Rosalito, 9496, Seminar Reflecting the Mirror, number 8711, and this is Part 2. Here is Alan Watts. Reflection considered as, I was considering it from many points of view. Reflection as self-consciousness, the person first aware of his own existence by looking in a mirror. And reflection connected with that, as thereby giving you the possibility of pleasure or disgust for your own existence. What do you see in the mirror? Do you like it? Don't you like it? And this is the same sort of property as in the sonic world, as distinct from the visual, when we make sound reverberate in the echo chambers or sounding boards or sounding boxes

[01:09]

of musical instruments. It's the same, for example, when you get singing in a great cathedral. One of the, a great cathedral is in a way designed as a musical instrument. So that when a choir sings in it, you get a curious kind of reverberation. And some singers, where they don't have that reverberation, train their voices to contain a kind of echo in them, to give this quality. Why? Because the echo tells you, yes it happened. And so in the same way we get this, this begins in so many ways to build up into something kind of compulsive. You know very well the sort of situation where you are having a great time at a picnic on the beach and somebody says, say it's too bad nobody brought a camera.

[02:13]

Because through taking a photograph you record that this really happened. And in just the same way a lot of people will do anything to get their names into the newspaper. Because then it's on the record, it really happened. And you only know that it did happen as an echo occurs. And if you can get that echo going on as long as possible, you see, you're going down into history as that you really lived. So then the price we pay for the echo, for the record, is double. That is to say, there is on the one hand the possibility of feeling good about being alive, you see? You look in the mirror and you have the experience of vanity.

[03:16]

On the other hand the price paid is that the moment there's a record, you get the possibility to live prediction. The moment you can remember what has happened, you can project that series of events and say in all probability this leads to the following series of events. This is to your advantage, yes, but it is to your disadvantage because you pay the price of anxiety. Will it come out all right? Can I control it? Or indeed, since I know the prediction is in the last resort, can I control it? Or indeed, since I know the prediction is in the last resort, that all my schemes and my very existence will eventually fall apart. And therefore I've got to work and worry and do things to prevent that happening.

[04:20]

The question is, is the game worth the candle? And of course if the game isn't worth the candle, there will happen to it, as it always happens to all games, it'll simply conclude itself. It is an important point to remember that all predicted futures are already passed to the degree that the prediction is certain. When we are playing games, and at a certain stage, say in chess, the outcome of the game is certain, and both opponents decide, well, white has to win and mate in x moves, the game is cancelled and a new one is started because the point of playing the game is to remain in a state of uncertainty. But when certainty develops, then the future is passed.

[05:26]

You've had it. So then, the more we develop skill in prognosticating the future, and in controlling the outcome of the future, the more we are going to abandon any such future. Because we really don't know what, we don't want to know what the future is. This is the natural, instinctual reaction of many people to having their fortunes told. They would rather avoid it. They don't want to know when they're going to die. And you can say, maybe this is because people like to preserve the illusion of freedom. And by not knowing what's going to happen, therefore have the sense that what's going to happen is not already arranged, or not already practically existent.

[06:27]

The future could be, in other words, something you come across, like a painting that was done 10,000 years ago. But here it is, that to the degree that we develop the ability to be aware of what is happening, to record it, to describe it, and through that description to predict what it will do next, to that extent we find it less and less worth going on. So I raised in the last lecture this absolutely fundamental question. We can see ourselves today, through our technology, moving into the extinction of the human race.

[07:35]

You can think of a number of ways in which we might make an end of ourselves, any one of which would be heftily disastrous, but the combination of them is overwhelming. We have the nuclear bombs problem, we have the population problem, we have the erosion problem of the reduction of natural resources, we have the pollution problem, and we have the problem, well, which is related to pollution, of what I would call general ecological disregard. Disregard of plant life, wildlife, bacterial life, all kinds of subtly interrelated life systems, which flourish only so long as they're dependent on each other and working for each other, and we are involved in such a network of different kinds of life systems without

[08:49]

which we can't exist. But we are geared to living on the short run. That is to say, let's take any business project in which there's a corporation designed to make a certain product, and it has a lot of shareholders, none of whom are, as a matter of fact, interested in what the corporation is doing physically. They have invested in it simply to make money. Therefore, all they want out of it is money, not 40 years hence, but this year, because they won't wait for money 40 years hence, because that will be for their children, and

[09:54]

they don't really care about that. They care about making the results immediately. So as a consequence, the corporation acts upon the earth, supposing it's in the lumbering business. They get as much lumber off the hills as they can in the shortest possible time. The lumber man knows, if he is actually engaged in working in the forest, that he should replant and keep the forest going. Or let's take winemaking. You have hills and hills and hills with grapes growing all over them. Now you can run in there and tear all the grapes off the hills and turn them into wine, and whoops, it's gone. You made a fast buck. Next year, because the vineyard thing failed, you can invest in something else.

