This, then, is the last seminar in the series of seminars on the future, devoted to the subject of the future of politics. All along I’ve been emphasizing a particular point, which is this: that the very idea of the future has something spurious in it; that to live for the future is an indefinite postponement of life, and that the great political systems of the Western world—whether they be capitalist or communist—are based on the notion that what we live for is the future. And this is a very funny thing, especially when you think about Marxism. Because the Marxists have always said that religion is the opium of the people, because it’s based on the idea “pie in the sky when you die.” But in fact the politics of Marxism are just as much pie in the sky. It’s always a five-year plan for something to turn up that will be better than what we have now later on.

And, in exactly the same, way our notions of the great society are based on a futurist approach to life wherein you go through, in your education, a whole series of steps. The word in Latin, gradus, means a “step.” So we have first grade, second grade, third grade: gradus, gradus, gradus. Finally we become a graduate. You know, you’ve gone along the steps. But you’re still doing it. So that when you become finally successful as the president of your corporation, you have a funny feeling of being cheated. You’ve climbed the stairway and you got to the top. There’s nowhere else to go. And since you’ve never been taught to live in the present, you don’t know how to. So then an insurance salesman comes around and says, “Listen, I’ve got the very thing for you: a retirement program.” Because when you’re 65 you’ll drop out of the system, and then you’ll really be able to enjoy yourself, see? Despite your prostate trouble, menopause, false teeth, and everything else.

So the art of living in the eternal now is not taught in our educational system. And it’s not taught because it’s thought of as being feckless, irresponsible. It isn’t irresponsible at all. It is everybody’s duty—I can put it that way—to enjoy themselves. Because if you don’t do that, you become a nuisance. You become aggressive, you become a robber, you become a thief, you become somebody who’s trying to organize the rest of the world—that is to say, a power maniac—simply because you haven’t learned the very simple, inexpensive art of living in the present moment. It really doesn’t take an awful lot of energy to maintain a human life. If you really consider what you need to eat, what you need to wear, how much housing you have to have, it comes down to something quite simple. And the simpler, the more you have the capacity to enjoy watching a raindrop crawl down a window. But if you watch a raindrop crawl down a window and you think, “My! Look at that!” everybody says: “You’re crazy! What are you watching a raindrop fall down a window for? Can’t you find something more important to do?” That means: can’t you make more trouble than that? So the mentality that doesn’t recognize the importance of watching a raindrop crawl down a window is the one that is creating the trouble in the world today.

I had an astounding session just a day or two ago with the chief of an Indian tribe. He was from the western Shoshone Indians, which are located roughly around central Nevada. And he was explaining how the government of the United States is really seriously trying to get rid of the Indian way of life completely, especially by virtue of a bill which allows the Indians to borrow money on their own land—well, you know what the end of that’s going to do. So when he had told his story I said, “Well now, what do you want us to do about it?” He said, “That’s the wrong question. I knew this was coming.” He said, “You pale-faces, you white people, you always think about doing something. That means in voting, in politicking. But that’s what’s the matter with you.” So I said, “Yeah, that’s what’s the matter with us.” He said, “We’re going to do something about it, but we’re not going to do it in your terms. We expect you to be sensible enough to correct your own actions. We’re not going to fight you—in the ordinary way, and not on your terms.”

He said then, further: “We are in harmony with the physical earth and geography and the sky and the waters of this country, and you will strangely find that there are going to be more and more tornadoes, more and more earthquakes, more and more natural disasters. Because, as people, are violating nature. You are destroying it, and it will fight back against you. And we are nature. We’re not some strangers on this land. We are the same thing as, the same process as, the land. And we regard ourselves as the same as the continent. And it’s not just us in North America, we’re in touch with the Indians in Peru, in Chile, Brazil, and we’re one great family. And we’re just waiting for you invaders from the West, from Europe, to strangle yourselves and get rid of yourselves.” In other words, he was saying that he wouldn’t play the political game—not on any account—and didn’t really want us to play a political game on their behalf.

Now, this is something so inconceivable to most white people. Because, for example, when you get Indians on a reservation, and they don’t do anything and they don’t develop it and they just sit around, we say: well, they’re no good. They’re just lazy. They cannot make us understand the importance of a contemplative life. We say: you are of no value. You’re not even human unless you’re changing things, unless you’re interfering, unless you’re progressing. We confuse growing with progressing: unless something is happening—a great operation, a new project is going on—and you’re busy with it, you say: well, you’re lazy. You’re a good-for-nothing. Because you are not working for the future. But they say if you’re working for the future you’re quite mad. So they don’t work for the future. Just like a Chinese coolie: works long enough to make some money, then he knocks off work and he goes to the gambling joint and he gambles, or he smokes opium, or just generally wanders around and digs the scene. And we say: well, that’s awful, that’s irresponsible. You can’t do that. That’s not maintaining the world properly.

What do you think? Maybe that is maintaining the world properly. Maybe it’s we—who think that everything should be progressing—who are destroying the world. Of course we are: by our Protestant ethic, by our notion of keeping everything in charge. It’s true. We have a great initial success. We destroy diseases, we keep people alive. But on the end is the H-bomb to get rid of it all entirely. So these non-political people are saying to us: the trouble with you is you don’t know what you want. You have a future which you’re working for, but you’re all retch and no vomit. You promised yourselves the good thing is going to happen. You keep promising, promising, promising, promising. Even your money is a promise. It says on the dollar bill that the Treasury of the United States will promise to pay a dollar. What are you going to get if you deliver this and say, “Come on now, I want whatever it is that this dollar is!” And they can just give you credit. Because it’s paper. It’s all symbolism.

So all these myriads of so-called primitive people—like Amerindians, Mexican Indians, Africans—don’t communicate with us, and we don’t communicate with them, because they don’t want what we think is the desirable good society. Well, some of them do, of course. In Japan, for example, the Japanese have been thoroughly conned into the idea that the Western way of life is a great thing. And so they are, by and large, frantic industrialists. And so, as a result, the cities of Nara, Osaka, Kobe are covered in smog. Tokyo is just a madhouse. They’re getting it.

So the whole point is: the future is an illusion. The basic ideas in Hindu cosmology, that in the course of time you go through the series of yugas—or the “epochs:” you begin with a great state of affairs and it gradually deteriorates—is a way of saying to people: in the course of time things only fall apart. Therefore, get out of time. Get off the wheel of saṃsāra; the rat race. And so this underlies my idea of what I call the politics of diversion. Divert Western man from history, from the notion that he is in a historical process which is leading to something always better and better and better, but which in fact only leads to more and more destruction. Divert people from time by living a style of life which is timeless, and which is therefore more attractive than life devoted to time.

That doesn’t exclude our technological power. Part of the whole point of technology (that I’m going to take up in detail in a later session) is that, through technology, we have the power to obliterate poverty completely. But this must not be looked at in a historical way. While it is looked at in a historical way it will not work. That is to say: the whole problem of money, and the distribution of the wealth of the world as produced by technology, is a psychological problem and not a material problem. People are hypnotized with money (which is the symbol of wealth) as if it were something that was valuable in its own right. That’s confusing money with gold. When Ramakrishna said that one of the evils of the world was gold, he was (I think, perhaps, unconsciously) quite correct.

There’s a story that, once upon a time, all the banks in the world got tired of shipping gold from country to country. And so they decided to open an office in an island in the Pacific where all the banks had their headquarters, and all the gold was put together there, so that all they needed to do when they had to exchange some gold was to trundle it across the street. And operations proceeded beautifully for about ten years. And then all the heads of the banks from the different countries came with their wives and their children to visit the island and have a great convention. And so they inspected the books and the transactions, and everything was in perfect order. At last the children said, “Daddy, wanna see the gold!” So the bank president said to the managers, “Take our children down to the vaults so that they can see the gold.” And so all those managers said, “Um, well, it’s sort of difficult and problematic, and it takes a lot of time.” And the president said, “Well, don’t be stupid. What’s the matter? Can’t they see the gold?” So they hummed and hawed and said, “Well, we’re sorry to report that, seven years ago, there was a disastrous subterranean earthquake and all the gold was swallowed up. But of course we all knew how much we had at that time, and so we’ve kept the books accordingly.”

So it’s a joke. People don’t realize, in other words, that money is bookkeeping—nothing but bookkeeping!—and therefore the whole idea of taxation, for example, is a complete anachronism. The thing that is stopping the flow of the actual wealth of the world is this fixation on money. What you need to do is actually reverse taxation and, instead of charging taxes, issue credit. But you have to keep the credit balanced to the gross national product in some form of figuring, and then everybody can circulate what they’re making. Otherwise you’re in this ridiculous situation where people are starving in India, and we are hoarding food supplies and burning them and try and dumping them in the ocean, which is sheer insanity. But it’s all based on a psychological block about money. So this kind of psychological block is what in Indian philosophy would be called a māyā. It is an illusion. And it’s the same kind of illusion as that of the future; of the idea that the future is when we are really going to live. And if that’s the way you operate when you get there, you’re never going to be able to handle it because you still want a future ahead of you. You’re a perpetual donkey with a carrot suspended from your collar on a rod, like this, and you’re pursuing it.

