse and worse till it destroys itself. Never the long period of breath and it starts out again, beginning beautifully but getting worse and worse all the time. Everything runs down in time according to that cosmology. And so there seems to be a fundamental futility, desire, desire for whatever it is that you want.

[02:15]

But behind this, the intention of honeying desire, seeing whether one can dissipate desire, whether one can hurt it. It is a deeper question altogether, which is, what do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? Let's suppose I do this offering of vocational guidance to students. They come to me and say, well, we're getting out of college and we haven't decided what we want to do. So I always ask the question, what would you like to do with money when I want it? How would you really enjoy spending your life? Well, it's amazing. As a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, well, We'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, because everybody knows we can't earn any money that way.

[03:20]

And I said, well, I'd like to live outdoors, right, in the right of horses. I said, you want to teach in a writing school? And I said, let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that. And forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it and you can eventually become a master of it.

[04:22]

The only way to become a master of something is to be really good at it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So we don't worry too much about that. Somebody's interested in everything. Anything you can be interested in, you'll find others who are. But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on spending things you don't like and doing things you don't like and to teach your children to follow the same track. See, what we're doing is we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we're living. in order that they may justify themselves by satisfaction in life by bringing up their children, to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it's all wretched old vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question. What do I desire? Well, when we answer that question in a naive way, we figure out that we want to desire

[05:29]

All we want is to control everything, to create girls that don't grow old, animals that don't rot, clothes that never wear out, advances that get from one place to another instantly so we don't have to wait. are available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just simply like that to get this funny technological omnipotence. But if you take time out to think about that and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that's where you want to be, you will soon see that's not what you want. Because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things, that is the stage in which the future is almost completely predictable.

[06:40]

You will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the task. You've had it. That's not what you want. You want it to try. You don't know what that's going to be, because obviously it wouldn't be able to try unless it did. You want a cutting surprise. I'd like you to say, what sort of a surprise would be cutting? And you can't really answer that. But you know, if there were to be such things as cutting surprises, it would also be un-cutting surprises, making room shop. So you're like somebody taking out one of those wishing well boxes, you know, where you fish in and you bring out a package. And you don't know whether you've got a dead rat in it or a new camera. And that's the way, that seems to be the thing that really incites people.

[07:42]

But quite suddenly there comes out of this party a feeling of real disillusionment with the idea of power. To be in power, to be in control, is not something that any sensible person wants. Imagine the situation of Big Brother. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Heinrich Himmler, to be glued day and night to a highly defended office with telephone, television screens, watching, peeking, flying around, everyone and anything, getting all this information together. Why? You could never leave the office. I mean, the great characters like Ed, who would go home in the evening, but when he's back home,

[08:50]

You know, there are guards sitting outside the door with that hotline telephone and everything. No. He's always having to be in control. And he can't take any time out. He can't just walk in the park with a friend or go into the movies or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the bar with the big fella. You know, I talk to the guy and The company wants to be uncontrollable because they want power. People are frustrated in love. People are jilted. There's a natural tendency in human beings to keep power. And that's a very negative thing, like having a bad temper. To keep power after you're frustrated in love, you should try and get back on the love beam. Because nobody wants power. Now, you may say that's shirking responsibility.

[09:53]

And if you were a really responsible person, you would go out to power and try to use power to the best possible advantage for the benefit of all. All right, what would be the benefit of all? Ask them, what do you want me to do with this power? I'd be paid. What would you like me to do? Well, nobody knows. But they haven't thought it through. They think of all sorts of short-range things. And they are largely conflicting and confusing because they're not well thought out. But again, when it finally comes down to it, nobody wants to be God. Now then, when oriental philosophy and religion were first introduced to the Western world, He was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power. He was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century, when we heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights, and we would eventually develop Superman, according to Nietzsche, or to be sure.

