or whether God is primarily will. And the Thomists argued that God is primarily being, and the Scotists that God is primarily will. Because the Scotists argued that God exists because he wills to exist. But the Thomists argued that God wills because he is. And this was the kind of marvelous hair-splitting. with words that went on in the heads of these medieval philosophers. Because they suffered from the great disease which has afflicted civilized man, and in a very peculiar way has afflicted Western man, which is what I would call hypnotization with words. We have to realize that the world we live in is not words. It is a non-verbal world, or as Korzybski called it, an unspeakable world, which is a phrase I always like.

[01:04]

You know, there's something slightly naughty about it. And when philosophers try to understand the world purely by manipulating words, they don't get very far. And that is why philosophy in the Western world, in the universities, has become an extraordinarily unproductive discipline. It is so dreary and so dull today to study philosophy in a university that philosophy departments have degenerated into tiny little buildings and minute little sections in non-central areas of the campus. and indeed are in danger of breaking up altogether and being divided between the mathematical department, because mathematical logic goes into mathematics, or the department of linguistics, because since philosophers are dealing almost entirely with words, they are really being absorbed by grammar.

[02:14]

And the reason is that philosophy became arid by being completely verbal. Originally, philosophy meant natural philosophy. And there are still shops in London, old shops which have over the window a sign, such and such a company, philosophical instruments. And you look in the window with intense interest as to what philosophical instruments might be, And there are chronometers and slide rules and telescopes and protractors and all kinds of essentially scientific instruments because science was originally natural philosophy. It was an inquiry into nature resulting from man's curiosity. And the moment philosophy as a discipline becomes entirely separate from the discipline of science, as well as from the discipline of psychology, it's a flop.

[03:19]

It's merely manipulating words. So, any inquiry into what consciousness is, or what the universe is, must not only be a discussion, but also a practical investigation through which one's five senses, at the very least, must experience what's going on. Because what's going on, if you ask the question, what is all this? Supposing you ask the question, what is being? There's no answer to that in words. Because in order to answer something in words, you have to be able to classify it. Words are nothing but labels which we put on intellectual boxes into which we sought various kinds of experience. And it is no consolation to have an empty wine bottle with a fine label on it and no wine in it.

[04:25]

So in exactly the same way, it tells you nothing to talk about being, existence, as such, and to have no real experience of that. But there is a difficulty, of course, in having an experience of existence, because everything you experience is existence. Therefore, what is the common element to everything you experience? You cannot experience that as a what, because a what is it? Expecting an answer in words can't be done. But if you ask, what is it? And then somebody shows you, then you can experience it. The difficulty here is that all experience of anything at all is on you.

[05:31]

And when I say it's on you, it's in the same sense as all reflections on a mirror are on the mirror. Now the mirror has no color. We say it's silver, but an ideal mirror isn't even silver. It has no color at all, and therefore can purely reflect all other colors. But we know, by reason of the frame or the edge of the mirror, that the mirror is something very definitely there. But we don't have that sense of boundary with respect to our own personal mirror. And that is because in one way the boundary is vague. If you will study your field of vision, you will find that if you raise your hands, look straight in front of you, and wait till your fingers go out of sight, just out of sight, see?

[06:36]

Then you trace how much you can see. And you find you've got an oval. Only you're not aware of it as oval in the ordinary way because the edges are vague. And there's no clearly demarked frame. It's not like looking like this, you see, where you can see a clearly demarked frame. But as soon as you do this, you put your hands into the field of your central vision. But you also have peripheral vision, and so it's vaguer off there. So you're not aware of the oval in the ordinary way. So, in the same way, when you come to other senses, how can you... It's rather easy with the eye sense, with seeing, but with the auditory sense, it's very difficult to find out what are the limits of your hearing. Very easy to see with the eyes. What are the limits of smell? What are the limits of touch?