Well now, when we approach the subject of politics, you obviously recognize at once that the word is connected to the Greek polis, meaning a city. And the city, as I’ve indicated in a former lecture, is probably an ephemeral phenomenon in human life. As our technology of communication develops, cities are going to disappear. And—for the same reason—as our technology develops, politics are going to disappear. Let’s go back to an early stage of our development when human beings changed from being hunters to being farmers. This is a very critical stage in the history of technology. When we were hunters, every male knew the whole culture. In other words, he had to fend for himself to make his own clothes, to make his weapons, to know the arts of hunting, and also he was in charge of his own religion. There were peculiarly religious people in hunting cultures, and they are called shamans or medicine men. An interesting thing about a medicine man, as distinct from a priest, is that he is not ordained by anybody else. He doesn’t have to be approved by a guru, or by an organization or a church. He goes away alone into the forest and gets his own thing. He may contact what he calls the ancestors, but he has to do it by himself.

Now, when a community settles—and instead of being a roving hunting people living in the forests and they form instead a village—a great change occurs. Where do villages and towns occur? Where a road crosses a river or a road crosses a road. And then, around that which were originally hunting tracks, trails, a stockade is built. And that is called the pale. We say a person is beyond the pale. That means he’s an outsider. Because the pale—from the palus, the tree—is the posts used to make the stockade. So inside the stockade there are four divisions, four blocks of town. And it is of the essence of an agricultural as distinct from a hunting culture that you specialize, that you divide labor. And so when labor divides itself, it tends to divide into four major groups. Those, first of all, who are the brains: the brahmins, the idea people, the thinkers. Second, the brawn: the military men who defend the scene. So they are called in India the kṣatriya. Who next? Why, the traders, the merchants, the vaiśya. And then next, who? The craftsmen, the skilled workers, śudra. Of course, then, outside there are the people who don’t have any particular qualifications, and they’re the lower outcasts who are untouchable.

But there are another group who are very curious. They’re also outside the pale, but they are respected for being outside the pale. And they are called in Sanskrit śramaṇa, which is the same as the word shaman—or in Chinese [???], meaning an immortal who lives alone in the mountains. In other words, the people who still retain the values of the hunting culture, and say like this. When you settle down in the city, in the polis, and you divide labor, and you’re tinker, tailor, solder, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, you assume roles. You put on a mask and say: I’m a soldier. I’m a priest. But you get more maskier than that. You say: I am a person. The word “person” means mask. Per-sona: the mask worn by actors in the Greco-Roman drama. And you are taught, while you live in the polis, that you are your mask. I was taught by my mother that I was Alan Watts, and I’ve never been able to recover from it completely! And so everybody is assigned this role that you’re supposed to play.

Well, you play that role. But in ancient Indian custom it was recognized that you only played it for a while; that when you had raised your children and done your social duties, that you then had to prepare for death. Death, when you’re playing a role, seems a tremendous threat. What’s going to become of me? But they explain that that doesn’t matter. You just have to find out, when you are ready to die, you can die properly and with dignity if you know who you really are. So in order to find out who you really are, you withdraw from your role. And you become what is called vānaprastha (which means “forest dweller”) instead of gṛhastha (which is “householder”). In other words, you go back to the forests, away from the polis, outside the pale.

The doing of this may take many forms. It may be purely perfunctory that you retire to a cottage in the back yard. You may actually go out into the jungle. You may actually tear off all your clothes and run naked and sit by the river. All sorts of ways of doing it. But you give up your name. You become nameless, or you may assume a name which is a divine name—one of the names of god. There are people trying to do this in the United States today, called hippies. I met one the other night, and I asked him what his name was, and he said, “My name is You.” And he absolutely would not acknowledge any other name at all. Great! Okay! You’re You.

So when you become vānaprastha, you’re outside the pale, and you concentrate your psychic energy to find out what’s going on. What is this that we call existence? You can find this out quite easily, but you have to pay attention to it, you have to concentrate, you have to give your whole mind to, say, take hold of a sound and find out what sound really is—or you can look at light and find out what light really is, or you can touch something—and find out what is going on here. And when you find out you stop being anxious.

But you see, then: politics is the order of that transitory state—which is the city arrangement, the role-playing, the game of social life—designed in a particular style. Now, I’m not trying to say in any way that the polis is something wrong. We shouldn’t put it down and say it’s bad. The only thing that could be bad is to take it too seriously. In other words, if you take the fundamental idea that the whole universe—all its forms; all the forms of biology, all the different species, the giraffes, the rhinoceroces, the baboons, the roses, the eucalyptus trees, et cetera, everything—is a form of biological game. It’s a dancing thing going on in different styles. And we wouldn’t want to say to any of those things, “You shouldn’t happen.” Because they’re all the great māyā, the great illusion, the great play. And so the polis, the human community, organized with division of labor, with classes, with all the complications of economics and banking and transportation and so on and so on and so on—all this is a particular kind of play. And each form of it is as legitimate as, say, different kinds of dancing: a waltz, a rumba, a foxtrot, a frug. All are perfectly legitimate forms of dancing. So the universe does this.

But the important thing to understand, and what the sannyasin, the śramaṇa (the man who goes outside the pale), is saying is: please, people who are in the pale, my existence reminds you that you’re only playing. Don’t take it too seriously. Because if you take it too seriously, you’re going to start destroying each other, and fighting, and saying this city against that city, this country against that country, so on, because you’re too involved. So every sane society allows a certain number of people to deviate—monks, some sort of outsiders—and says: “You don’t have to join. You don’t have to play the game.” A society which is insane and unsure of itself cannot allow that to happen. It says: “Everybody must join. Everybody must work. Everybody must belong.” And then freedom disappears.

Because, as a matter of fact, the anxiety is: if you say, well, you don’t have to join, there are conditions under which you could go out, then a lot of people get together and say: well, what would happen if everybody quit? I ask: what would happen if everybody decided to take American Airlines flight 3 to New York tomorrow? Well, they just wouldn’t get on. I mean… and they won’t, anyhow. Because a lot of people aren’t interested in that, are not ready to quit. That doesn’t mean that they’re inferior. The acorn is not inferior to the oak tree. It’s a potential oak. But as an acorn it’s just as beautiful and lovely a thing as a full-grown oak is. A baby is as lovely as an adult—sometimes a great deal more lovely. So a person who is in a beginning state of evolution is just as marvelous as a person in a high state of evolution; just as much a manifestation of the divine dance.

So when a society allows a certain number of people to withdraw, it should have no anxiety that everybody will want to withdraw, because some people are absolutely fascinated in competition, in being involved, in playing the game. They should be. It’s fine for them. But we are witnessing in the United States today a great motivation for withdrawal. It’s simply because we haven’t provided for it. We haven’t—there’s no opportunity for a Protestant to become a monk, or a Jew. The Catholics have halfheartedly provided for this sort of thing. And there have to be people who stand outside the gate and do not identify themselves with a class, with a name, with an ego, with a persona, with a role. And a society which cannot tolerate that is weak and in grave danger of dissolution. A society which can tolerate it is sure of itself inside. It doesn’t have to insist on everybody agreeing with the way you see things. That’s the nature of democracy: to say you have a right to differ.

And so, furthermore, underlying the nature of a democracy is the notion of mutual trust. And this is difficult in a polis. You can’t, obviously, have an ongoing human arrangement in which proper behavior between each other is enforced by violence of some kind, by police. Because, after all, who stands behind the police? Who gives the police their authority? Why, the people do. But if the authority of the police becomes something separate from the authority of the people, you get a violent situation. You no longer have democracy, you have a dictatorship. But if you really trust each other, you don’t really need much in the way of police. Yes, you need some scouts to direct the traffic who simply establish which row is to move first—not by authority, but simply pointing out that, when we get to a crossroads, there has to be some sort of order here. And we let so many cars go through this way, then we stop stop them and we let so many cars go through that way. And that’s to the mutual benefit of everybody’s concerns. So there’s a scout there to give a signal which we’ve all agreed upon.

But when that scout starts dressing up like a storm trooper, and putting on all kinds of guns and whistles and helmets and things like that, then he begins to act his role. He begins to behave like that kind of a person. And he becomes a vested interest. And so we have to say to him: go back to your boy scouts hat. Take off that helmet and those bandoliers full of bullets and those boots. Start looking like a human being again—and then he’ll behave like one, and everybody will respect you. And when you put up your hand and say, “This row, please,” and then everybody will of course naturally accommodate themselves.

So… as, then, a society tolerates within itself a group of people who play no role, who are in that sense liberated, we come to see—all of us—that the political game is not absolutely serious, that the laws of the state are not the laws of nature, that the laws—what we could even call the laws of nature are, very many of them, nothing but social institutions. Like time, like space, and so on. And so in not taking our civic political life too seriously, we can live it at a decent pace and stop from the idea that it is our sacred duty to impose our wonderful way of life on everybody else. And that, you see, is a quality of humor. When you don’t take yourself too seriously, then you can laugh at yourself. And this is a most essential ingredient for a politically healthy people: is to be able to laugh at themselves. That’s why one of the difficulties about churches and law courts—I was in a law court some time ago giving evidence, and the two accused people were smiling. And the judge hit the gavel. They said, “You two young gentlemen should realize that you’re on trial for a very serious crime, and that this attitude of laughter is disrespectful to the court.” And the attorney got up and said, “Your honor, this is the first time these two men have ever been in court, and they don’t understand what the rules are.” “Well,” he said, “it’s high time they did.”

