I was discussing this morning, the way in which time, which is a measure of motion, involves us in certain illusions, principally what I call the historical illusion. That is to say that the meaning of human life lies in living through a progression of events which culminates and finds its satisfaction in the future. And trying to show you how, in various ways, the illusion of history has been extremely destructive to people. How, for example, it fascinates us with symbols.

[01:16]

They may be symbols of wealth, such as money, or symbols of status. So that the people who are, in our world, highly successful cannot understand why their lives are so empty. Because they lack presence, they lack the full, rich relationship to the physical world in the here and now. And because they don't understand why they're so miserable, they think they can cure their situation by more of the same. That is to say, by bigger and better futures, more money, more power, more status. And so they go on compounding the problem, and still failing to understand why they're increasingly miserable. And they don't know what they want, because their wants have, as it were, grown to dimensions where they're inconceivable.

[02:20]

And so they also don't know who they are, because they have confused their true, organic, living being with the mask, the persona, the role, constimated around the ego, which they have been taught to believe themselves to be. None of this is to underrate the real uses of time, that is to say, of clocks, because all time is a matter of clocks. There is no time in nature. There is rhythm in nature, yes, there is motion in nature. But the clock, as a measure of motion, is a human artifact. The world, as it spins on its axis, doesn't tick.

[03:24]

And I also pointed out that the calibration of the clock, whereby we have hairlines to designate the point at which a certain second occurs, is symbolic of the emptiness of our moments. When the moment is reduced to a hairline, you feel that it's here and gone. That you can't ever really be now, because it's all flying away, all flying away, and you can never sit down and be there. This was Faust's problem, you see? When he attains his highest moment, and his calling, I still delay, thou art so fair, see? The moment is a very curious thing. It isn't fleeting at all. It looks as if it is, but it isn't. The moment is always with you. And this is the point, to understand this is the point, of all those spiritual exercises,

[04:31]

which are concerned with concentrating on what you are doing now, and keeping your mind on it. For example, in the practice of the Japanese tea ceremony, the entire art of it is to have complete presence of mind. To be completely with doing just this thing. Likewise, in all sorts of yoga exercises, try and be completely now. The whole training of a Zen monk, day in and day out, throughout his discipline, whether it's meditation, or whether it's work, or sweeping, or cooking, or eating, or whatever it is, they keep insisting, do what you're doing. Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and do that. But the point of that exercise is that after you practice it for a while, it suddenly occurs to you a great shock, which is a sort of satori, that there is nowhere else to be but the moment.

[05:34]

You cannot be anywhere else. It doesn't flow away, it's always here. Maybe a lot of things flow through it. Forms change, experiences change, rhythms change. And so on. But it's always there. So you have plenty of time, in the sense of real time, which is the moment. To have time is to have the moment. Do you remember the story that Flory told at the end of last session, where the Dalai Lama's brother says that, yes, it was very nice to come to the United States, but the problem, the difference between here and Tibet, was that here you have all sorts of power and whatnot, but you have no time. In Tibet you have a very primitive existence and lots of time. And it's so interesting to get into a culture that is so-called primitive.

[06:45]

It's very easy, because you can now take a jet plane to Puerto Vallarta. In a matter of very short time, you can be in touch with a culture that is ancient. Because you only have to go from Puerto Vallarta down north or south to the Indian villages along the coast, which you can only reach by boat. Or by jeep through jungle roads, which are just terrible. And you get out to these people, and suddenly everything stops. Now, where are they going? They're doing the things they've always done. And in some way, we always say, it's a sleepy village. Not very exciting. So, actually, Zen is the art of combining an exciting life with living in the complete present.

[07:59]

Very curious. It's not sleepy at all. It's not like you would think of a sleepy village. When you watch Zen monks walking, they don't dawdle, they're like cats. You know how a cat crosses a road? It has a complete kind of, it knows where it's going, it just goes like that. And that's like a Zen monk walking. It's a most curious combination of what you would call the virtues of economy, of expertness in doing what you do, and at the same time, not being in any hurry. This Zen master in San Francisco, Suzuki Roshi, is particularly admired by his students for achieving an enormous amount of work without ever seeming to make the slightest effort.