[11:08]

And in our safety world, remember all that early of where evolution would lead through the development of technology. And so at this time, people like H.P. Brodowski were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the East. And they praised it, they commended it to us in a technological sense. That there was psychic technology. That there was something that you could go way beyond anything that's begun to the physical science. You could call your physical body to another liberal vibration and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else. You could live as long as you liked because you could control the fundamental process. You could determine if you decided to die where you would be reformed, exactly. you would be a complete master of life.

[12:14]

And so there are still innumerable books being sold which present oriental philosophy and religion in this life. That Charlton Lobsang Ranha, who writes about Tibetan mastery, people read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game. So, therefore, the wise men of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life, as, for example, people whose emotions didn't bother them, who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings, who could foretell the future who could read your thoughts, and who were without all kinds of ordinary human predilections.

[13:21]

Well, when I first met Buddhist priests, Zen masters, swamis, all these wise men from the East, one of the first things that occurred to me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings. They had bad tentacles. They were puffy about certain things. They just acted as I would expect human beings to act. And so, of course, I was very disappointed. I thought they had seen it play. They didn't come up to these promises, the site of technology. But after a while, I got to realize, why not? That they'd already thought all that through. They had thought through what might be done if one had all these problems. And it was decided that wasn't a good idea. The powers of this kind in Sanskrit are called siddhi. S-I-D-D-H-I. But there is hardly one decent scripture or text of yoga that does not say again and again, if you get siddhi, ignore them.

[14:33]

Go on to something else. These are only the footnotes. These are not only foothills, but they are seductive blind alleys. Won't take you anywhere at all. Now, I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way. And we've never thought it through. When you get control over it, what are you going to do with it? Supposing I have an outing. I have a whole week. It could cost a full lot total. If I see a desirable woman, all I have to do is to offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions. And instantly, I'm a master.

[15:38]

Now, what do I think that's true? What kind of situation am I in? I don't know. Because all I've got again is that plastic doll that when I push it, it does what I tell it to and doesn't have any comeback. What you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there, where there's a comeback. And you say, my God, this thing is alive. It has the will of its own. It is not in my control. And I would like to have a relationship with something like that because it would never be helped. And also, you would feel true affection. After all, you could make love to yourself in an era. You couldn't have one of those Dutch wives who died in a place in Kobe where you get these lot of girls that you fill with hot water. And the sailors take them on long voyages. But what an awful thing, you know, when you realize that this thing has no...

[16:46]

beer, there's no satire in it, no thing that it does on its own, you see. So when you think things through like that, you understand you do not want power. You don't want it to be sold to you. And therefore these Zen Buddhist masters that I met and others were not super operatives. And very many Westerners who visited Japan expected to get a satori, as a result of which they would know everything and control everything, would grievously be disappointed, and said there was not much in this after all. So therefore, from the standpoint of Buddhism, But the fact that the power gain is not the gain is expressed by saying a Buddha is one who has gone beyond the gods.

[17:57]

Because the gods have power. The Buddhism imagines all kinds of levels of heaven world inhabited by all kinds of gods. And the supreme of all the gods is called Ishvara. Now, it is said that all those gods in their paradigmal world are in some time. They're in the round of birth and death. And what those gods must come down? They're in actual destruction. They're at the peak of power, spiritual power. They're not delivered yet. They still don't know what they want. And therefore, in the exploration of what you want, you get to the point where having all pleasures at your command and they fall and you take a new sort of pleasure and eventually you get like the ancient Romans who had all these mad crowds of barbarians who had to go every Saturday to the Coliseum for a show

[19:14]

really had to support everything. Because they had public bars, they had prostitutes, they had every kind of luxury. But when they went to see one of the big shows that people like Nero put on, they would have, for example, floats searching the college field, all full of slave girls from distant parts of the Mediterranean. The next minute they would release wild lions into the arena to eat up all that was laid there. They got a big, horrific kick out of that. Because, you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the Naraka world. That is to say, to hell. When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So naturally, you descend from the gator world, at the top of the wheel, to the naraka world at the bottom, where it shows all these beings in great proportion.