Now, every great court where a supreme king, chakravartin, presides, always provides for a jester to be present. Because the moment the king in charge, or the justice, becomes too serious and takes himself too seriously, there is tyranny abroad. And so a proper king has sitting right down there, on his left, a character in cap and bells—the fool. And in ancient days the fools were very powerful people. Very important people. One of the fools of the court of England, Rahere, founded St. Bartholomew’s Hospital out of his wealth. Because the fool, as Shakespeare puts it:

…within the hollow crown

that rounds the mortal temples of the king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic—

—the antic is an old word for the fool—

…and there the antic sits,

Scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a little time

To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks.

Then at last comes death, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle walls, and farewell king!

Because the fool is the one who reminds you all the time that you’re mortal, you’re fallible, you’re human. Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch. Don’t take yourself too seriously, see?

So at the Congress of the United States, at the sessions of the Supreme Court, there ought always to be a fool who says to the judges: Tch-tch! But, you know, the trouble with republics is that they are a little insecure, and they don’t allow fools around. Very secure kings only can allow fools. Dictators can’t allow fools, because they rest upon the will of the majority. They get into power through referendums. They sure can’t tolerate fools around. It’s only an aristocrat—a person who has come from a long, long line of rulers and isn’t insecure about the situation—he can allow the fool.

So if a people is to be mature, a democracy is to be mature, it must allow the fool. It must allow the joker—and not merely as a cartoonist in the daily press to point fun at the goings-on of the presidency, but somebody actually present at cabinet meetings who is appointed to be the maverick, to be the funny man of the whole session. In the same way, a university faculty must have in its membership a small percentage of complete screwballs who are not respectable scholars, who have weird ideas, because they will keep the rest of the faculty alive. Not too many of them, always a little balanced—like the salt in the stew: a little bit, but not too much, you know. That is always the element of the people who say to the whole system that’s going on, to the whole reality of life: ha-ha!

So now, I want to contrast out of Asian sources two great theories about politics, respectively, from two books. And the first book is the Arthashastra, which is the manual of political wisdom originating from what you might call the great period of medieval India. And the opposite sort of book altogether, the Tao Te Ching from China, probably 400 B.C. These books contrast with each other in a completely beautiful way. Both of them are manuals of advice to an emperor. When, in Sanskrit, one speaks of the word chakravartin, it means a “wheel-turner.” And a chakravartin can mean either a complete omnipotent monarch or a buddha.

Now, this is the extraordinary thing about the life of the Buddha himself, because he is reputed to have been the son of a very, very powerful king. And when the astrologers got together at the time of his birth, they said, “This boy, Gautama, is to be a chakravertin.” The question is: in what sense of the word will he be a chakravartin? Will he turn the wheel of the world or will he turn the wheel of the dharma? And his father wanted him, of course, to maintain the royal line and turn the wheel of the world.

What is the wheel of the world? The wheel of the world is the saṃsāra, the rat race, the squirrel cage. And the wheel of the dharma is the same wheel—only, you run along it without thinking you’re getting anywhere. When the Earth circles the sun, it’s not going anywhere. And when you play music, you’re not aiming at the final chord. When you dance, you’re not aiming at a particular spot on the floor. But if you think that—in the process of music or dancing or whatever—that there is some destination at which you should arrive, then you are in the rat race wheel, the saṃsāra wheel. And the chakravartin is the master of controlling things.

And so, in this extraordinary book called the Arthashastra—Artha means “citizenship,” belonging to society, what is involved in the duty of social organization. Shastra means a text that is of an authoritative kind; not so authoritative as a sūtra, but nearly. So here is this book written to describe the duties of a man who is a complete tyrant. You’ve got to be god. You’ve got to govern. This is your duty. Somebody has to be elected to be president of the United States, or whatever—by whatever method of election; it may be vote, it may be birth. And it tells you that if you take the reins of power what you’re going to have to do. It’s phenomenal.

This man who wrote it was far more realistic than Machiavelli, and he said: from the start, realize that you will never succeed. The road of power is always failure. But you may have to take that road. That may be your svadharma—which means your own function, your vocation, what life elects you to do—and you will never succeed at it. But in the pursuit of power this is what you’re going to have to do. The first principle is: have no friends. Don’t trust anyone or anything. You therefore imagine yourself living in a palace (which is a fortress), and the palace is so constructed that it’s a mandala, a circle. Rings within rings within rings, both architecturally and organizationally. And you are the spider in the middle of this web. In your inner sanctum you cannot really sleep. You must at best only sleep with one eye closed. And you have guards around you all the time, and you have secret guards who watch those guards. You can’t really eat, because somebody always has to taste the food for you first to be sure it’s not poisoned. And then you arrange your ministers and advisors in a following way. Every ring you set at odds with the next ring around it, and you promote discord between the separate rings on the principle of the Latin saying: divide et impera, “divide and rule.” So that therefore, for example, you have a very close association of cabinet members who are your immediate advisors. But don’t trust them. Have just beyond them some subordinate advisors who want to usurp their positions and will watch your cabinet ministers for any treachery to expose them and immediately give them away. And in this way you guard yourself against treachery from the immediate circle. And so you do this the whole way out.

Then you plan within the center of this palace a secret exit, where you have a trapdoor and a tunnel that goes down to the river where there’s a speedboat waiting to make an immediate getaway if there should be a palace revolution. But on the way from the tunnel, as you go down, there is a special keystone that you can remove and cause the entire palace to collapse and shatter everybody inside it.

So here you have this thing which is very, very much like a modern fantasy—George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty Four—where Big Brother is watching everyone. And the trouble for Big Brother, though, is that in watching everyone to see that they don’t break the law, he has no time to enjoy himself. Just as this poor guy, who’s the Mahamahārāja chakravartin cannot sleep because he’s always got to be on the watch, so Big Brother could never take his girl for a walk in the park. He’s always got to have his eye glued to the television which is inspecting what everyone is doing. He’s the most miserable of men; the spider caught in its own web.

So the whole theory of political control by imposition of the rule of law from above—which is, alas, the Christian theory of the universe; this is the way god is operating. Do you realize that, according to the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, god is personally aware with his full total consciousness of every atom of existence? That is to say, a mosquito’s wing does not vibrate without the entire total consciousness of the divine mind. The mass of the Episcopal church opens with a prayer:

Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open,

All desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid

Think of it. Think of having to be occupied with the vagaries of every human mind! Think of the boredom of having to put up with all that. See? Poor god—victim of his own power game. And so the most ingenious man who wrote this Arthashastra showed all this up in the most vivid way. That is the price of power.

Now, the gods of the Hindus do not work this way. They do not operate in the manner of the chakravartin. And this is revealed in the fact that they have more than two arms. When Śiva is depicted dancing the Tāṇḍava dance, he had ten arms, all of which operate individually. Avalokiteśvara has one thousand arms. Avalokiteśvara, when translated into Chinese, becomes Guanyin; Kannon in Japanese. And in the gorgeous Sanjūsangen-dō temple in Kyoto there is an image of Kannon literally with one thousand arms—can count them—and surrounded by one thousand replicas, only these ones only have ten arms, and each one of them has eleven heads. This is kind of a spooky thing to us. We say: well, what is this kind of deformation of the human image about?

But what it’s like is that your body is covered in nerve ends, and each one of these nerve ends is sensitive as if you were covered in eyes. And they are carrying information through, and you operate and you adapt to the world without having to think about it. So it means that the true power of the divine being is that it has one thousand arms and does not have to cogitate about how to move them. The poem says that:

The centipede was happy quite,

Until a toad, in fun, said,

“Pray, which leg goes after which?”

This worked [his] mind to such a pitch

He lay distracted in a ditch

Considering how to run.

But the centipede operates all those legs without having to think individually how to do it. Just as you breathe, just as you grow your hair, so in the same way the Hindus have the idea that the universe is operated in the same way. The supreme lord has one million one hundred thousand whatever arms, and each of you is one of those arms. And they go like that.

But in the West, with our political-monarchical theory of the universe, god is supposed to know every detail and keep track of it all. So there is a book called the Doomsday Book—the book of the archangel of judgment—and in that is recorded every single thing you have done, so that in the day of judgment you have to answer for it all. As Jesus said, “Every hair of your head is numbered.” Whew! Now, the Hindus would say: oh, there are lots of hairs, but forget the number! Call it, you know, call it a kalpa. Call it a kroa of kalpas, a koji of kalpas. They have these words that express fantastic numbers like we use in modern astronomy.

So you want to keep track of everything? Remember it all? Figure it all out? So that there will be a day of reckoning in which we can say finally this is the truth about what happened? That’s a very dangerous idea. And this idea of the day of reckoning is the one idea that can very well destroy the world. Because if you get in a final argument and say, “We’ve got the bomb on our side and you’ve got the bomb on your side, and we know that if either one of us uses it the whole world is destroyed, so what’s to be gained?” “Oh,” says one side, “we believe in the last judgment: that beyond death there will be a reckoning when everybody’ll be brought together.” And the supreme boss will line up everybody in front and say: now, the rights and wrongs of this issue are as follows. And the people who believe that they will survive death in the spiritual world—you know, “better dead than red”—will believe that the communists will be brought up before the judgment throne of god, and that god will lecture them and say that they were all in the wrong, and that it was right to blow the bomb against them. That’s the consequence of believing in immortality, see? You could actually do it.