[09:06]

And he can move, they've just been working down at Tassajara Springs, and they have rearranged a rocky stream to make it look more natural. And he can move bigger rocks than any of the tough young men who are working along with him. Simply fantastic. But it's all based on the real relationship to the material, especially to the material moment, and working in such a way that you never strain yourself because you never rush. You don't have in mind the goal and wanting to get there in the greatest possible hurry. You have in mind simply that every phase of doing the work which will eventually arrive at that goal is as much worth doing as when you're playing music. You are involved completely in the production of the sounds as they go along,

[10:12]

without hurrying them to reach the end. That's the same as sex. A lot of people are in a hurry to reach the end, and therefore they never have sexual satisfaction, because they have nothing but orgasms. And although people have talked a great deal about the importance of the orgasm, and that's true and right and perfectly proper, it's worth nothing without the build-up. You know, it would be the same thing as taking dietetic pills, where you have a few pills which contain all the essential nutrition to slow down, get on with real life, or by having some substitute for sleep, that you could take in a pill and not have to sleep. Incidentally, I just want to put in a parenthesis here about the importance of sleep. There's a very special kind of sleep, which the Hindus call Sushupti,

[11:16]

sleep without dreams and very deep. And it isn't sleep funny, that you go to bed and time is totally eliminated, until you wake up. And you seem to wake up immediately after you went to sleep, and yet something happened. Now, there is a way of getting into completely profound sleep, which I call, I don't know where I got the word, I call it a temple sleep. And I found it best in a protected area out of doors, on a sunny afternoon or at night, where you get under a tree, and you get a suitable pad, and you lie on your back,

[12:18]

and you simply open up like a cat does or a dog does sometimes, you stretch in every direction like this, and you surrender to the earth, and you sink, you let go, you imagine your body is extremely heavy, so that it's dropping into the earth, and you just let yourself go to the night, with the kind of feeling that you are being moved through by immensely powerful life energy, healing energy or whatever, and you give, give, give, give to this letting go of everything, letting go of all control, of all consciousness, of all anxiety, of all care about anything. And you go right down into this immense depth, and then you wake up a little before dawn,

[13:20]

and the sky is a deep, deep blue, and you can see the stars through the leaves, and that feeling that you get when morning comes, and everything is awakening, and there's a kind of extraordinary freshness to the world, that you really thoroughly get with the dawn, it's a magnificent experience. But you see, the trouble is that sleep strikes our whole culture as a waste of time. Why have to take this out, you see? Why have to cut it out? But what I'm indicating by giving you this little imagery, is how it's possible to enjoy unconsciousness, and what restorative value unconsciousness can have, in just the same way, a death. You know, um, Stevenson's poem, Under the wide and starry sky,

[14:21]

Dig me a grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. If you can see death in that way, as the, just as when you went to sleep, you abandoned all the cares, and so on, so in death, you abandon all responsibilities. People in the moment of death have had great, marvelous experiences with this, if they got with it. Just think, you don't have to pay any more bills, you don't have to watch the clock anymore, you're not responsible for anyone, you don't have to solve anybody's problems, you don't have to solve your own problems, you don't have to avoid evil, you don't have to do good, nothing. The whole thing, the whole strain of being somebody, is abandoned. And when that happens, some people, before they die,

[15:25]

have this enormous access of delight, and suddenly see the point of everything. And so, for that reason, all forms of initiation, in every place I can think of, have invariably been connected with the art of dying in the middle of life. Die now, and give up. Give up the compulsion to go on. Give up protecting yourself, looking for security, looking for all those things, which, when you get them, hurt. Don't you know that? That when you get security, it hurts, because you're worried you're going to lose it. This is terribly true. And so, when you die in the middle of life, they used to have, of course, in some religions,