[20:28]

Now, of course, the priests say, when they're bringing up children, if you do a bad thing, you will end up in the hell world. But this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world. You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want. As a result of fortunate pursuit of pleasure, which ends you eventually in the pursuit of pain. So when you're in the hell world, that's where you ought to be. So then the question is, to clarify once more, what do we want? If you understand first of all that you don't want absolute power, you don't want absolute control, you want, yes, some control.

[21:29]

You see, we always love Controlling something that's not really under our control. Remember I gave you the illustration right in the beginning of holding a diastolic top, and thinking sometimes you're with it, but sometimes it's alive under your hand. And this sensation, too, what we get, say, in driving a car or something like that, it's not only under your control, but on the other hand, it isn't. And that's the beautiful thing, because when something It's partly under your control, but isn't. Then you have the same sort of relationship with it that you have when you have someone you love. They're partly under your control because they agree clearly with you and go on with you and so on, but also they're not. And the measure to which they're not is the measure to which they've been really aligned to you. So then, we are sequestering our it the motivation of power gaining disappears.

[22:36]

You think through it and you know that's not what you want. What other motivation takes its place as the origin of action? And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. It's actually because When you want to relate to another living being, what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights.

[23:49]

You don't want to go. You want another you, another self. Because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are. And so then at once, where you see that that is the case, and that the most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others. And you can see at once yourself in the situation of all the other people. And then you think, no, I don't want to control these people. I would like them. Yes, to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do. But honestly, I can't force that. Because if I forced it, they wouldn't be happy.

[24:55]

See, when you marry someone, when you have a family, you want your children, you want your relatives, you want your wife, etc., to be happy to do the things for you that they don't. So we say to each other, would you like to bring the washing in? Very often the answer is no, but I will. Because you see, we put it that way because we always hope that the things that we do for each other will be pleasurable with both sides. The school teacher will get up in class and say, what nice boy will clean the blackboard for me? All these ways we use are trying to get voluntary cooperation, willingly given help.

[25:59]

That's what we look for. But here there is a, despite the amount of foolishness that goes on this, it's a sound thing, see? That there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you, and not under your control, to do for you what you want. Because they like it. And you, on your side, would want to do something for them in that way, and so give pleasure to the other. I think in sexuality, where you get kind of a critical example of it, the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving all the other to women.

[27:05]

And if that doesn't happen, many men feel disappointed because the thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it. Now that's compassion in the real sense of the word. Feeling with and through someone else. Where the whole trick is that you lose control for a while of the situation. And say, I throw the ball to you. Now it's yours. Now, I may seem, therefore, as a result of talking this way, to be talking like a Jewish or a Christian theologian. Because that's what they say about God. That God did something called kenosis. in the beginning of all time, to notice through the Greek word meaning self-empty, self-sacrifice, giving up, and thereby conferred freedom of will and the power to love on angels and human beings.

[28:28]

And therefore took a terrific risk by trusting the other, by trusting a principle called other that is not under your control. Of course, it is out of his damn control, but he'd just pack a bunch of cigars on time and let it go. See what the two of them will do. No, like, we'll all agree it's possible to take the cigars. But you see, it's really, in a way, the same idea as the Hindu idea. When a Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says, no, God gets lost in that person and gives up power. And it's the same thing, the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So the moral...

[29:30]

you give the power away, what you're really doing is you're othering yourself. Now, the more you other yourself by giving power away, the more of a self you are, because self and other are reciprocal. So we find that people who, through a sadhana, a yoga discipline, overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think, theoretically, they would all be non-intuitive and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego strength. But actually, they're nothing of the kind. They are, every one of them, unique. They're all quite different from each other. And they are very, very strong characters. Because the more they have given it up, the more they get it.