[07:41]

You see, all these things are very vague. But everything that we experience is on you, in the same sense as reflections are on the mirror. It is, in other words, all that you're aware of is a condition of your nervous system. Now, what does that tell us? It always leaves something out. Something about which we are infinitely curious, especially if you are really alive. Because a really alive person is a person who has a sense of the mysteriousness of existence. Now, people tend to divide themselves into various categories, personality types.

[08:46]

And there are some people who don't want to admit that they have any curiosity at all about the mysteriousness of existence, because they like to maintain that they are practical people, that they deal with strictly down-to-earth affairs, and that all inquiries, say, into the nature of existence are highfalutin abstractions, which may be of concern to some very esoteric people. But if I want to declare to you that I'm an ordinary person, like everybody else, and that you needn't expect any shocks out of me, then I won't go into questions of what is the nature of existence. But on the other hand, if you have any slight grain of poetry in you, any slight sense of any capacity in you of that peculiar energy which turns ordinary people into geniuses or artists or great scientists.

[09:57]

You have this itchy, fundamental, un-get-rid-of-able, get-rid-of-able-of curiosity as to what is this all about. And you ask this question and you don't know whether you've asked the right question and you don't know how it could possibly be answered. But you know that it is very queer indeed that this world is going on. Because the world is rather menacing. it isn't just a succession of rather nice, comfortable experiences. I mean, it isn't like just sitting down to a beautiful television show, and then at the end of the show you press the button, and the light goes back to a point and vanishes. Now, if that was all there was to life, it'd be very simple.

[11:00]

We say, well, now it's entertaining, it goes on for a while, and then it just ceases. Whether it happens again or not is no concern of ours, because if it just ceases, we're not going to have any troubles. The problem is that this television show will come on with not just nice little pictures on a screen, but the box will suddenly shoot flames out at us. all sorts of spikes or it will scream into our ears. It will accuse us of immorality, of carelessness, of lack of responsibility and will gnaw down into our very guts and tangle us all up in knots. And all these things are very vivid, sensuous experiences. So that's why we ask questions about it. Why does such a thing like that go on? How is it that that's what there is, as distinct from some other kind of arrangement altogether?

[12:05]

And we discover that there's not much we can do about it. We can sweat and work and talk endlessly to get, say, political reforms, economic reforms, medical reforms, etc. cookery reforms, all kinds of things that would make our life more comfortable. But we find that that's only a drop in the bucket. That we conquer one problem, and by conquering that problem, we get seven new ones. Because everybody is in the situation of the sorcerer's apprentice. That he learned the magic of how to make the broom fetch water, but he doesn't know how to stop it. And we have interfered as human beings in the course of nature. And once you've done it, you suddenly find yourself involved in a situation where you can't stop. You're sucked in.

[13:12]

And then the trouble is, you're in charge. Now what are you going to do? See, that's really the whole story that lies behind the story of the fall of man in Genesis. What happened was this, that the story about the tree of knowledge isn't usually understood very well. The knowledge of good and evil. In Hebrew, the words which we translate good and evil don't have a moral connotation. They have a technical connotation. They have to do with skill as of, say, making bronze axe heads or flint arrowheads? What is a good arrowhead or a bad arrowhead? Or what is technically advantageous or disadvantageous? So the eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge meant acquiring technical skill and therefore being able

[14:23]

to control the course of nature. So in other words, instead of saying, well, I'll just do what I feel like, I'll run along on my instincts, like an animal does, like cats do. Cats don't use any tools, unless you regard their claws as tools. They're sort of built in. But they don't use tools as we do, They don't use measuring instruments. A cat requires nothing except food outside its own physical organism. But we require everything in the world outside our physical organisms. In fact, our whole culture is devoted to the acquisition of objects outside our physical organisms. So you could say there is a state in which organic life flourishes without using instruments. This is pre-fall.

[15:25]

And in that state, there are no laws, not any formulated laws at least. And everybody does what he feels like doing. As we used to say, they just follow their instincts. And that leads to the kind of life that bees live, that ants live, that mice live, that rats live, that cats live, that dogs live, that butterflies live, that birds live, and that's been going on for millions of years. And human beings introduce a new wrinkle into the thing, which is that we reflect on what we're doing. It's as if the development of the human cortex had provided us with a mirror, And in a mirror, you see yourself and know yourself.