So this idea, then, that the world is governed by conscious and personal knowledge on the part of the deity is the politics of monarchy. It is the politics of Machiavelli, the politics of the Arthashastra—although in the Arthashastra it is quite clear that the writer of the book realizes the fallacy of the whole thing. What he is saying is that if that’s the way you want to go, this is what you’re going to have to do, and that therefore life is an organization that will not work under dominance. It will only work by cooperation. So you get the opposite book, the Tao Te Ching.

The legend of the Tao Te Ching is that it was written at the request of the captain of the guard (of what was then the Chinese capital) when the court librarian got disgusted with the life of the court and decided to retire into the mountains. The Chinese have a strange love of the mountains. There is always idealized being able to wander off into the mountains and get lost. And one of the lovely poems of the Chinese says—it’s called Looking for the Master:

I asked the boy beneath the pines

He says, “The master’s gone alone

Herb-gathering somewhere on the mount,

Cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown.

And all the old Chinese scholars and poets have this nostalgia to leave the world and its competitions and one-upmanship games, and go into the mountains, and leave no trace.

So Lao Tzu—which means the old boy; literally “the old boy”—when he tired of the life of the court, he’s supposed to have been stopped by the gate guardian when he was leaving, and the guard said, “Sir, I cannot permit you to leave because you’re very wise man and you’re very valuable to us. So would you please write down your wisdom for ruling the state? And then I’ll let you go.” So Lao Tzu said, “Yes, I will,” and on strips of bamboo scratched out the text which is the most paradoxical book ever written. Because it starts out by saying—there’s a thing called the Tao. What is the Tao? The Tao is the Way, is the how-to, is the way of nature, is the course of things. And he starts by saying:

The way which can be described

Is not the eternal way.

And then he goes on to describe it. At one point he says:

Those who speak do not know.

Those who know do not speak.

But yet he speaks. He writes the book.

Well now, this book is a manual of advice to an emperor, essentially. It can be read on many levels. It can be read as a mystical book, it can be read as an alchemical book, it can be read as a meditation manual, and equally well as a political textbook. And the basic idea of the whole thing is that in the art of ruling you do not use force. You never press the issue. And it is for this reason that the Lao Tzu book is the basis of judo. In judo you don’t use force against your opponent. You use his force if he uses it against you. You can practically prove that if someone comes to a calamity as a result of a judo thing that it was his own fault. Because the principles of it are like that.

There is an esoteric form of judo called aikido that—I would say, any young man in education today should learn aikido. So should every young woman. It is a fundamental science. Aikido is the art of being unattackable. Because when somebody tries to hit you, you’re never there. You simply dissolve, you disintegrate, you’re not there to catch hold of. And the curious thing about aikido is that you learn certain tricks that you can accomplish only if you don’t use effort. You can, for example, learn to put your arm out straight in a way that nobody can bend it. But in order to do that you must use no effort. It’s the most peculiar, paradoxical thing. It really freaks you out when you get involved in this experiment and the teacher shows you how to do it. It’s the funniest experience. It’s just like everything suddenly became contrary to common sense.

But that all goes back to Lao Tzu; to the imagery that is used of the pine and the willow. The willow tree is springy and relaxed, and when the snow falls, the willow tree droops and the snow drops off the branches. But the pine tree is too tough, and therefore has an arm like this. And, as the snow falls, it piles up and piles up until the branch cracks. So Lao Tzu says:

Man at his birth is supple and tender.

In death he is rigid and hard.

So: suppleness and tenderness are the characteristics of life, rigidity and hardness are the characteristics of death.

He likens the functioning of the Tao to water, and he says now: water is always taking the line of least resistance. It doesn’t strive. It always seeks the low level—which men abhor, because they always want to be on top. But what can you do with water? You can’t cut it, you can’t injure it, you can’t compress it. So he’s saying, in other words: if you want to govern the nation you must behave like water. Govern the nation as you cook a small fish. That means that you must do it gently, because when you have a small fish in a frying pan, if you chivvy it around too much it falls apart. And so, therefore, he has a conception of the Tao which is, as it were, the exact opposite of all conceptions of god. He says this:

The great Tao flows everywhere,

Both to the left and to the right.

It loves and nourishes all things

But does not lord it over them.

And when merits are accomplished

It lays no claim to them.

It says:

The swishing wind does not last out the morning,

The pelting rain does not go on all day.

If heaven and earth cannot keep these things up,

How much less can man?

So he has an idea of the emperor as an anonymous sort of person who is always retiring—who would be, in other words, to a political community in the same way as today the sanitary engineer is. Now, we have a sanitary engineer who is an official of Sausalito or Marin County. Never would you imagine the sanitary engineer going through town with a great police escort and flags in all directions. Nobody even knows who the sanitary engineer is—and yet he’s a very important official. Without him there would be health problems and all sorts of difficulties. But because he’s in charge of the sewers everybody would say, “Well, that’s not very glamorous.” And Lao Tzu is saying that the chief official of the state should have the same attitude as the man in charge of the sewers. That the less he parades himself, the more effective he can be. The less that’s known about him, the better.

So he says: The energies of the emperor should be directed to keeping the minds of the people unpreoccupied and their bellies well filled. In other words: let’s not have news about politics. Let the newspapers be full of interesting things, not political things. But our newspapers, which are all about politics, are full of catastrophes. You open the newspaper and what do you read? What is news? Bad news is news. The saying, you know: no news is good news. All news is bad news. They don’t say the great things that are going on. Very rarely. You get somebody who claims to have cured cancer or something, and then it gets a headline. But, by and large, bad news is the news.

So Lao Tzu advocates no news at all, no discussion of politics. He says: my ideal state would be a small one in which you could hear the chickens in the neighboring state. And there would be no apparent government. It’s a kind of anarchy. But, of course, anarchy depends upon everybody being responsible. When you drive down the highway and you see a rock lying in the road, you don’t say: oh, the department of highways will take care of that. You stop your car and kick it over to the side.

I don’t know if you know that book The Power Within Us, which is written by a man who is reconstructing the travels of a Spanish explorer in the United States. And he says the evil of Spain is that everybody regards the nation as an entity that exists in its own right distinct from every individual in it, and therefore shifts responsibility to that—as if the nation existed; as if, in other words, the government were something different from you. And he says that’s where the evil comes from. We say: oh, the government will do it, the government will see to it.

So there is likewise a story in the Bible that one day there was a question of electing the king of the forest. And they went to the various vegetables; they went to the oak tree and said, “You are strong and upstanding. How about being king of the forest.” And the oak tree said, “I don’t have time for such a thing. All my energy is expended in making this gorgeous wood and constructing good acorns, and I wouldn’t have time to be king.” They went to the vine, and the vine said, “No, I couldn’t be king of the forest because all my energy is absorbed in these grapes, and you need your wine and so on, and I have to do that.” And they went all around, and finally they got to the bramble. And the bramble said, “Sure, sure. I have nothing special to do. I’ll be most happy to be king of the forest.” And so the bramble grew up and strangled everything. Point being, therefore, that being king, being in charge, is an operation that doesn’t work.

Now, let’s look at this from the point of view, say, of electronics. It primarily comes down to scanning: observing and integrating the behavior of a very complex system. How can you do it? There’s a bottleneck. You cannot pass that much information through a single source without rendering that single source (of observing it) incapable of observing it. It’s as simple as that. Therefore, if you are going to have a control of an enormous amount of information it has to be delegated to many scanning units, and you have to trust them all to work together. Because, again, if you go back and say: well, there has to be something that scans the scanners and see that they’re doing their job right—why, of course, the thing that scans the scanners can only take a very general impression of each one. It can’t go into the details, can it?

So a highly organized system (where a lot of detail is going on) has to be a system of mutual trust. There is no way of bossing it. If you want to have it at all, you have to have it by letting go and saying to all the units in it, “C’mon, let’s play together.” But the moment you come on uptight about them and say, “Now, I want an accounting from each one of you,” each one of them feels a little mean about it and will conceal information. And you, if you’re going to keep charge of the whole thing in that style of behavior are going to have your hands full—too full. You won’t be able to watch it all.

So therefore, every organic complexity works by the delegation of authority. Every organic unity is a system of love—that is to say: of mutual trust. It says: “Thank god I’ve got you around!” I often think about this when somebody does something that’s marvelous, and I think: “Whew! What a relief that you could do that and I didn’t have to!” All that effort that you put in doing this is so beautiful, and just relieved me of the necessity.” See? And that’s the way that the life principle really works: in complete opposition to any idea of lordship, of “all the credit belongs to me.”