[30:38]

So, in this way of thinking, let's put it in another dimension for a moment, which, of course, is going to include as much of yourself as you can objectivize. In other words, your stomach, your intestine, your everything, see? Save it all. Now it's your turn. Let's see what you're going to do. Let it happen. You know, you do the complete let-off of control. And you're fine. that I have to put it in the provision away first. You get the sensation that everything else is living you.

[31:46]

It lives you. That you've given away control, you see, to everything else. It's a lovely, irresponsible state to be in. But then, you see, you do the flip. In giving away the control, you got it. You got the kind of control you wanted. That's to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world, but you didn't have to make up your mind what to do. You let it go. Now, do you see that, how your bodies work?

[32:48]

You don't have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do to you. You've delegated all that authority. If the President of the United States has to lay awake at night thinking what every official under his command is going to do, he can't be proven. You've got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way that you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do. Now this is the secret of what we will call organic power as distinct from political power. Now to put it in this way, the great Dao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them.

[33:54]

The more therefore you relinquish power, the more powerful you become. But in such a way That instead of having to lie awake at night, controlling everything, you do it beautifully by cutting the job for everyone else. They carry it on for you. So you can go to sleep at night and talk to another person to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it, I want to wake up at 5 o'clock and it will wake you up just like a alarm clock. So the whole, while it seems a false paradox to say this, the principle of unity, of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe.

[35:03]

That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less wrong with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to cut another, as you would another, and say, let's see what you're going to do. In doing that, in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you, you are also saying it to yourself. Because finally, As I pointed out, you do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. There's a guy named Tom who ordered a health man to come in.

[36:10]

And Tommy was an extraordinarily efficient worker. For the first day, he put him on sawing logs. And he sawed more logs than anybody ever sawed. Fantastic. They were all done in one day. The next day, he put him on to many fences. And there were all kinds of broken fences on the farm. And in one day, he had the whole thing done. So I thought, what am I going to do with this guy? So we took him down into a and said, look, here are all the potatoes that have come in from this harvest, and I want you to sort them into three groups. Those that we sell, those that we use for feeding, and those that we throw away. So he left it at that, and at the end of the day, the laborer came back and said, well, I cannot miss this. I quit. I said, you can't quit. I've never had such an experience. I'll raise your salary. I'll do anything to keep you around me. All right, good man.

[37:13]

It's all right mending fences and chopping wood, but it's potato business. It's decision after [...] decision. So when we decide, we're always worrying, did I take the bill long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite. So what you do, you go through the motions of picking out what you will do about it. And then when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment. I mean, I'm thinking a little extremely, making some fun of it, and so on, because after all, we do occasionally get the vague outline of things and make a right decision on rational grounds.

[38:17]

But we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right. It's amazing how often it works. that worry about people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen. So that when you make a decision, can it work out all right? I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control. But somehow or other, you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority.

[39:25]

Why, very great businessmen are those who can delegate authority. because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism, delegation of authority. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And you see, then, what is happening is this. The more You let go of it. Don't trust it. As if it were quite other than you. The more you realize the acceptable identity of self and others,

[40:34]

If you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self, no good. If, on the other hand, you find it through giving self, that is, control, over to other and trusting that, you may make a mistake. You may make a bad gamble. But in the long run, you're acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution. This is the way biological evolution goes on, constant delegation of authority. Why, obviously, the democracy is superior to the monarchy. The Tocqueville has read that democracy is always right, but for the wrong reason. because they're operating in a democracy, the principle that Buckman's controller called synergy.

[41:49]

Synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system, the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members. How does that feel back again at this point? We're always entering a new environment. We don't ever know fully what the new environment is, because the only environments we know are the past ones. There has always been operating in the development of cellular life on any level a new way of organization higher than any existing form did. And we're not aware of it until after time. If you ever saw, for example, the film Contiki, this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsa wood rock to sail from South America to the Pacific Islands.