[16:26]

When the cat looks into the mirror, the cat is puzzled because it's another cat. I always like to tell a story about the Hebrides Islands on the far, far west of Scotland where very primitive life goes on. And there was an old couple living on one of those islands And the officials came and said, sorry, but you're going to have to move to the mainland because the island is being washed away. And your house won't stand up much longer. So they shifted them to a new house on the mainland. Well, when they got in there, the husband went upstairs to the bedroom. And for the first time in his life, he saw a mirror. He'd never seen one before. And he looked in it. He said, lach, tis favor. And he thought that was a very supernatural and weird thing. And so he took the mirror.

[17:29]

He thought his wife shouldn't see this magical thing. And he put it under the mattress of the bed. So he went downstairs. But every so often he would creep up into the bedroom, pull the mirror out from the mattress and look and say, "'Lock, tis favour.'" And his wife started to get worried about this. Why was he always going upstairs and coming back looking kind of as if he'd swallowed a canary or something? You know, it was strange. So one day when he was out having whiskey at the local bar, she went upstairs. She started digging around. And at last, looking out of the mattress, she discovered the mirror. And she said, I knew it, I knew it. Locht is another woman. So, when you know, when you finally find out, you see, that the reflection in the mirror is you, and you know yourself, that act of self-consciousness

[18:44]

Being aware of you as you is the beginning of all technology because it's reflection. All consciousness in the sense of human consciousness, as we now know it, begins with reflection, thinking about. So you can use the mirror to reflect or you can use words to reflect. to represent life, what goes on. It's all a matter of representation or re-presentation. Feedback. Feedback is cybernetics. That's the basis of technical accomplishment. So the moment you start doing that, you start living in a new way.

[19:46]

Instead simply of being the spontaneous production of biological process, you start putting your fingers into it and figuring out the way you think it should go. But here's the problem. The process which you are trying to regulate is extremely complicated. And you don't understand it fully. You understand a little bit about it. And therefore you make changes in it. And they have entirely unexpected results. Because in changing the process at one point, that point, should we say that ganglion of biological behavior, was connected with all kinds of other things and you didn't realize these connections existed because you hadn't explored it that far. And therefore, every time you make a change which you think is in a beneficial direction, it has completely unpredictable consequences all over, all over the place, all over the planet.

[20:58]

And the more you understand and try to figure out these things, you get an increasingly complex body of knowledge. And that brings you to the realization that beyond this complex body of knowledge is the possibility that there is knowledge still more complex, so that you begin to be engaged in an infinitely insoluble problem, which goes on and on and on and on. And the difficulty you have is this, that as this problem becomes more and more complex, It's again, it's the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, because you know, he chopped up the broom, which wouldn't stop bringing him water, and it developed into two brooms which brought water. And he chopped those up and they became four, and so on. So, in the same way exactly, as you become more and more aware that controlling the universe involves an increasing degree of complexity,

[22:05]

You then feel, well, now, in order to keep up with this, I've got to delegate this problem for the simple reason that I can't think about it fast enough. Because thought, using the symbols of numbers or of words, is very slow in comparison with the speeds of nature. So you invent computers to think with extreme rapidity. to keep pace. Now you delegate to other scientists all sorts of special fields of study, and they all go off and do that. Then they bring their results back, and you try to coordinate the results. But then you find you have to have a coordinating committee, because one person's head can't take the whole thing. And then finally, as this thing goes on, everybody is starting to learn more and more about less and less. And you have this overwhelming sort of bottleneck, this jam, this information explosion, which we are facing in our culture today.