[16:28]

ceremonies, where you underwent a ritual death, you were put in a coffin, you went down into a deep pit, some symbolism of death. In Christianity, you were drowned, it's called baptism. And that's supposed to be, but they forgot, you see, what it was all about. And then, when you come up, you would think now, I have been relieved of all responsibility. I have been relieved of all necessity to be anything, because I've become nobody. So they give you a new name, but they give you a nobody name, instead of a somebody name. In Christianity, when they baptized somebody, they gave him the name of one of the archetypal angels or disciples. So that you were no longer, say, Laotian, you became Peter. And Peter is one of the nobodies,

[17:32]

the great nobodies, you see. So, I've noticed recently, I've met a few young people who have abandoned the ordinary idea of naming themselves. I met a young man just the other night, and he said, what is your name? He said, it's you. And I remember a story about Dr. Spiegelberg, when he visited my son-in-law, when my son-in-law was very young, and he got this formidable professor, Professor Friedrich Spiegelberg, and said, I don't know what to call you. And Spiegelberg said, just call me IU. So this kid's name was you, and I found, oh, there's a man going around who calls himself a plastic man. And, that's all anybody knows it by. Somebody came by the other day and suggested that it would really disturb the whole nation if an enormous number of young people

[18:34]

all changed their names to Hare Krishna. So that their driver's license, what you do is you just go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and you say, I've changed my name, would you please give this license to Hare Krishna? Everybody would be Hare Krishna. But this, you see, is the thing of this death. Death filled the role that you thought you were playing, giving up all these responsibilities to amount to anything, to be something. Now, here then comes this absolutely critical point, which is why in every initiatic discipline there is a discipline. In other words, the individual is in some way nurtured for that moment. Because, obviously, the moment you have given up all the cares and responsibilities, you get an immense access of psychic energy.

[19:35]

Because all the energy which you've been expending, defending yourself, is available for something else. So you become quite potentially dangerous. And so always the society has been concerned about what will become of free people. Will they use the energy destructively or constructively? But the first thing to realise, to understand, if one is concerned about this, is that there is a great deal of energy attached to this. One normally supposes that human beings are naturally lazy. People we call lazy are just tired. Or they're undernourished. Or their organism isn't working properly. For reasons that either tire, they've been fighting themselves too much,

[20:36]

they can't stand it, or else they don't have the right vitamins or something. The human being is not lazy, naturally. The human being is a very strange creature. It has an enormous amount of surplus energy. Also, does the stickleback fish, this particular fish, dances a great deal to get rid of its surplus energy. And so, in the same way, human beings have all this energy at their disposal. And the question is how to canalise it in such a way that they don't cause trouble with it. So then, you have, in other words, to be ready with something to do with it. So as to canalise it, and not just blow it all off. But it

[21:38]

is all contingent upon this huge gamble. Let me put it in this way. It is that the initiation death is a gamble. Will you bet me that if you completely abandon all control, you know, where the ordinary kind of will control, give it up completely, see? You're not responsible for anything. Will you bet me that if you make that gamble, you will suddenly discover that you are full of great stuff, great energy. And a lot of people will not accept that gamble under any circumstances. They're scared to death of it. Some people will make the gamble

[22:40]

and they'll be like the guy who won the Irish sweepstake and was ruined for life. Because they don't know how to handle it. And this is one of the great problems of today, when mystical experiences and things like that are so easily and readily available for all sorts of reasons that a lot of people who are very immature get hold of this kind of experience and don't know what to do with it. Because they don't have the skills with which and in terms of which this kind of experience can be beautifully and creatively used. It isn't just a matter of goodwill. The proverb says the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It isn't enough to be a person of goodwill. It isn't enough to be gentle as a dove.