And so it’s so funny when, in Christianity, everybody ascribes the credit for anything good that happened to the lord god. There’s a sense in this, but it is not the sense that’s usually advertised. When you say, “It wasn’t me that did it,” you as an ego—supposing you’ve achieved something great, and you say, “No, it wasn’t my ego that did it. It was all these myriad little molecules and cells, each one of whom contributed to this extraordinary thing that I did.” See? You could go in that way towards infinite diversity, and say of everything that you did: “No, it wasn’t me. It was my people. It was all these little fellows who, each one of them, did it.” But to the degree that you go towards the infinitude of the little ones, to that extent you have a true sense of unity. Whereas if you don’t give any credit to the little ones, and you say, “Well, I just push them around, and so on and so forth,” you don’t realize how things are put together.

So this is the true inner meaning of the principle of nonduality: that it isn’t just kind of crass unity which says all the multiplicity is an illusion, and they’re all really one stuff. What it’s saying is that the truest unity is the same thing as the most detailed multiplicity. Because you can see intellectually: you don’t know what you mean by unity unless you understand multiplicity. The one throws out the other idea. They balance each other like the back and the front. So, in exactly the same way, the more you go for highly articulate multiplicity, the more you get unity. A living organism, with the complicated differentiation of its parts, is more united than a piece of rock or homogenized milk. It’s more of a total working system. You know, you can throw the milk across the floor and it won’t reassemble itself.

So this is the thing, then, that the whole idea of the giving in to the other, of trusting it to do it, trusting—when you want to learn a certain discipline, control your muscles in a certain way, you have to do this by trusting them to do it that way rather than trying to dominate them. In, say, Bonpensiere’s marvelous book on playing the piano, all his idea of developing high skill and technique is based on trusting your muscles. And they have in them an intelligence, and you trust them to use their intelligence in manipulating the instrument. So, in other words, the more you diversify yourself, the more the unity comes about.

So this is the real secret underlying the democratic principle, the notion of what a republic is as distinct from a monolithic monarchy, where the people cease to trust themselves and say to an authority: please, you take care of us instead. Because it works exactly the opposite direction. And that direction is the opposite direction of the way in which all living organisms flow and manifest themselves.

At the end of the question period yesterday I said we’d come to something which I would have to take up today, and this arose because we were discussing the problem of prediction—which is, of course, related to the problem of control. I had made a passing reference in yesterday’s seminar to the fact that the knowledge of time, the knowledge of the future—what Korzybski calls man’s time-binding ability—is an advantage for which we pay a very serious price. To know the future in a conscious way gives you, obviously, a survival advantage. But at the same time it gives you a survival disadvantage, so that what you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings. You gain the ability to plan your future—say, to invest, to take out insurance, to do all those things that are called provident—but the price you pay for it is anxiety. And you pay this price because you know that you don’t know enough. Did you know, as it were, enough about the future to try to be provident? But you don’t know enough about the future to be sure that your providence was correctly done. Therefore you worry. Therefore you are concerned with what will happen tomorrow.

And it’s so extraordinary that that passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus says, “Don’t make any anxiety for the morrow, what you’re going to eat, what you’re going to drink.” And I’m amazed about that, because every minister I have ever heard discuss this passage says it can’t be put into practice. The church simply never did teach that. That’s the most subversive passage in the Gospels, which is swept under the carpet. See? In a way, of course, Jesus told all sorts of stories in order to make people think. This one: this image of the flowers of the field and the birds that don’t make any plans. And he did another one, for example: the story of the Pharisee and the Publican. This is very interesting, because its effect is extremely funny. He says, “Here is the Pharisee,” who goes up to the front row of the church, and stands up and sort of memorializes god on what a good guy he’s been, that he’s fulfilled all the duties, and so on. Then there’s the Publican, who creeps into the back and beats himself on the breast and says, “Only god be merciful to me, a sinner.” See? Now, having told that story, the situation is completely reversed. Because then all the prigs creep into the back of the church and beat themselves on the breast and say, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” And so that now we would have to tell the tale exactly the other way around and say: now the honest guy is the one who simply walks straight to the front and addresses god man to man.

But you see: what people don’t realize in what I would call gurumanship—the art of teaching—is that the teacher tells tales not for their immediate obvious meaning, but for their later effects. What is the result of having told this story? This story has completely deflated fake humility, where you try to be humble. It’s a kōan. So, in the same way, the passage on “be not anxious for the morrow” really asks you: why can’t you put this into practice? Here is a precept. Who can practice it? Nobody. They say: oh, it’s impossible. We cannot give up making plans. We cannot give up prediction.

Of course we predict, in a way, in a sort of unconscious fashion. The simplest act involves a kind of prediction. So in this case we are simultaneously aware of things which, if you do regard the present as a hairline, would be called past and future at once. But if you’re not hung up on this idea that the present is this hairline thing which is purely abstract, then you have no problem in accepting the idea that we are simultaneously aware of past events and future events. Because they’re all—just like you’re watching from a traveling vehicle, and you can see where you’re going to be and you can see where you have been from where you are now. So in that sense, then, we have a knowledge of the future when I move to pick up my glasses. But that is a different kind of knowledge from when I speculate in an abstract way as to what I ought to do a month from now, or might happen a month from now, you see?

So then, the question then becomes: we predict those far futures which are not within our present vision by calculation. It may be astronomical navigational calculation or, as it was in old times, astrological. People thought they had in astrology the means to foresee the future and know what to do. And then the question arises: well, what of—supposing there is a fine science of prediction, whether it be scientifically respectable (like navigation or meteorology, which isn’t too hot) or whether it be something like astrology. Are these really profitable sciences? Now, I pointed out the problem is, a, that when you know the future you pay for it with anxiety. You know “I am going to die.” A creature that doesn’t make predictions, like a cat or a dog, when seeing another dead cat, will not necessarily infer “that’s going to happen to me.”

Because, you see, a true animal, a truly functioning entity, is not self-conscious in that way. For example, you all know that only other people have heads. You don’t. Only: how do you become concerned with your head? Why, because you have been made conscious of your face. You’ve looked in mirrors, you’ve been talked about. It’s the only part of our body that we leave permanently unclothed, except the hands. Even when we put gloves on, you know, the hands are covered. But we always keep the face naked. And you learn that you’re there in terms of having a mask, you see? You can touch it. Put a good face on it. Lose face, save face—all these things indicate the importance of the face, you see, to one’s identity. Whereas inside, beyond the face, where are you? See? If you were living naturally, you would be as unselfconscious as your head is. You know, even the brain is not sensitive to probes in it.

So you would live in terms of all this is going on is you. But you’ve been talked into the idea. You’ve been smashed back into your head, see, by social indoctrination, and your face has been made to stand for you. The real you behind the face is everything that you see and hear, touch and sense. So the headless man—to have no head, to go out of your head, to lose your mind, you see—is, in a way, always characteristic of the wise man, because he’s come back to his original emptiness which is behind the face. See, when you turn to see your head, you can’t. And what is behind the eye? It’s not dark, it’s not light. You just can’t apprehend it in any way at all. And that’s what it’s all about.

But so, then, when you start calculating and you resort to prediction, you are now trying to get hold of all this. But many people have an instinctive feeling, say, when confronted with a great astrologer who could tell them all their future, and say, “I don’t want to hear it. I’d rather not.” And this is, in a way, a wise if uninformed reaction for the simple reason—well, let’s put the other point of view for a moment. Another point of view would be a realistic person saying, “The trouble with you is: you don’t want to know your future because you’re afraid of life. If you were to know your future you could take practical steps to adapt things to it. If you knew you were going to die next Tuesday, you would immediately put your house in order and make less trouble for your friends and relations. Face it.” That sounds alright to begin with. It’s like all technology is initially a success.

But the real problem it finally comes to is this: when the outcome of a game is known, the game is cancelled—because the whole point of playing the game is that we don’t know the outcome. Because the known future is already past, and the higher the degree of certainty of knowledge as to the future, to that extent it has happened. You’ve had it. And we don’t want to put the future in that situation—not really. Because, you see, if you think of the cosmos as basically a game of hide-and-seek—where the lord god is creating the universe by forgetting that he’s god and imagining that he’s you—then this is the fundamental way of getting rid of the eternal boredom of knowing all about it, and of there being no surprises. The whole vitality of being alive is that it is always surprising. To be enlightened is to be surprised at everything; that it is a wonder, that everything is a miracle, that it is highly improbable and really shouldn’t’ve happened at all—but there it is, you see? If there isn’t that sense, there is no vitality in anything.

But again, of course, we have the problem that I discussed yesterday in another form: the problem of order and randomness, and the drawing the line, you see? Where to draw the line between order and randomness? So, in the same way: where to draw the line between the known and the unknown? How much to predict? How much to say, “Well, I’d rather leave tomorrow to tomorrow.” “Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.”

So you see, again: it is all a question of where to draw the line, of how much to control things, and realize that when you go beyond a certain degree of control, when you go beyond a certain what I will call natural pre-vision—such as I described by the analogy of looking out of the window of the train—when you go beyond a certain degree of natural pre-vision you encounter a law of diminishing returns; that the more you succeed, the more you fail. And then you get into this sort of—I described it yesterday from the academic point of view: when scholarship acquires an exactness and a highly detailed degree of information that constitutes an information bomb, and nobody can keep track of it, and the whole thing becomes a bore. Who wants to keep track of it any longer? Who gives a damn, you know, about those final details of Shakespeare’s use of the conjunction “if?”