[10:58]

You have no responsibility. The grapes will only come back on that hill if you make them welcome. In other words, you've got to love the vines and work over them and cultivate them and keep the hill in the right state. Then the grapes will want to come back next year, and you'll have the wine again. But if what you're interested in is money, you have no interest in the actual physical situation. And therefore it is for this reason that people whose occupations and whose lives are primarily involved in making money may succeed in doing this by jumping from buying wheat to buying carloads of grapes, which they never see, they just buy them on the railroad and sell

[12:03]

them before they get to Chicago or wherever they're destined for. You will find, almost invariably, that people who are on the business of making money have no idea how to spend it. I'm going to announce a seminar next year, maybe, by saying, Are You Rich and Miserable? If so, I have some news for you. I'm going to tell you how to spend your money. But this is the problem, you see. This is an absolutely basic illustration of the way in which when man creates the symbolic world of measures, of words, of all sorts of symbols which represent, represent, or

[13:08]

indeed reproduce the physical world, he's got to be terribly careful not to confuse the two levels. Because what happens if he does? Well look at it. Look at the history from the point of view of economics. You remember in the Great Depression, when one day everybody was living it up, there was the great boom of the 1920s, and then suddenly the great bust of the 1930s. What happened? There was not one day in prosperity, one day in poverty, but there had been no alteration whatsoever in our material resources, in our energy resources, in our intelligence resources. From a strictly physical point of view, we were as rich in the boom days as in the bust

[14:16]

days. What broke down was the mechanics of distribution. Because there was a slump, not in wealth, but in money. As if to say, well you can't work here today on this building project because there are not enough inches to go around. And we don't understand, you see, that money has the same order of reality and only the order of reality, of inches, of grams. It is a method of measuring real wealth to avoid the inconvenience of barter. So that if you, instead of having to take ten baskets of eggs down to the market in order to buy a hunk of lamb, you could take the measure, the official measure of ten baskets

[15:22]

of eggs, which you had sold by some other process in going to market, and you could take that down to market and receive, for this measure token, the lamb you wanted or whatever else, the clothes. But then when human beings created machinery and therefore eliminated the services for which many people were paid so that they could barter their services instead of their eggs, their services were displaced by machinery. And of course that's the object of making machines, the whole point of making machines is to get rid of work. What other reason? So therefore, when you, but because people are mixed up about this, when they got rid

[16:26]

of work by creating machinery and automation, they said to the people put out of work, why you're unemployed, and therefore you can't have any money, because you're not earning a living. Oh, it's okay, there was no one to buy the product. You hear the machines turning out, [...] canned goods, everything galore, no one to buy it because they don't have any money. So the government steps in and says to the farmer, we'll pay you not to produce anything this year, we'll support you, we don't need these products. Or they hand out regretfully to all the unemployed a little dough, which they make them ashamed of because you have to line up in a queue, some wretched bureaucrat who asks you all

[17:29]

sorts of questions and says why haven't you found a job yet, why did you quit your last job, etc., etc., etc. And meanwhile the manufacturer can't sell his stuff. So what does he have to do? See in order to, the basic principle is when you get rid of the mythology of the symbol, a community has to pay itself for the work the machines do in its place, see, in other words it has to issue itself credit for what machines produce, otherwise nobody can circulate the product. But it doesn't do this, because that's to go into debt. And people only go into debt when they're in desperation. So therefore in order to go into debt, in order to have enough money to circulate to buy these products, you have to create an emergency because people will only go into

[18:29]

debt in an emergency. So therefore have a war, that's an emergency. It's absolutely necessary to invent wars and to have an external enemy. You invent this, then everybody says oh it's all right to the government, increase the national debt a little, we'll pay more taxes, etc., but mind you, you have more debt than we pay taxes. And so they up the issue of money, credit, so that there is enough purchasing power in the hands of the populace to keep the machines working. And you see this is the most moronic stupidity that could possibly be imagined, because it's all based on the confusion of money with reality. On the confusion of yards with cloth. The confusion of pounds with apples. And you see this is the fits into which the human race has gotten itself through reflection.