[23:42]

You also have to be wise as a serpent. So I say this in a general preface about getting out of history. This is the real dropout situation. A Buddha, for example, in a certain way of talking is a dropout because he dropped off the wheel of samsara. The rat race of birth and death where you are always living for a future. But you see the nature of horror is a vacuum. If you drop out of one situation you drop into another. And so observe where you drop in when you drop out. Well now

[24:49]

that brings me then to this point that I will call the Great Diversion. The future is not forever. It is something you cannot work for for exactly the same reason that you cannot work to be happy. Happiness, it's always said, is a by-product. And it will accrue to you through becoming absorbed in something else altogether. In some other quest altogether. The quest for vision. The quest for doing something, anything may bring happiness. And so in exactly the same way the good future,

[25:54]

the great society, the ground tomorrow is never going to be attained by working for it directly. When you've got that idea which is embodied just as much in the five-year plan as it is in the great society of working for that thing, you will never make it. The only way you can get the good future is by a diversion from time altogether at right angles to the course of history. So what is important now today is to create a diversion of such splendor that people will forget about the things they think are important. All their squabbles, all their ridiculous projects for destroying the planet in the name of progress, give it up

[26:55]

because they see something else is going on which is a great deal more fun. It's like, you know, you would have gambling tables at Las Vegas and in some great casino there's been a terrible game going on all night where people are getting more and more emotionally upset and they're all involved in their tremendous stakes and there's a huge crowd gathered around it and, oh, what if that doesn't come out and so on. And suddenly somewhere over in another corner of the casino something starts up and all the people here are threatening to shoot each other and so on. And over there they're all laughing and someone's sitting at the back of the crowd a few characters and the big crowd, you know, there's a big serious game going on and they're all looking over. Suddenly here there's a thing going on and they start turning over and looking at the other table and they begin to peel off and go over there and start joining in that game. And finally,

[27:56]

just at the moment when the immense crash is going to come out and these two great gamblers have gambled the whole universe on what they were doing as if they owned it and they're about to we've got the bomb ready to blow each other up. They suddenly look around huh? Nobody's watching. And they start looking over there. What's going on over there, isn't he? So this is the only way in which we can do anything about the future at all. The only way is to create a diversion of doing things and living in a way that is non-historical and that is instead of preparing to live the great life as a result of all sorts of preparations use what capacities you now already have for living the great life to do it. Don't wait. And this will create

[28:59]

a fantastic diversion from history. Then you see that man can attain sanity once again by becoming non-historical like the bees like the ants like the birds. Now we look at ants and say oh ants we don't want to be like that that reminds me of communists. But that's only because we are not close enough to ants to see their different personalities. If there are a bunch of ants sitting around and they're apparently to us doing very very simple things like nurturing eggs and milking green fly but the ants themselves all look different to each other. They have slightly different colorings slightly different wiggles on their antennae which are just as important to them as our facial differences are to us. And they have ways

[30:01]

of communicating. And they think that this is a very very good life. I mean they have occasional troubles and wars and so on but they don't they've lived that way so far as we know for millions and millions of years without any progress. Now you would say that could be very dull. Yes it would be dull if you kept keeping records and reading them. Because then you would say oh well you would get too much memory. Now this is a very important thing. Again let me warn you that I always exaggerate. Therefore you must take it with certain reservation which we call a grain of salt. A memory is a good thing. Sure. But equally important is a forgettery. We have in the human organism fortunately and massively a hole at each end. One for nutrition

[31:02]

and one for elimination. And people don't pay enough attention to the problems of elimination. At least they paid in a certain way. Has become one of the major problems of modern civilization. As a practical problem for the city of San Francisco where to put the garbage is becoming quite critical. Mountains and mountains and mountains of garbage are arising. And it is almost as if the human being could be eventually crowded off the earth by his own wastes. That's because we haven't really thought about elimination and the problems of elimination. We've only really thought about the problems of keeping, storage and the things

[32:04]

we store. I'm appalled by the files that I'm required to keep. By the correspondence. By the increasing accumulation of records. This thing, I don't know why I make these tapes. Some people like to listen to them. I never listen to them because it would take me as long to listen to them as it does to make it. And I would simply be repeating the experience. Why do that? If some student wants to go through something more carefully, fine. But you can read a book so much faster than you can listen to a tape. So there is a thing going on now called the information bomb. Which is the proliferation of records. And this has reached such a pitch that it is plainly absurd. Let me give you some examples from a field