[42:54]

But once he had checked it in London, he discovered that all sorts of unexpected factors cooperated with him. That when the wood got wet, it expanded. so that the tides bit into it and held it completely secure. He'd never expected that. And he found that as he sailed along, a flying fish would tend to be a light flap on the deck every morning. So great. That all kinds of natural factors, he'd touched the keel where he was flowing with the course of nature and everything cooperated. He'd touched the keel. He'd made the act of bait. And he was just picking up, in other words, the tactics which had been hundreds and hundreds of years ago and then followed by others who had worked it out by their great ecological awareness. So we do come out of this way of thinking

[44:10]

to something which has, I would say, the most enormously creative and revolutionary social content. That it has become not virtuous, not self-sacrificing, And not anything like that. It had become the hard and practical policy to let no control to others, to give up trying to dominate the people. Also, in a parallel way, it is because of this time in our history, very much hard practical politics.

[45:12]

To learn how to enjoy ourselves. You can go to the Protestant people with their Protestant ethic, who are against this kind of thing, and now say to them with great glee, It is your son's gift to learn how to enjoy himself. Why? Because in an age of leader, people have really got to know how to enjoy themselves. Because if they don't, they'll match the whole thing to the human race. So a utopia has become not some sort of a dream, but an urgent necessity. We can't do without it. But if we try to do without it, what's going to happen is that we are going to terminate our race in a mutual matter .

[46:21]

And so the paranoia in the United States that is going on uh... where everybody you think not to be picked up how great it would be to do not i'll get a lot of pop-up or all that kind of victory and uh... right and left columbia at the company road probably not have the opportunity of uh... cutting our own intelligence, our own technology, to take the risk of doing what we want, which will work, to the extent that we realize that what I want, basically, what I really want is what you want.

[47:36]

And I don't know what you want. But that's the kinship between I and God. So when I ask, I go right down to the question. What do I want? The answer is I don't know. When Bodhidharma was asked, who are you? Which is another form of the same question. He said, I don't know. I don't know. When you don't know what you want, you really don't know. When you really don't know, You see, there's a beginning stage of not knowing, and there's an ending stage of not knowing.

[48:43]

In the beginning stage, you don't know what you want, but you don't know what you want. Well, you've only thought to the fiction. Then when you come to the important, you think about it and go through and say, yeah, I think I like this, I think I like that, I think I like the other. That's the middle stage. Then you get beyond that. Say, is that what I really want? In the end, you say, no, I don't think that's it. I might be satisfied with it for a while and I wouldn't turn my nose up at it. But it's not really what I want. Why don't you really know what you want? Two reasons that you don't really know what you want. Number one, you have it. Number two, you don't know yourself because you never can. The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as the night doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself.

[49:50]

It's always this endless mystery to itself. I don't know. And this I don't know is uttered in the infinite interior of the spirit. This I don't know It's the same thing as I love, I let go, I don't try to force or control. It's the same thing as humility. And so the Upanishads say, if you think that you understand God, you do not understand, and you have yet to be abducted further. If you know that you do not understand, then you truly understand.

[50:54]

For the problem is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not. And the principle is that any time you, as it were, Voluntarily let up control. In other words, teach the kid to yourself. You have an act of power. Because you're wasting energy all the time. Trying to manage things, trying to force things to conform to your will. The moment you stop doing that, that wasted energy is available. Therefore, you are, in that sense, having that energy available. You are one of the divine principles. You have the energy. When you're trying, however, to act as if you were God, that is to say, you don't trust anybody and you're the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line, you lose the divine energy.

[51:56]

Because what you're doing is simply defending yourself. So then, the principle is, the more you give it away, the more it comes back. Now you say, I don't have the courage to give it away. That's right. And you can only overcome that by realising, and we'll get back to a principle that I brought this morning, you give it away because there's no way of holding on to it. The meaning of the fact is that everything is dissolving constantly, that we're all pulling apart. We're all in the process of constant death. And it's the world we hope men set their hearts upon, and they're actually very tough, so we might know from the desert stuff we face, like a little hour to a song, you know, or a Mark Highland jazz. You know, the cloud-capped tower of the gorgeous palaces, the great globe itself, by all which it impenetrable dissolves, like the bit substantial, touch and fade, it leaves not a rack behind.