So, in the same way, in practical politics we have reached a state today where law is out of hand, because it is too meticulous. There is too much paper. There are too many whereas’s, if’s, and’s, and but’s, subclauses, and so on, and nobody could keep track of it, and the whole thing is in a state of total confusion. And this confusion exists in the name of sanity, in the name of trying to set things in order, because everybody shouts (when somebody does something wrong): “there ought to be a law against it!” And soon there is, indeed, a law against it. There’s a law against everything. We are all, at this moment, doing something illegal. I don’t know what it is, but it’s always there. And somebody can find it out and invoke it if they wish to make trouble for us. I’m quite sure that my entire situation is illegal! And it’s so for everybody. And this is the result, you see, of wanting to pin everything down.

In ancient China the Confucians had a thing they called the rectification of names. And the Confucians are curious people, because while they have some marvelous ideas, they are certainly lacking in humor, and they’re rather ponderous and puritanical and stuffy. The Taoists, on the other hand, have humor and are always making fun of the Confucians. Now, the rectification of names was that Confucius said we must be sure when we use words that their meaning is established. So this means the dictionary. And so they were the first real serious thinkers about dictionaries, about definitions, about laying down what the words mean. But the Taoists pointed out by saying: if you are going to rectify the words, what are you going to rectify them with? Well, they said: with words. Well, then they said: how are you going to rectify the words you use to rectify the words? Well, they thought about that, and then they said: well, their words are self-rectifying—that is to say, you rectify words with words, and the words you use to rectify the words are rectified with the other words, so it’s a closed circle.

So you can play a game called vish, in which you supply the players each with a copy of the same dictionary. And then you have lots of words written on slips of paper in a hat, and somebody pulls a word out of the hat and everybody looks it up in the dictionary. Then they take the definition and they look up a key word in the definition and look that up, and so on, until they get back to the word they started with. The first person to get back to the word that everybody started with calls out “Vish!”—short for “vicious circle.” And then there is an umpire present to rule on whether they cheated. In other words, whether they looked up, when they saw “knowledge,” “to observe,” “to record,” looked up the word “to” instead of “record” or “observe” or whatever, you see? So the dictionary only gets out of the vicious circle when there is a picture beside the word. Then it escapes. But otherwise, all attempts to pin down words are simply going in a vicious circle.

So one uses words effectively by not trying to pin them down too hard. But we are always saying: put it in writing. If we’re really serious about an agreement between two people—put it in writing. Because I can trust the document, but I’m not sure if I can trust you. Do you exist? Prove it. Have you a birth certificate, a passport, a card of identity? If you can produce this wretched piece of paper, you’re there. If you can’t, you’re not. Well, obviously, it was a good idea to record certain things so that we could be sure that people wouldn’t be dishonest. But all this started from people being dishonest. And if we’re going to stop people from being dishonest, there’s only one way to do it, and that’s for people not to be dishonest. No other way that has ever been invented will prevent it. And if you think you can go on living by preventing people from being dishonest with you by rules and regulations and laws and policemen and all this kind of thing, you succeed in the short run, but, once again, in the long run you run into a total tangle. The United States of America is the country in the world with the most laws, and yet our police are completely mistrusted by every sane person. They are crooks and scoundrels and violent fascist kind of people—with exceptions. You know, everything has exceptions. You know, the nice-cop-on-the-corner sort of thing. But, by and large, through a state in which people say, “Oh well, the law will take care of it”—the law won’t take care of it. You have to take care of it. And you can only be a law-abiding citizen by trusting your fellow men. And if you don’t do that, no one will trust you. And therefore, a system of mutual mistrust will exist, which of its very nature must fall apart. It cannot operate.

So once again, you see, this is a problem of the confusion between physical reality and symbolic reality. The law says this, therefore it must happen. And if it doesn’t happen, somebody’s there with a club to see that it does. Maybe, unless you wangle out of it, conceal it, find a loophole in the literature, get a good lawyer—that means a man who can say that the law didn’t say what it was intended to say. So that then, of course, everybody is accountable—and that means keeps accounts. I increasingly find that it’s difficult to operate because of all the records that have to be kept. One spends more time recording than one does doing.

So this is to say, then, that the symbolic method—prediction, recording… all prediction is based on recording. It’s like you take the graph of the movement of a stalk or of anything you want to graph, and then you establish a trend to see where it’s going. So recording is the basis of prediction. But if you go into this beyond a certain point, the process cancels itself out because it’s no longer worth doing.

So the wonderful Jewish idea of the year of jubilee—you know, when all debts are canceled and let’s begin again—that’s what we need now. We need a new chemical. You know, like people talk about putting nerve gases in the air which will immediately paralyze the enemy. What we need is a gas that will destroy all paper whatsoever. I wonder what would happen. I’ve often thought about it. Even though I depend for my living to some extent on paper—writing books—I think on the whole the benefit to humanity from the complete disappearance of paper at this point—it wouldn’t’ve true, perhaps, at some other time, but now—I think that much would be said for it. And it would have to include plastic, celluloid film, and all that sort of thing as well. Zhwwt!

1:46:29

Watts

Yes. All recording to disappear. In other words, the book of the recording angel is to be eaten up by god.

1:46:39

Watts

Yeah. This is the thing. Now there, of course—please understand, I’m being somewhat facetious, and that this mustn’t be taken quite literally. But it is saying that this point—look at a group of tourists. I take people to Japan every so often, and the Japanese are absolutely weird about this. Wherever you go, the tourists, the Japanese, everybody, they carry cameras. And it’s very nice to have a camera, and photography is a fine art, yes—but there is a certain kind of people who never, never look at anything except with a camera. They go around capturing reality in this box. Cha! And there was one man who was a magnificent photographer who came along with me who never did anything but photograph. And he was always late and dawdling behind the other people—even though we moved at a very leisurely pace—because he was interminably photographing, photographing, photographing, capturing the world (stopping it, making a still, see?) with his box. A movie is simply another kind of still. It’s a more complicated kind.

So the clutch box you go around with as a result I find that people do not relate to the environment. The only thing that you should ever carry when you’re strolling is a scarf or a cane to help you climb. Your hands should otherwise be completely free of encumbrances. So should your eyes and your ears and everything. Then it will really happen. But otherwise, if you go around with a recording instrument all the time, it won’t happen. The only good recording instrument would be one that you were completely unconscious of, that you didn’t have to focus and flip and krrr! study, instead of looking directly at things that were going on, participating directly with people, and social relationship.

So, in the same way, when you have not been just a tour where you’re seeing wonderful landscapes and works of art and antiquity, also when people have very good times, they have a picnic at the beach, and it’s delightful, somebody says, “Oh, someone should’ve brought a camera”—to prove that this really did happen. But what happens instead nowadays, when somebody gives a great party and all sorts of people are invited, they are sure that the society reporter comes from the press. And then they can read about it in the paper the next day and look back and say, “Now that really did happen. It’s in the papers.” Well, in the same way, a young adolescent who feels that he doesn’t really exist commits a crime in order to get his name in the papers. There you’ll be headlined as a great hero and villain. And he’ll know he’s there; he’ll be recognized.

It didn’t happen if it wasn’t recognized. Therefore, as some very bright person pointed out a little while ago, we have many pseudo-events: events that are created for the sole purpose of their being reported in the press. Like, Life goes to a party. You remember those things? All those parties were organized by staff of people who came out from Life magazine and said, “This would make a good party. Let’s set it up this way,” and they get various people to cooperate, and that’s all there, and they have the party. In the same way, publishers—instead of looking around for creative authors—think up books. Then they find a hack to write them. They say this would make a good book. And it’s a pseudo-book; a non-book. There is all kinds of work done like this. Foundations invent pseudo projects. Because instead of, you see—what happens is that instead of going around with a kind of field staff looking for what artists and scholars and people are actually doing that is creative, they stay in the office, and they get masses of applications come in which are too boring to read. So finally they sit around, think up, “What would make a good project to give all this money to?” And then they think up a project. And then they go around and try and find people to do it. And all those people they find are frustrated PhDs from Harvard and elsewhere who are sort of academically competent, but don’t have very much on the ball. They have to be told something to do, investigate it, research.

So it’s the same principle, all along, of allowing the recorder (which translates life into a system of symbols) to predict the future for us, then it makes us anxious—you see how the vicious circle operates?—and, having made us anxious, we turn back to it and say: “You solve this problem. We don’t want to be anxious. We want a foolproof system.” Alright, back to the recorder, back to a closer study of the symbols. How can we outwit the future? But do you see? It’s a complete vicious circle. The more it succeeds, the more it fails. The more you are quite sure where you’re going, and that the plane won’t crash under any circumstances—well, by the time you can travel from here to anywhere in the world in an absolutely assured won’t-crash plane, it’ll kill you. There’ll be no point in taking the journey. Because the place you will go to will be the same place you started from—at least it will look exactly like it. And furthermore, it will already—that journey in the completely foolproof plane, because it is absolutely planned, you will have already taken the journey. That’s why the place you are going to will be identically the place you came from. And so who will then pay for the airlines by traveling on them? Nobody will. There has to be the risk in it for there to be any point in taking it.