[23:22]

And many of us are beginning to realize that an enormous number of our social institutions I mean things like the telephone company, the post office, corporations, freeways, and all that sort of thing, are breaking down. Because everything's overloaded. It's become too complicated for anyone to handle. And you can blame the President of the United States as a personal scapegoat for all sorts of things that are going on. But the president of the United States is one of the most helpless individuals on earth. Just think, if you were president, you would never have a moment's peace. You would be on the telephone constantly, constantly, constantly. You would have to sit, as the president does sit, with stacks of reports.

[24:26]

going through, going through, even though they've already been summarized by all sorts of secretaries so that he reads just what they want him to read. He has to go through all this hour after hour, constantly, listening to this, listening to that. He can never let go. See, but no individual can take that kind of strain or responsibility. So he has necessarily to go completely insane. That's the nature of the structure of that office. Because the more a human being approximates to the conventional conception of God, the more he is completely mad. Because his conscious scanning process cannot deal with that much information. He is simply suffering from excessive input. But this happens increasingly to every individual because of the communication system which is feeding into your conscious scanning process more and more and more information.

[25:29]

And so everybody is therefore, because of the nature of communication, that it's serial, as McLuhan points out, communication comes in terms of the Gutenberg Galaxy, which is the serial lines of print. Or the serial line of talk, going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da at you all the time. And the trouble is, you can take in a vase of flowers at one glance, but a book, you must go... Some people can take a page in at a glance. But anyway, even if they do, they have to take the next page and [...] the next page. And... Then they'll say, well, that's a reasonable account of things, but leave something out. I need more information on this, that, and the other. You see? And you can go on that way indefinitely. So as linear information is increasingly poured into us, we're all increasingly crazy.

[26:41]

We just can't handle it. And we've all been absolutely drummed into our heads that that's the most important thing in the world, to be informed. How can you act unless you're informed? Well, when do we have enough information to know how to act wisely? When indeed? So some people say, well, to hell with it. I'm not going to study all these things. I'm just going to take an ancient Chinese book called the I Ching. And here I can toss a coin. It just happens to be a 64-sided coin. Not just plain heads and tails. It's more interesting than that. And I'll decide what I'm going to do on the basis of that. Now, you see, we are facing that as a social revolution. That sort of thing is coming. Because solving the problem in traditional, rational, scientific terms is becoming too complicated. And therefore we face the prospects of a colossal outburst of irrationality.

[27:49]

Not necessarily based on the same sort of gumption that for some reason or other our actual brains seem to be endowed with. And we don't know why because we didn't consciously construct our brains. They still baffle our neurologists completely in trying to figure them out. So we get back to it, you see, that we don't have enough knowledge not to trust our instincts. And I know instinct isn't any longer a respectable word in psychology and so on. They're called drives instead today. That's very significant because contemporary man feels driven He feels, in other words, the sense that I am driven is the sense that I am a puppet, a poor little thing that is banged around by enormous billiard cues.

[28:59]

And I'm a sort of elliptical billiard ball that is responding to being banged around by these cues. And they're called motivations, drives, pressures. And I imagine then that I, myself, am not these drives, these motivations. See, I have to be motivated. As if somebody had to put a dynamite stick underneath me to do anything, simply because without motivation, I'm just an inert clod. But you see what an unsatisfactory and deprived definition of oneself this is. Because what has happened is that we have got a sense of self which goes hand in hand with a rather obsolete scientific notion of the independent observer.

[30:01]

There is the idea there can be an observer who can stand aside from everything and look at it objectively and know what the truth is. Unfortunately, there isn't any such thing as the truth. This is not a world in which the concept of the truth operates. I won't say that the idea of the truth is entirely lacking in merit. Let's not be that extreme. There is a truth for a number of people. who can somehow agree as to a state of affairs. And that for them is the truth, simply because they're all looking at whatever they're talking about from more or less the same point of view. If we huddle together along the window here, we will all agree as to approximately where a given rainbow is situated. But somebody over there on the next boat will have a very different view of where the rainbow is.