[53:06]

All falling apart. That was the great assistance to me. That fact that everything is in decay is your help. That is allowing you that you don't have to let go because there's nothing at all longer. It's achieved for you, in other words, by the concept of nature. So once you see that you just don't have a prayer and it's all washed up and that you will vanish and leave no direct behind. And you really get with that. Suddenly you find you have the power. It's enormous access of energy. But it's not power that came to you because you grabbed it. It came in entirely the opposite way. The power that comes to you in that opposite way is power

[54:07]

with which you can be caught. You've been listening to Alan Watts with Part 3 of the seminar entitled, Did You Do It or Did It Do You? If you'd like a cassette copy of this talk, send $9 to NEA Box 303, John Toledo, 949-650. Be sure to specify part 3 from the seminar and continue to it. Because again, MEA, Box 303, Sausalito, 94966. This is SP Archery with a comment on Dilemma and the Date of Time. I should like to draw a verbal cartoon. A man studying a heavy book with tumultuous standing beside a cornucopia, a horn, which is expelling a constant stream of information even while the rising datapire already reaches his chest.

[55:20]

And he needs to hold his book high above his head in order to study it. A picture should not be needed, but if one were wanted, perhaps the single word dilemma would suffice. And, of course, it is quite a dilemma. What is to be done with this mounting debt of time? No sooner do we begin to make certain connections from information we already possess in our attempts to study and evaluate the whole, so to speak, than another newer piece of information swaps us. How can we evaluate what we already know? We believe that somewhere hidden in the constant piling of data is a particular piece of information which will modify all our past knowledge, which we have not yet evaluated. And once we get this particular piece, should we keep on searching the pile for yet other pieces to what end?

[56:24]

In the belief that knowledge is merely a collection of pieces of information, yet the data pile continues to increase, nearly endlessly, it would seem. If there is any resolution to this dilemma, to the man in the cartoon, it would be good to know if it is there. Well, information is often surely useful, occasionally not. And more often than we are willing to admit, quite repetitive, equivalent to the research technician who again and again ten thousand times boils distilled water at atmospheric pressure and finds the boiling point to be a hundred degrees centigrade. And then, at the ten thousand and one experiment, if you will, to give the expression, notes with surprise that the water begins to boil at ninety degrees centigrade. What does he then do? Does he check his instruments to establish their accuracy, or does he fire off a project proposal to the Foundation?

[57:31]

One resolution to this dilemma of the constant stream of data of the man in the cartoon is this, in my view. The pedophile cannot deprive himself of knowledge, of a finding of intelligent connection. It is useful for extraction purposes, for extraction from the pile of that data which one needs in one's quest for knowledge. The data pile is equivalent to a dump to which all sorts of things are constantly added. And I don't mean this in any pejorative manner, because dumps serve many useful purposes, indeed essential ones. But in order to find the dark materials of some benefit, you need to approach it with some forethought already in mind, unless you happen to be a miscellaneous collector of all sorts of trivia, either for the sake of trivia or because you hope to find some uses someday for the bits and the pieces.

[58:42]

The world of the cartoon, obviously, is seeking knowledge and with some forethought. The steady stream of data which is nearing submerging him interferes quite actually with his search to make intelligent predictions. He needs to extract himself from the pile, even while knowing of its existence and its potential value to him, whenever he finds that he needs to acquire some pieces of data which may apply, positively or negatively, to his search for knowledge. He may find what he believes he needs within the data pile, and he may not. But the pile itself does not then immobilize him, precisely because he is not dependent upon it for his continuing attempts to make intelligent corrections, knowing full well that regardless of the mass of the data pile it is only he, as an individual,

[59:44]

who is capable of making these connections. This is S.P.R. Churchill.

[59:53]

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