So this is the most important thing for all technologists to understand: that technology is a process like cooking, like polishing, which you must do for a certain time and then stop. Then it’s done, it’s ready. It’s created. But if you keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on, you—you know, supposing I have somebody I love very much, and I like to stroke her, you know? It’s very nice to stroke her. But if I keep on stroking her, I’ll rub her skin off!

1:54:47

Watts

Up to a point it’s fine, you see? Beyond that, too much. It’s so simple. I mean, I feel like I’m talking in platitudes. But this is a thing that people have simply neglected when it comes to technology, when it comes to law, when it comes to the whole philosophy of prediction.

Well, let’s take an intermission.

The whole philosophy of Bushidō, or the way of the warrior, in Japan is a test of nerve between men as to: can you face this thing? Can you face being chopped up instantly? The Zen poem which says,

Under the sword lifted high

There is hell making you tremble.

But mo chih chu

—which means “go straight ahead”—

And there is the land of bliss.

There is paradise.

Don’t stop. Don’t hesitate. The minute you are put off or made to flinch, as we say, by the heavy edge of the sword, you’re lost. If you don’t flinch, you’re always quick enough to defend yourself. So life could be construed in terms of a competition in who’s going to flinch first. See?

1:56:19

Watts

Right. So we are involved politically in a game of studying the logistics of a mutual eating society—that all life, all living creatures, exist by virtue of destroying something else. Biology is a system of transformation. Just as the waves here, you see, are a series of transformations in the surface of the water, so every kind of living species is a series of transformations of form. But they do this through the route of teeth, of sharp edges, of chewing, of pain. And so when anything is chewed up, it has pain. And that pain is its reaction to being chewed up. And by virtue of pain and being chewed up it is transformed into a higher order of being than itself, because the one that finally catches you is higher up in the game. And so the experience of pain is something that we say: that’s terrible. That’s the end. But, on the other end of the spectrum, as it were, the pain of a piece of caviar egg that is being chewed up is experienced as exquisite pleasure, as triumph, as victory.

Now then, the secret of, say, Buddhist enlightenment is to realize that these values that are put—pain: terrible; pleasure: great—are arbitrary. That when, for example, you were a baby, and you made a bowel movement on the floor, and you thought: “Wowee, that was great!” And your mother said, “Ugh! It stinks!” And you were taught to interpret the smell of excrement as being something bad. In the same way, exactly, we are taught to experience the sensations of being sick, of being in pain, and of dying—in other words, of not continuing in the survival process—we are taught to give them an emotional equivalent of bad, bad, bad, bad, don’t do this way, don’t go that way. See? Stop! Overcome it! And therefore we have a hangup about it.

But the paradox of the matter is this: that if you have a serious hangup against dying, you can’t be a good soldier. Think of that for a moment. What a funny situation that is. In order to have the courage—we demand of our young men, you know, who are full of strength and vitality—we say to them: “Come on, now. It’s your duty to defend our society against its enemies.” And in order to be able to do this efficiently you must have a virtue called courage. And to have the virtue called courage you must be in a very weird paradoxical situation, which is that, in the prime of life, when all the world is open to you and you want to love the girls and everything else, you must not be afraid of death. You understand very well that, when you get to be an old man, you stop being afraid of death. Because you know you’re going to die. You’re worn out and you’ll be very happy to die eventually, because carrying on is just too much. And so you can say with Robert Louis Stevenson:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig me a grave and let me lie.

Gladly I lived and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

See? That’s fine for an old gent. But for a young man or a young woman who’s full of energy we demand, right there, the courage to lay down life. And so, in a way, the old are cheating the young. Because from the old people’s point of view it doesn’t matter so much. And so they can brag and talk about the virtues of courage without actually having to fight. Because it’s no problem. But for the people who we actually ask to do the fighting, it is a problem.

So now, then, we have to consider the whole question of the philosophy and use of violence, because this is the final political question. Politics are ultimately—when you get down, shall we say, to the nitty-gritty of politics—it’s a question of violence. Because we would say when persuasion comes to the end of its tether and people won’t be persuaded, then a fight starts. Now, we can explore a whole philosophy of being so skillful in persuasion that you never need to resort to violence. But let’s leave that aside for the moment. Let’s go through the path of violence and explore that, and find out where it ends up. And I would very strongly advise all of you if you get a chance to see the Japanese film called Samurai. It comes in three installments, three shows, and it’s the life story of Miyamoto Musashi, this tremendous samurai hero who becomes the unquestioned master of swordsmanship under the tutelage of a Zen master. The Zen master is Takuan. And you should read Takuan’s essay on the art of swordsmanship, which is in Suzuki’s book Zen and Japanese Culture, where he describes how you apply Zen state of mind, state of consciousness, to the art of fencing in the same way as Herrigel describes it in Zen in the Art of Archery.

The thing the whole story reveals is that Musashi comes to the point where he realizes the total vanity of killing. He wants to be a farmer. He wants to have a wife and a child, and he wants to grow things. And he absolutely despises the idea of fighting. But he is challenged to a duel by the most gorgeous young samurai in Japan. You know, physically beautiful man whose whole ambition in life is to fight with Musashi. And Musashi just doesn’t want to do it. But he feels somehow what—the motivations of this are are extremely complex—he must fulfill the [???], the point of honor, the fighting with this young man. Because the young man so desperately wants to fight with him. So they arrange a duel, and of course infinite complications, socially, are involved with this, because the young samurai is the teacher of one of the great noblemen, the daimyo. He is is personal teacher in swordsmanship, and therefore all the daimyos, retinue, associates, and court are involved in this.

So they set the place of duel on a particular island. And Musashi sends a messenger that he will arrive to meet the appointment for the duel in his own time on a boat. He comes in just before dawn onto a beach where this young man is really waiting to meet him with everything set. While he’s coming in the boat, he takes a paddle from the boatman, and with his sword cuts it into a certain shape. And this is the weapon he’s going to use. He keeps his short sword sheathed by his side in emergency, and he approaches his antagonist on the beach with nothing but the wooden paddle. But he has so timed everything that the critical moment of the battle will occur when the sun rises. And because he stands in the water all the time, on the edge of the sand, the opponent has the sun in his eyes and can’t see, and is therefore defeated by nature. But in the moment of being slain the opponent is so proud to have had this battle that you can see him looking—just before he drops dead—he looks into Musashi’s eyes with the utmost admiration and love, and falls down dead. Even if he was defeated somehow, you know, he has found his ambition. And then all those daimyos and noblemen gather around and come and say to Musashi, “This was the most magnificent fencing we ever saw!” And Musashi weeps. He says, “I will never again meet so great an opponent.” And he goes away immediately. There are no honors, no nothing. He walks back to the boat. And the boatman says, “Oh, I’m so happy you won!” And Musashi can only weep. What a futility the whole thing was.

So what the Zen masters taught the samurai in the art of swordsmanship was that, ultimately, if you really understand how to use violence, how to use power, you don’t use it. The highest school of kendō (fencing) is called the no-sword school. Now here, you see, is a funny situation. If you’re a Buddhist, one of the first principles that you observe—especially if you’re a Buddhist of southern Asia (Ceylon, Burma, Thailand)—is: you don’t kill anything. You’re a vegetarian. You abstain from the taking of life. Your first precept, pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi, means: “I am to take the precept for abstaining from the taking of life.” So people say: well, how can these samurai, who slaughter everybody in all directions, be Buddhists? Well, here’s the problem we have to consider. Because you still have to ask the Hinayana Buddhists, who are vegetarians: how can you dare to scrunch all those poor vegetables and make them suffer for your existence? I asked R. H. Blyth this. R. H. Blyth was the man who wrote Zen in English Literature, translated all the haiku poems. He was a devoted vegetarian, and teetotaler. And I teased him. You know, we had a wonderful discussion together once, and I said, “You vegetarian, you are scrunching up all those vegetables. How can you do that?” He said, “They don’t scream so loud.”

So here you have the paradox of Buddhism, which is a way of life which highly stresses compassion and kindness—ahiṃsā: “harmlessness”—yet somehow in a funny way aligning itself with a class of soldiers using these frightful weapons. But by the association, eventually a few of those soldiers learn how to get out of the system. Now, Japan as a whole may have learned, at this point, how to get out of the system of violence. It’s doubtful. They may have learned their lesson in that Second World War. And you could say perhaps the cultured members of the country as a whole have learned that the game of violence doesn’t work. But a few individuals learned this as a result of studying bushidō and the art of jūdō and the art of kendō, of fencing, to its final limits. They learned the power of never defending yourself.

There’s a beautiful scene in the movie when Miyamoto Musashi is in a little cheap inn, and he’s eating his dinner, and it happens that the rice has some lice in it, and that he’s suddenly challenged by brigand who is in charge of the particular crime racket in the area. And this brigand comes on with a very strong line at him, you know? And you see Miyamoto Musashi picking the lice out of the rice with his chopsticks and throwing them away absolutely unconcerned. And this brigand looks at him. He’s tried all his tricks, all his terrors, and this man is simply bored. So the brigand instantly becomes Musashi’s disciple.