[19:36]

Through creating all the symbols, as a result therefore, we live in a material sense a completely phony existence. Let me go into some examples of this for your entertainment. Let's take the average home in an industrial society. You remember, let's go back in some of your memories, those of you who may be old enough to remember, a farmhouse, belonging to a pre-industrial era. Now I'm not going to idealize the pre-industrial era. I'm not against technology. I think technology is marvelous, that we just can't do without it. But the thing is we are not allowing it to work. But go back to the old days, to a farmhouse. Did you have a living room in your farmhouse? You didn't.

[20:41]

You had a place called the parlor, which was mostly uninhabited, and was opened up when the clergyman called, or when the relatives came, and you sat around in the parlor and sort of talked, because the parlor is from the word parley, the talk place. And you know, there were certain family heirlooms there, there were some special old plates and photographs, a cabinet, perhaps a piano, but the whole place smelled of mothballs and nobody ever went in it. Where did you live? You lived in the kitchen. And a great big honest-to-god kitchen that was really functioning, and everybody came in. It wasn't just a little incestuous family with mama and papa and a few kids, but there were all sorts of people, aunts and uncles and people who worked there, and everybody came in and there was a huge community, and all your children were exposed to a great variety of adults. Now, for some weird reason, this home has been turned inside out.

[21:47]

The parlor has suddenly become the main room, it's called the living room. The kitchen has been exiled to a small closet comparable to a bathroom and similarly decorated, white, sanitary, colorless, and most people living in cities have a kitchen about the size of a small closet. They are not really interested in food. They eat in order to live, they don't live in order to eat, which is the proper way around. Because they regard food as a sort of medicine, you know, so many carbohydrates, so many proteins, so many calories, and you buy so much food, and you look on the package, and it's got the same kind of small print that medicine has, saying contents this, this, this, percent and so on, point zero, zero, something, and everybody looks upon food as medicine.

[22:55]

And one of the most important things in life is to know the difference between medicine and diet. Lots of people confuse them. For example, LSD is medicine, not diet. You just mustn't live on that kind of thing. But everybody is absolutely hooked on medicine, and that's one of the great troubles of religion in our society, is that it is hooking people on religion. Where a doctor tries to get rid of his patients, a clergyman is always trying to keep them. They'll pay their contribution regularly to the upkeep of the church. It's like you're saying, pay your contribution to the doctor regularly to keep up the hospital. I mean, if you have a voluntary hospital, that's a different matter. But most of our hospitals are doctor's shops. They're not voluntary hospitals. In the old world, then. But here is the situation, you see, the home, where the room for living is a room in which

[24:01]

living is not done. Let's just consider, would you, for a moment, the design of a house. Here is the so-called living room, and what is it, what's in it? Chairs. Couches. The chairs are perches for people who are so stiff in their limbs that they're unable to relate to the earth. So they have to be settled on perches in order to be able to be there. The chair does have a reasonable function, which is in combination with a table. Because the function of a table is to keep food above the level of the animals and of roaring children around. It just keeps it a little bit out of the way. So naturally, you sit at a chair at a table. But just to sit at a chair, I'm embarrassed every time I ask people in here, and I put

[25:02]

all these perches around for our ungainly bodies, because we can't perfectly simply, like the Japanese, adapt to the floor and be comfortable. But then the overstuffed furniture is a real joke. These things look like gun emplacements, and the children often use them for that very purpose. They crawl in them and make portraits and go ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, you know? But whenever you have to move, think of the expense of lugging that stuff around, the expense of buying it in the first place. Every time you want to clean the carpet, you have to lug this stuff all over the place and vacuum underneath it. Then take the bed, the bedroom. People have whole bedrooms set apart, which is a total waste of space. Nobody needs a bedroom. Any sensible person wraps himself up in a blanket and lies down on a pad. A special room for doing this. I never forget, as a child in England, how depressed I was by the average English bedroom.

[26:07]

Because, first of all, they're unheated. And at a certain hour at night, your parents send you away, up to bed with you. And you go to this cold room, you know, where there's a bed, and it has black iron ends on it with brass balls on top. And there in one corner is a washstand. And there is a bowl in it and a jug of cold water, pitcher of cold water. And the bathroom is equally cold. If you want any hot water, you have to turn on a geyser, you know, the gas thing which gradually heats the water up. And that's the end of the line. You know, you're off in this vacuum. Well, there's nothing to do in a bedroom but bed. See? Well, I don't like to make that rigid a division between day and night. I like to slowly drift off to bed.