[31:09]

So what you see is always relative to where you stand. And furthermore, when we observe the world, we are not observing something as it were different from us or outside us. We thought we were. We thought you could look at something out there, and by looking at it, you would have no effect on it. But as things stand, you cannot observe anything without affecting the situation. This doesn't become apparent at the ordinary level. It seems perfectly clear that I can walk around this table seeing it from various points of view and not change the table or what's on it in any way. But if I start investigating the inner constitution of the table, I must start taking little chips off it. And I put those little chips under the microscope and shine lights on it.

[32:19]

I change the temperature of those little chips and they behave slightly differently. When I get way, way down to the nuclear level of whatever it was there, the various experiments I have to make in order to understand how that level of being is composed have very definite effects on how it behaves. So I alter it by looking at it. So how was it before I started looking at it? That's what I want to know. But there's no way of finding out. So you see what that's telling us, and this is going to be a crucial point of the whole nature of the seminar. What is that telling you? That you, by looking at things, alter them. that you can never stand outside the world and make it an object. You can never get outside yourself and make yourself an object which you know all about. What's that telling you? A very simple message.

[33:23]

You're it. You are inseparable from what you know. There is no such thing as an external world that's not you. Yeah, it may be in some sense outside your skin, but that doesn't make it outside you, because you don't end with your skin. If I say, well, my border is my skin, that is quite arbitrary. Where does the sun end? What is the outline of the sun? Well, it depends what kind of instruments you're using to look at it. If you use the naked eye, you will see, yes, up there in the sky, a relatively clearly outlined blaze of fire. All right, that's the definition of the sun according to the interchange it makes with the optical nerves.

[34:27]

But we know that if we photograph the sun so as to show... forces proceeding from it which don't impinge on the optical nerves we'd get a different picture so we could define the sun as that globe which is the extent of the radiation of its heat that would be pretty big it would certainly include the whole solar system We could define the sun as that globe reached by the extent of its light. That would be colossal. From that point of view, we're all inside the sun. So where, in other words, the boundary of anything is, is simply a matter of where we're going to draw the line

[35:32]

where does its gravitational field end? That's another way we could think of its boundary. And you know you have to draw the line somewhere, I suppose. But just as the sun has no what we would call true limit, so we don't. So what this... We have a sort of a sticky feeling about the world. In other words, that when you try to change it and alter it, you get all gummed up in complications. The meaning of that is that you were all gummed up anyhow.

[36:43]

Only you didn't notice it because you didn't try to change anything. You didn't try to interfere as if you could. When you did start to interfere, you see, it's like this. If I put my hands forward like that, I think I'm pushing my hands forward. What I don't notice is that my hands are being pulled forward as well as I'm pushing them. That they're being pulled forward is the same force as my pushing them and vice versa. Now you would say, how could it possibly be that at this moment my hands are being pulled forward? That's very simple. Why are you here? You see, this is a social... constellation and although if we want to figure out all the details it's very complicated but because you are here you are drawing out of me certain explanations and this involves the illustration of moving my hands and you have pulled my hands out when I do that you see because you wanted an explanation and I feel that really I should accommodate you

[38:13]

And if we don't have those sort of feelings, we can't have a society. So in that sense, that's only one sense in which the hands are pulled out as well as pushed. Now you'll find, you see, that everything you do is in that sort of a relationship to the world around you. It's not saying in the old-fashioned way, that you are merely moved by your environment, going back to the idea of the billiard ball being hit by the cue. It's not that simple. It isn't that you just respond as if you were nothing. You are simply you in relation to your environment. are not in a passive role nor in an active role.

[39:16]

You're simply one process with it. Only we ignore that because we can't talk about it. If you want to talk about it, you must draw the line somewhere. You must make a boundary in order to have a word because every word describes a class and every class is a bounded area. So if I want to talk about you or you or you or you, I've got to define you. I've got to say, this is your area of responsibility. This is where you are defined to be acting well and good if we're just playing games. But if we're talking about the physical world, there are no such boundaries. In this actual nature, the nearest thing you get to it is the Buddhist description of the mutual interpenetration of all things and events, which is to say that any so-called thing, any so-called event in the universe implies all others, and all others imply it.