So, you see, what happened—the politics of the thing comes down to a game of nerve. Let’s just take it geographically and physically. As you look at Japan today, go and visit a town like Kyoto, the hills on the north side of Kyoto are the loveliest land. The most beautiful forests and hills and landscape and streams where anybody could possibly want to live. And therefore, naturally, the richest and most powerful people own the land. This was the luxurious area. Well, it so happens that the Zen monks occupy a great deal of it. They live like princes—only, personally, each one of them is poor. They lead a life of what I would call luxurious asceticism. And you know what that means, when you’re camping: life can be sort of rough. You don’t sleep in silk sheets, you sleep in a rough blanket. But the surroundings are lovely. And so that’s the way they live.

The question arises immediately, then: how did they capture this land as monks with nothing—no weapons at all—from the most powerful brigands around? Because the people who are the nobility today were originally the roughest guys going. So today the Rockefeller family in the United States, for example, were the robber barons. Brutal people. The great lords and ladies of England who were originally the brigand chiefs who robbed the land and put everything down. So, in the same way, the daimyo were simply the most successful bunch of crooks. The government of the United States is, as a matter of fact, nothing other than the most successful group of gangsters. But somehow the monks overcame them. Because the monks looked them in the eye and said: you can’t frighten us. And they said: ha-ha, we can’t frighten you! And they tried everything, and the monks couldn’t be frightened. So the brigands got worried, because they would like to be as unfrightenable as that. Because if they knew they could be as unfrightenable as that, they’d win any contest. See? The monks simply stared them down. And I can’t imagine what that must’ve meant in terms of some personal suffering. For certain individual monks they may have tried tortures on them, and say: see if we can move you. They couldn’t be moved. Because they just could not be made anxious or frightened.

And the reason why they couldn’t was that they had learned this thing: you needn’t be ashamed of feeling pain. You needn’t panic about pain. It’s perfectly alright to be in pain, and to object to it. But don’t to object to objecting. Let go. And if you understand that, you see, you can be the complete hero incapable of being moved by any torture, because you see through the illusion of the world. And they saw that. And therefore, they could out-face all those brigands. And therefore, the brigands said: ho-ho, teach us! And the monks said: sure. And, as a result, the ownership of this land on the north end of Kyoto passed into the hands of the monks.

Now, shortly before the Second World War, the Japanese government committed an ultimately serious mistake, which is the reason why the Japanese were defeated. They deprived the monks of their lands and said: all churches have to be disestablished. We take away from your your lands. And therefore you’ll have to shift to restaurants and tourist places in order to make a living. Because something happened in Japan shortly before the Second World War whereby they lost their understanding of the no-sword school, and made this ridiculous gamble of bombing Hawaiʻi and starting that war in which they failed. And it’s so curious, do you see, that the starting of that war and rejecting the monks happened at the same time. And I wrote, just before the Second World War started, an article in Asia magazine called The Rusty Swords of Japan, saying how the samurai had lost their spirit. The war hadn’t started at that point. They had lost the understanding of the sword because they’d lost the understanding of Zen, and therefore they would lose. They hadn’t any nerve anymore.

So then, let us allow that, in life, there has to be violence—that trees have to be chopped down, that pigs have to be stuck, that chickens have to be strangled; that soft, succulent, sensitive substance has to be crunched by teeth. If this doesn’t happen, life doesn’t go on. So: wow! Now what are you going to do about that? What will be your response to that situation? You could say: “No, no! No, no, no! That’s just too bad! Let’s stop the whole thing! I want to stop the show, get off, not do that.” How will you do that? Even a vegetarian can’t stop it. You can commit suicide, yes, and say, “I reject the whole system. It is appalling and horrible.” That’s one possibility.

Well, what’s the other possibility? The only other possibility is to say that if violence is involved, if the teeth are involved, if there is that side of life, then let us do it beautifully. If you have to cut a head off, don’t do it with a blunt knife, because that will involve unnecessary suffering. Do it with the sharpest knife that you can make, and as fast as possible. And then, thereafter, if you’re going to eat living flesh—you’re going to eat a fish or a bird or whatever—you owe it to this form of life to prepare and cook it in the most expert way. As Lin Yutang said: “A fish that has died for you and is not well cooked has died in vain.” So that, insofar as the dead fish and the dead bird become you, they may at least have the privilege of enjoying themselves as you.

Now, that may sound, you know, a weird language, and you can say: “Ha, you can talk! It’s alright so long as you’re on the eating end. But supposing you were the bird—you wouldn’t enjoy it. You’d just disappear. You’d become unconscious, and you wouldn’t participate in this.” Well, I wonder if that’s really so. Let’s take the whole idea of Christianity: Jesus initiated a rite which we call the mass, and this rite has been kept going—for goodness knows why—but it’s been kept going for thousands of years among Christians. Every Sunday everybody’s supposed to go to mass. And what’s it all about? Jesus takes a loaf of bread. Now, what is a loaf of bread? It is grains of wheat that have been beaten up and pulverized into flour. And what is a cup of wine? It is crushed grapes that have been squeezed and broken into juice. Now, he makes an analogy. He takes the bread and says, “This is my body, which is given to you. Do this in remembrance of me.” He takes the cup of wine and he says, “This is my blood which is shed for you”—incidentally, for the remission of sins—“Do this in remembrance of me.” I’ve never heard clergymen talk about this, but obviously, here is life itself saying to you: “I am the wheat. I have been crushed to give you life. I am the vine”—he said!—“I am the vine, you are the branches. I am the vine which has been squashed. But please, it’s for the remission of sins. Don’t feel guilty about it. Take this and drink it.” Because in some funny way the creature that is the eaten one is giving itself. The sacrifice is voluntary. And please, don’t feel guilted.

So the whole sense of the idea of the mass as something that you participate in in order to attain salvation and liberation from guilt and hell and all that kind of thing is connected with the idea that the victim is a voluntary victim. And, as a matter of fact, in the very ancient sacrifices, human sacrifices—in Mexico, the Mayan and Aztec and Inca cultures where there were human sacrifices—it was of the essence of the thing that the victim was voluntary. Now, there cannot be such a thing as a voluntary sacrificial victim, except in a world, in a metaphysic, in a worldview where you know that death and life are simply opposing vibrations; that death can never win. In other words, you can’t have a state in which death is the permanent situation, because if life involves death, death involves live, and they’ve got to go yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa with each other like that, so that death comes every so often and wipes out your memory, but you keep on going under a new scene. Remember how long it’s taken for you to develop from babyhood until now? What a struggle it’s been? What a big thing? See, that’s one great wave in this vibration. Zzzhupp, like that. But there are short waves, like waking and sleeping, like—when you look at a light, the light is vibrating. It’s going so fast that you can’t pick up the intervals. But when you hear a very deep sound, you can hear the yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa-yaa of the vibration. But the vibration between life and death is such an enormous wave—well, there has to be an enormous wave in order that you can understand what a little wave is.

So Jesus, in the whole parable of this mass, this last supper, is saying: look—well, he’s saying what the Hindus say when they say annam Brahman. Annam Brahman means “food is brahman,” “food is the Godhead.” “This is my body.” Every victim which is squelched and squirmed and crunched and turned into you is, from a certain standpoint, a voluntary offering; a kind of process of cosmic masochism whereby you really want to be scrunched up and absorbed into someone or something else. Of course you’ll object. Of course you will raise all kinds of shrieks at the moment of being crunched up and say, “No! Stop! No, no, no, no!” But all that is the flavor of being scrunched up. “Oh, don’t let that happen!” See? See? See? “Don’t let that happen!” And you realize finally that, just as in the movie I was describing to you, when the antagonist to Miyamoto Musashi has actually been killed—he’d been given a death blow and he’s still alive for a moment—and he looks into the eyes of his adversary with this expression complete love and total admiration and drops dead. This is saying to life which involves the teeth: “I accept you. I love you.”

Well now, this isn’t quite the final story. Let’s suppose this is really the picture. Let’s suppose that the life force, the Brahman, does give itself to us through the fish. The fish don’t know it, exactly, and go through a kind of ecstatic masochistic dance in the course of being devoured. Suppose we understand all that. But then you have to say—when you review all this and you see this absolutely ecstatic display of pain being offered to you to continue your life as a gesture of love—and you realize what kind of a thing you’re dealing with, what you’re involved in, see? Do you see this idea of the vibrancy of a loving gesture being given to you all the time by all these creatures to sustain you in being? What are you going to do?

You say, “Now wait a minute! This is so gorgeous, this thing, that I must treat it with the greatest reverence. Let’s cool it. Let’s stroke it. Let’s lessen suffering everywhere we can”—like Schweitzer talks about reverence for life. This thing is so throbbing, it’s so enthusiastic in the way that it abandons itself and offers itself for my consumption, that one wants to say to it: “Thank you.” But this thank you is a loving thing. It’s a gesture of stroking it and calming it. Cut down the suffering. Always let compassion prevail out of a feeling of immense gratitude to this energy that turns itself into you all the time through pain. So that you—every individual is a murderer. The only thing in you that isn’t stolen from other beings through murder is water. Everything else in your body is borrowed; stolen from some other form of life by killing it. See? So you say in response to this wave of energy that is manifesting itself as you—as a result of murder—you say, finally: “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Please, I want to stroke you. I want to love you. Let’s cut down the killing. Let’s ease the pace of this thing.”