[33:05]

that I'm well acquainted with. Oriental studies. And then you know this is a small field of relative unimportance. But today, to be a serious scholar in the field of Oriental studies, you have to make light. You're a very, very meticulous scientist. Because if you publish an article in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, which is one of the dullest journals ever conceived, and you make a slight mistake with a diacritical mark on a Sanskrit character or a little line wrong in a Chinese character, you will next month be demolished in a footnote by some pesky scholar. And here they all are. They've got so much detail in their head.

[34:05]

They know so much. So much information has been acquired. Nobody could possibly master it. The articles come pouring out. If it's that way in Oriental studies, you should imagine how it is in electronics. It comes and comes and comes and comes, and I was talking the other day to a man who's done a great deal of work in this, and he spent 15 or more years acquiring some Tibetan prints. And he could, out of this material, compile two enormous volumes to be published by university press with every kind of commentary on these prints. And what would happen? They would be bought by a few big libraries and one or two scholars and nobody would ever read it. So he said to me, I am through with that game. I am an old man. I have seen enough. I have attained all the academic honors I ever could want and I am now going to have fun. And I am going

[35:07]

to publish these Tibetan graphics as far out posters as possible. But you see what happens. After a certain point, this method of the intellectual analysis, which was always good and useful in the beginning and did some very lovely things. After all, when you study, let's say you take a course on Renaissance painting from somebody who really knows what it's all about or on Baroque music or on Lieder or something like that. It's fascinating to see how those things were put together and why. It's extremely beautiful. But if you go one step beyond that, it's like cooking

[36:07]

the souffle just a minute too long. The whole thing disintegrates into dust. And as it is then in the academic world today, where you have an intellectual market going on to do this thing, to turn out graduate students, to turn out professors, who have to put the new graduate students through the paces and all the field has been covered so they give them more and more minute and ridiculous things to do and all the information because some of it is information piles in and piles in and piles in. Everybody, including the scholars, suddenly get around one day and say, what on earth are we doing? Especially if it's in a sort of historical humanistic subject that has no particular technical application. When Aldous Huxley graduated from Bayview, at Oxford, his tutor took him aside and said, Mr. Huxley, you have a very distinguished record as a student. He was in English literature.

[37:07]

He said, you should very seriously consider an academic career in English literature. You would make a very fine professor. And Aldous Huxley said, that's most extraordinary because I always thought literature was something to be enjoyed, not to be studied. And so it is, you see, that the capacity for the enjoyment of scholarship is not really known to these frantic scholars. Terrified that they will be demolished in a footnote. And having to make that thing and keep this thing going. You know, realize that the word schola, a school, means a place of leisure. It was where the phrase a scholar and a gentleman. A gentleman meant somebody who didn't have to earn a living because he

[38:09]

owned land or something. And therefore he could devote his time to scholarship. And so a scholar and a gentleman would acquire gradually their beautiful library. And he would go into that library and read at an easy pace. No deadlines, no thesis to present at a certain time. He studied for the love of learning. And all those beautiful like Bernard Berenson's library at E. Cuddy in Florence is a gentleman scholar's library where he loafed away many, many good hours studying a subject that he loved and got to know a great deal about it. You cannot produce scholarship by this method across the bay. It doesn't work. It produces simply increased harassment. Piling up of enormous

[39:09]

quantities of irrelevant facts, yes. But a fact isn't a sacred thing just because it's a fact. So you see in this way how a graded education system with goals, with aiming at God only knows what, aiming at a professorship of a higher rank, aiming at a higher salary, but whatever it is, all that is irrelevant to the actual scholarship. And so as a result the academic world is a lot of political games. With, I say again, some notable exceptions. One knows certain still absolutely genuine scholars who are trying to avoid committee meetings and