[27:08]

You know, doing things and reading and what not, puttering around. When I feel like it, I just roll up in a blanket and go to sleep. And anywhere will do. I don't need a special room for it. Now, if you've got to have a special room for a bedroom, all you need is a very small closet with the entire floor covered with foam rubber and an electric blanket and some sort of a sheet underneath you. And you could just zip into your little closet, pull over your electric blanket, and you have no problem with making beds. The average trial that a housewife goes through every day, crawling around beds that are tucked away in an awkward place, pulling them out, tucking the sheets underneath, two sheets, blanket on top, pillowcases, getting it all sorted out, bang, shoving it back into place. What a waste of time. You know, and lugging all the stuff around is ridiculous. And then the home itself, when you come to think of it, the whole thing, the whole bit,

[28:19]

what do most people use it for? It's nothing but a dormitory. The husband of the family goes off to an office, goes off to a factory, and he does something mysterious that the wife and the children don't really know anything about. And the children, most of the year, as Dylan Thomas put it, are shrilled off to school about 8, 30, 9 in the morning. And they're processed, mostly by other children. And they come home late in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the wife has been out at a coffee clutch, or at the League of Women Voters, or some luncheon club, or bridge club for ladies, or whatever she does.

[29:21]

And the home is deserted. Then everybody gets off work at the end of the day. The children come back from school first. And naturally the children come sailing into the kitchen, and the wife is probably back by now and beginning to think about dinner. And like all ordinary human beings, they'd like to be in there too. Naturally, they'd like to be cooking. But at a very early age, that is strictly discouraged. So they're not to bother in the kitchen, because it's too much fag to teach them how to cook. So instead, they are given toy cooking outfits. You see? Made of plastic. And the boys are given, the boys who should be hunting, or otherwise bringing in the bacon, are given plastic guns. And since none of these things work, and they don't kill anyone, they destroy them and enrage.

[30:27]

So that in any ordinary household, by 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the whole living room is littered with broken plastic, and decapitated teddy bears, upended dolls. And so Papa's coming home at 6 or thereabouts. And so Mama goes into a knock-down, drag-out battle with all the children to get that stuff thrown away into the bottom of the closets. And this goes on and on, and the children are screaming, and there's an awful atmosphere. Her digestion is ruined. There is absolutely no possibility of her being able to cook a decent meal on the basis of this. And the husband suddenly arrives back, slightly late. Because he has, after work, gone to a bar with some of his buddies. Because he just wanted a little relaxation and humane discourse. And they overstayed it a bit, and he realizes his wife will be mad if he doesn't get home on time. So in a slightly drunken state, he drives home much too fast, and imperils his life on the freeway,

[31:30]

just so that he won't be bawled out by his wife. And he gets back home, and is then expected to be a pal to the kids. Because, you see, the whole thing is a fallacy. That's not the way to live. It has nothing to do. See, because the husband doesn't involve the children in what he's interested in in life. You know, if I'm principally interested, let's take a far-out example. In playing the stock market. Well, I can get very interested in this. Just as interested as in bridge, or as in baseball, or in anything else. So naturally, if I were really interested in that, and had a kind of flair for teaching people how to do it, just as a result of my interest in it, I'd have my kids around and say, look, come on now, let's join this game.

[32:30]

Look, I'm going to do this, and this, and this today. What would you suggest I do? Let me see your suggestions for the day. And so, I find out one day that my kids' suggestions would have won better out than mine. So I say, okay baby, next day you're going to play it. See? And they would be involved. But instead, we send them to a school where we teach them to be everything and nothing. They're not trained for any concrete occupation whatsoever, except perhaps being some sort of bureaucrat. Or just some figure. So there is no real relationship in work, in the actual process of living, between a father and his children, or a mother and her children. It's all delegated off somewhere else. So in other words, this home represents nothing but an abstraction. Let's take again, what was the idea of the kitchen stuck off there somewhere in the back?