[40:25]

It goes with, let's say, in other words, that a baby burping in Mill Valley implies goes with the existence of the constellation M81. I mean the nebula, M81. If the M81 doesn't exist, the baby doesn't exist. If the baby doesn't burp, there's no M81. You can overlook that. You can say, oh well, the baby didn't burp today, so does the M81 go out of existence? No. Because the baby not burping is just as important to the existence of M81 as the baby burping. It's just whatever happens, whether the baby burps or doesn't. The whole thing's interconnected. And when you ignore that, you see, you suddenly find when you try to interfere and change things, everything's sticky.

[41:30]

You find you're all interconnected. All the unexpected things happen which you didn't foresee. Now, it's very scary. And when schizophrenics find this out, they have to become catatonic because they don't do anything for fear of what it might do. They just sit in a corner and wait. So you might say, well, if everything's interconnected in that way, I better just wait. Do nothing. But that's equally absurd as to the idea of interfering with everything. Because you can't do nothing. Why? For the very simple reason is that what you are is nothing but action. You are doing. You're nothing else than doing. Being is doing. Being is a vibration, is energy.

[42:34]

E-energy equals MC squared, i.e., doing is being. So, the question is then, if we can do in such a way as we do, we act in full awareness... of this inextricable unity of ourselves and all that there is. If you understand that, you see, if you once get the hang of that, it makes a great deal of difference to what you do. If you don't get the hang of that, if you don't understand that, you always act as an enemy of the world, or as if you could be an enemy of the world. You're always making trouble. So in this way, civilization as we know it so far is progressive troublemaking.

[43:41]

And it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. Now, if we could understand, see, that that's not necessary. then [...] we can get a new sense of action now when you drive a car you feel in control of the car but you realize you are controlling an energy which your organism alone doesn't possess see we're zooming along with this huge power And yet, you're using it. You've canalized that power. Now, let me suppose that you became aware that in everything you're doing, you're using the entire energy of the universe.

[44:50]

That's what you're using. And you're acting with it. put it in this way. Let's suppose that you learn just to let things happen. You entirely sort of let go and let everything happen just as it's going to happen. Let your thoughts go the way they want to go. Let your ears hear what they want to hear. Let your eyes see what they want to see. Let your body do anything it feels like doing, see? And you suddenly get the feeling of, because of your conditioning and habituation, you get the feeling that you are nothing, that you're just being led around. But that's simply because you've been accustomed to think of yourself as the objective observer, the interferer, the controller.

[46:03]

But you see, once you let yourself do that, it's as if you blew all the flog and the congealed cholesterol and old soap and grease out of your piping. It goes like this and lets all the blocks out of you. Because in the ordinary way, people go around thinking they're controlling themselves. So they strain and squeeze and they glabber on their emotions and they're all tied up in knots. So, you know, you need a pipe job. You need plumbing jobs. And so when you let go like this, it may be temporarily rather upsetting to people, but you go whoosh, you know, and all this stuff is let out of the pipes. Then you realize you've got a new thing. And you can discover, in other words, a new way of acting that's perfectly socially acceptable, perfectly disciplined or whatever you want.

[47:14]

But you're using freedom. You're using a freely functioning organism, psyche, instead of one that's all jammed up with all sorts of controls, all of which are fundamentally useless, because they are all various ways of people straining to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. And however hard you pull, you won't get any further off the ground, except you'll just waste a lot of effort straining. Like people who feel guilty. The guilt does absolutely nothing for them. It doesn't really change their conduct in any significant way. I know people who feel worried. It doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make them any more sensible in their behavior. They simply exhaust their psychic energies for perfectly useless purposes. And they wonder why they're tired.

[48:16]

Reflecting the Mirror, Part 1, this morning's lecture by the late Alan Watts. We will continue with this seminar with Part 2 of Reflecting the Mirror next Sunday morning.

[48:33]

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