[40:09]

grading papers and all that kind of thing because they still love learning for its own sake. But there are not many of them. And they have amazing put-downs. If you love learning for its own sake and you're not worried about all the fine little points that you could get caught up on they say you're a popularizer, you're a dilettante, and above all an amateur. And you know what an amateur is is distinct from a pro? We've come to use the word pro, the man who's very competent, an amateur, the dabbler. Amateur meant the man who does it for the love of it. From the group Ammo in Madrid. The professional, the man who earns his living at it. It's curious how these things change. So you see, what we must be looking for is a

[41:09]

diversion from that whole tendency which makes the professional instead of the amateur. That whole compulsion to use whatever it is that you do for some other end altogether. In other words, I'm baking bread not because I'm a vocation to be a baker, but because it is made of making money. If the sooner you do that the sooner lose track. You lose the point. So the diversion this way, instead of going on with the course of history. Robert Oppenheimer shortly before he died said, it is quite obvious that the whole world is going to help. And the only thing that could possibly prevent this is not trying to prevent it. Because the minute you get meshed with that contest

[42:10]

of, you see, there's nothing more nobody I know in this world is more hostile than a pacifist on the rampage. The vigilance, the vitriolic, once I got in an argument with Margaret Mead, the woman who was talking about, she was in a very, very highly emotional state. This was perfectly understandable about the bomb. I said, I am a little worried that we could get so excited about this and so violently try to stop the bomb that we might inadvertently blow it off. She said, you are right.

[43:34]

I don't know if you don't know that there is nothing more I can do to stop the bomb might try to that we might inadvertently try to get out there and do something about it. After all, you're responsible, you've got a gearing and all that kind of thing. And I have to tell you, it takes an enormous effort to be lazy to say, now wait a minute, go back to Lao Tzu and never forget it. When I see a man getting ready to put the world in order, I know there will be great trouble. Come in a great state as you cook a small fish. Now, do you see the puzzle in connection with all

[44:47]

this? Here's the problem with the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Do you remember in this story which, what was his name, Dukar, who was a musician, he used the magic to try and save the work. And it got out of control. And when the broom wouldn't stop fetching water, he didn't know how to stop the spell, he chopped it. And immediately it turned into two brooms bringing twice as much water. And as he hit them, the fragments turned in each one into a new broom bringing more water. And that's the situation we're in. See, we're in an economy which has to expand or collapse. We talk about a growing business, it means one that's making

[45:55]

more and [...] more. So everybody has got to be incited to want more and more and more products. And if you don't do it, you're a bad consumer. And there are all kinds of ways of pressuring you into being a good consumer. You come around here, you live on a houseboat. Well, we don't pay taxes because we're a boat. And, well, that worries people. And they say, oh, don't you have sewage here? And everybody says, no. Well, I say, that's a serious health problem. Well, it just isn't because everybody who lives around here is very healthy. And the main problem in the bay is industrial waste, chemicals, kill the fish. Fish like our waste, especially mackerel, they thrive on it. All you've got to do is bring a big shipment of mackerel and dump it. And then what about

[46:58]

the birds, you know? They deposit their excrements in the bay. And at certain times of year, you can hardly see the water for birds. What are they going to do? Have posses going around shooting the birds because they're ploughing the bay? What they want in this bay is distilled water with a 10% saline additive for realistic effect. So the thing is then, if you live in this sort of thing, eventually somebody says, well, we won't insure you. Or you're doing this regulation's wrong, that regulation's wrong. The real reason is that you're not being a good consumer. You don't own the right kind of appliances, the right kind of car, the right kind of anything. And so you're considered a bad consumer. And you've got to go on owning. Somebody made a fantasy a little while ago about the future where everybody is required by law to possess enormous flashy cars and fantastic expensive things. And only

[48:03]

great business tycoons will be able to get away with driving jalopies and wearing old clothes. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part two from the seminar, Time in the Future. If you'd like a copy of this, your lectures, send $9.00 to M-E-A-O-X-3-O-3-S-O-C-E-L-E-A-

[48:26]

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