[33:31]

And when you have company to dinner, they all sit down at the table. And food is mysteriously prepared somewhere in the background. And suddenly it arrives at the table as if you had servants. When we forget that nothing increases the appetite so much as the guests sitting around the stove, watching it cooked. That's why people have reverted to barbecues. Why people like sukiyaki. Why there are so many hibachis. Why are we using all these oriental words? Just sit around and watch it happen. It increases the appetite. Nobody wants a dining room. Unless you have butlers, and maids, and sit down. Elegant food brought to you with high style. There is not such service available. Even if you could afford it.

[34:33]

But how much better, you see, to have a great kitchen. Where, you know, there's a substantial slab of a table. And there is salamis, and cheeses, and onions hanging from the ceiling. And where all the food is put out in the bottles, and the cans, and whatever containers. Just like you display your books in a library. Who would ever imagine covering up the books in his library? So in the kitchen, all the food should be there. But, we cover it up. We have these cupboards, you know. They're all getting away. Whenever you're trying to work on the thing, suddenly, bang! You hit your head on some shutting out cupboard that comes over the thing. So all this, you see, is part of this whole thing. I could go into so many dimensions of the way we do this.

[35:40]

But just for a moment, a brief excursion into automobiles. This is the sheerest madness. The... They say that what's good for General Motors is good for the United States. And they say to you about what sort of a condition you're in. What your state of consciousness is. Could you drive a car while in that state of consciousness? Well now, supposing you have a very good dinner, and you down two good bottles of wine. You shouldn't drive a car. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't drink two bottles of wine. You shouldn't drive a car while playing the violin. Or reading a book, or making love. But those are very creative human activities. So is having a convivial dinner.

[36:40]

But to think that at any moment, you should be able to be in a condition to up and drive a car. Supposing you were in the middle of profound meditations, and were seeing the vision of almighty God. Suddenly somebody says, you need to drive a car. You know, we're absolute maniacs, that being able to drive a car is the test of sanity. To propel a death dealing instrument along a freeway. I mean, it's like saying everybody should be able at any instant to pilot an airplane. Well that's enough, you have to be in training to pilot an airplane. And that'd be accordingly, paid very highly for the job. So, uh, the car, but all this is about nothing. Because the cars most people drive, are non-cars.

[37:44]

They are curious, weird engineering objects, with the most uneconomical engines. Made to consume as much gasoline as possible, to become obsolescent as fast as possible. They look as if they're streamlined, and aren't. Because they're not streamlined underneath. And to have a truly streamlined object, it has to be like a metal cigar. But these things look like a metal cigar on top, but underneath they're all open. You know, and the wet can come up every time you go through a puddle, the water goes all over the engine. And, uh, um, they're made of, of, of, pressured, huge sheets of pressured tin. So that if you get a dent in it, you have to take the whole thing off. And, uh, I mean they're just so bad, it's unbelievable. But they look right. They, they're made for the eye. And a certain kind of easily deceived eye.

[38:47]

And then, in order to accommodate the swarms of these things, because there's no proper public transportation. We have these gigantic freeways. That are really dangerous to drive on. You know, everything going at 60 miles an hour, and suddenly it all halts, because there's construction there. And you just try and stop in time, not to have a 20 car pile up. They keep having those. So, the, the problem is, you see, we are bewitched. We are being bewitched. Into an idea of what the good life ought to be. Which is strictly and purely conceptual. Visual. It has nothing to do with what our nerves, and our gut, and our tongues, and our stomachs respond to.

[40:02]

It's all based on a kind of visual deception. And even that's beginning to wear thin. You take a photograph in Life magazine, full color. Of layer cake. All that rich, creamy top. And you can see it's made of plastic. But a great many people are taken in by that. They think that, that that looks really good. See? And they'll eat mountains of that stuff. And it's all gas, fundamentally. You take bread. The average bread, the wonder bread. It's styrofoam. Squishy styrofoam with vitamins injected. And when you chew it, it immediately collapses. And turns into the same sort of basic pap that they feed babies, you know, out of cans. Gerber's stuff. And the babies always spit it out. You know how disgusting it is, feeding babies?

[41:07]

They have no appetite for this stuff. But it's all, it's essentially froth. It's plastic coated air. With minerals somehow in untastable quantities and vitamins that have been worked into it. The only trouble with that kind of bread is that it's not large enough and it's too imperishable to make a good bolster. So that's, that's our, our state. So the question arises, if that's the way it's going to go, and if there's going to be more of it, is the technological revolution a ghastly mistake? Well, you see, this is the thing now that is exercising a great many young people.

[42:11]

And you must watch out for this, because this is really serious. A great many young people today are saying it was all a mistake. And we are going to be most happy to see this entire civilization blow itself to pieces. We hope it won't do it by atomic bombs, because that'll catch everybody. But they are saying, we hope it will become so disorganized, and so run down, and so incompetent, that it will just fall apart. And they are hoping to survive by taking to the hills. And living in a kind of a scrubby way, what we would call a scrubby way. The Indians, the American Indians, have believed for a long time that this is what would happen to us. And they are just waiting until we collapse.

[43:12]

And they, they are the only people left who know how to live off the land. Now, I think that these people who, who imagine that they are going to be able to take to the hills, I think the average young college dropout who thinks he's going to be able to take to the hills is a fool. He'll have no more idea how to manage life in the hills than the man in the moon. He's not inured to it, he's not born to it as an Indian is. And he's going to get into great difficulties. I'm, I'm horrified that the way that most hippies mismanage their food. They have that macrobiotic diet which is unbelievably dreadful. It is the worst diet imaginable. And it's put out in the name of Zen and has nothing to do with Zen at all. They won't be able to, to manage without depending on technology.

[44:18]

So in some way, we, we have to find a way of using technology. That is realistic. That is an act of collaboration with the physical universe instead of an act of opposition and assault upon it. We can't do without it. So I'm, what I'm getting down to is this, that to resolve the problem created by the invention of symbols, by reflection, we've got to be very, very aware of the distinction between the symbolic order and the real natural or physical order. Then and only then can we use the symbolic order to help whatever is going on in the physical order.

[45:28]

And so help potatoes and help fish to be livelier and more edible fish. That's what you have to do. You have to, in any species that you want to eat, it's your responsibility to cherish it, to farm it, to help it to grow. Then you're justified in taking some pickings of it. So, but it's only, that can only be done on the basis of recognizing this absolutely fundamental distinction between the level of the symbol and the level of nature, or let's say material reality. Because actually, you see, the material world is the spiritual world.

[46:37]

Most Westerners think, you see, the other way around, that they think that the spiritual world is somehow allied to the abstract world. That, for example, let's take, for example, the number three. Three is a purely abstract conception and can be three anything. Three in itself has no existence, except as an idea. But many people think, you see, that the dimension of mathematics is more spiritual than the dimension of potatoes. But it's the other way around. Potatoes are spiritual because they are incarnations of the whole splendor of life. Yeah, you could talk about potatoes in terms of mathematics. You could measure potatoes, but you never can really catch a potato in a mathematical net any more than the lines of celestial latitude and longitude trapped for stars.

[47:44]

So, it is the actual, you see, the physical world is not matter. We don't know what it is. We will see that when you try to find out what the physical world is, what nature is, it interminably eludes you. You can't finally put your finger on it and say, got you. Because you find that what you put your finger on was in a way your own finger. At least that's what you were trying to do. And you never pin it down. Because nothing is more spiritual than matter. So the people who are accused of being materialists in a bad sense, actually they're not people who like matter.

[48:53]

They're people who like money. Or some symbol. Status. That's not material. And it shows this basic, you see, confusion of the world of measures with the world of nature. So you go back to your fundamental origins in Sanskrit of these ideas. And you find that the word Maya, the world of illusions, is not the world of nature. But the world of meter. Because the word Maya is based on the Sanskrit root matra, from which we get meter, matter. It's measure. And it means, matra, the root in Sanskrit, to lay down measurements for building a house.

[49:59]

So the material world is not this. You see, the material world is the world as measured. Like saying, oh, this cost five dollars. That's the world of Maya, the world of illusion. But we have confused the word material. We think by the word material we mean the actual tangible world. But, and that is opposed to the spiritual. The tangible is the spiritual. But the world that you can, the world of measures, the world as counted, should correctly be called the material world as distinct from the spiritual. Now you can't, if you use the word material in that sense, you can't eat it.

[51:07]

You can't eat the measures. But you can eat the fruit. And that, you see, is the world of transformation of energy, where eating the fruit, by a miracle, the fruit becomes you. And the apple eats other apples by becoming you. Like, um, a chicken is one egg's way of becoming others. See, the world of magical transformation. Well, I guess they aren't going to tell you, so I will. That was Alan Watts on another lecture by him. By the late Alan Watts. And it was called Reflecting the Mirror No. 2. If you're interested in getting that or any other Alan Watts lecture on tape,

[52:13]

write MEA Box 303, Sausalito, California, 94965.

[52:21]

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