For thousands of years, we were hunters, and now we’re pretending to be stockbrokers and accountants and business executives.
I wonder if competition is really basic to human beings. There are societies, like the Eskimo, where you don’t have this competitive spirit, where you have a high degree of cooperation. We might not have had any kind of society or culture at all if we hadn’t been hunters, because this was the first time organisms had to cooperate.
War is incredibly difficult to understand; if you asked the computers, they would tell you that everybody could be living in luxury if we didn’t spend all our money on nonproductive military hardware. The money that all the nations have spent on war since 1914 could have solved the economic problems of the entire world by now.
War is a luxury we can’t afford, financially or any other way; the hydrogen bomb is a suicide bomb.
War is now an ideological quarrel about abstractions. And they’re the worst kind.
I don’t really think of religion in terms of strange visions. I know that by taking certain drugs, or by fasting, or by altering the oxygen content of my lungs and blood, I can see things I wouldn’t ordinarily see. But that, to me, is not religion. That is physics. Any kind of inquiry into parapsychology, telepathy, clairvoyance, ESP phenomena, psionics—all that to me is physics. I’m still investigating the vibrations of nature. Religion, as I see it, is understanding completely any vibration in nature. If there were only one speck of dust in this Universe—nothing else in all space but that one speck of dust—this would be a matter for astonishment—i.e., religion.
The religious mind as we know it in the Orient is strictly experimental; it’s not interested one whit in dogma, in doctrine, in belief. It’s interested in a certain kind of transformation of consciousness that is empirical and experimental.
Religion in the West is largely a matter of belief in a certain scheme of things, and in morals. Neither of these two questions looms very large in Hinduism and Buddhism. Morals to a certain extent, yes, but they aren’t interested in whether you have the right beliefs and the right ideas so much as whether you have a certain kind of experience. And that can be reached only through an experimental process—the process of experimentation called yoga.
It’s always seemed to me that many religions made statements about the Universe that at first there was no way of checking. For the sake of argument, let’s stick to the Christian view, which is the only one I really know much about—the early concepts of the Earth’s being the center of the Universe, the world being created in seven days, that sort of thing. Now science has given us what seems to be definite knowledge about many of these matters that at one time would have seemed beyond the possibility of any knowledge. And in almost every case, it has turned out that the religious statements were nonsense. Because of this, I’ve always felt hostile toward those religions that made such assertions and then persecuted and even murdered the people who proved they were not true.
Most people don’t realize how many alternative ideas of God there are. A Christian apologist will start out with excellent reasons for believing that there is, as a British Member of Parliament once said, “some sort of a something somewhere.” And you immediately equate that with the Biblical God, who is really a barbarian modeled on a Near Eastern tyrant. Nobody would think of inviting that God to dinner.
Religion doesn’t really serve the function for most people that it once did.
Religion isn’t supposed to mean anything. What’s the meaning of “hallelujah?” It’s just whoopee. What’s the meaning of the galaxies, the spiral nebulae, the quasars? They’re just immense rejoicings, like Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. These meaningless religious celebrations are not so much primitive as basic: and if you can’t let yourself get into their spirit, you’re only half alive. The result of all this is that you’re going to get, and already have, a tremendous uprising of interest in mystical religion among the intelligent population of the United States.
Morals are too important to be left to the clergy.
I often want to ask what right the Pope has to regulate marriage; what does he know about it?
Nature has always been playful: the economy of nature with respect to sex is extremely wasteful from a pinchpenny utilitarian point of view; nature is profligate in throwing seed around. Of course, I don’t look upon nature as being utilitarian; I look upon nature as a gas, as a terrific jazz that’s going on. Whether it’s “successful” or not is completely unimportant.
The future doesn’t worry me, because I know that deep within me I’m really God and that absolutely nothing can go wrong.
Really, nothing at all can go wrong, because I know that I am God in disguise. That’s a very difficult thing to say in Western culture, but it’s very easy to say it in India, because there everybody knows it’s true. Jesus knew this, but couldn’t possibly say it in his culture without being accused of blasphemy, which was what happened, and they killed him for it. Christians never understood him. They said, “Sure, Jesus is God—but nobody else is,” and that strangled his teaching at birth.
By thinking about the future and its possibilities, we do have a chance of averting the more disastrous ones.
An attempt to relate man to the Universe? That’s a good idea.
The basic assumption of Western thought is ex nihilo nihil fit—that out of nothing comes nothing at all. My assumption is that out of nothing comes something. You can’t possibly imagine a solid without space; you can’t imagine space without a solid. They’re like positive and negative poles.
Fear of death is one of man’s major problems. Human beings will always be in the sort of situations we’re worrying about now just as long as they are so terrified.
In my function as a shaman, I’ve watched many people die and told them they were going to die and that this is the supreme opportunity for human happiness—to let yourself go entirely and stop caring. Just give in, give up. And when you do, you suddenly get this tremendous surge of energy.
Accepting death is the key to freedom. There’s a Zen Buddhist poem that says, “While living, be a dead man, thoroughly dead. Then, whatever you do, just as you like, will be all right.” In other words, if you have let go of yourself, you’re no longer worried about death. You feel very free. All time is borrowed time; it’s all for gravy. The biggest hang-up that human beings have is this death thing, and Christianity hasn’t helped much on that. It’s being finite that confers individuality on us; it’s death that enables us to be individuals, in the best sense.
Individuality is a function of being an activity of the Universe, here and now. When you study an organism, human or animal or insect, it cannot be differentiated from its environment. The whole thing is a process; although there are differentiations within the process, it is a unified field of behavior. Unfortunately, the average man has no sensation of being an organism/environment entity.
You know those works of art that are made up of a pattern of lines in which, when you look at it, you can make out a figure even though it’s just a pattern of lines? You don’t always see it at first and you can’t separate the image from the background: it’s all continuum. In the same sense, we’re continuum, a part of nature. This accounts for the illusion of individuality.
The determinists will tell you that the organism is the puppet of the environment; the free-willists will say that the organism can kick the environment around to a great extent. I want to say that there’s a single dance.
It seems to me that this is what we should really get down to—what should the human race do next?
What I find lacking in all this is the recognition of our environment as something to be respected and shaken hands with in a brotherly way. We’ve got to recognize the right of this so-called external, objective world to be treated as something as alive and real as we are.
We have too many eggs in one basket here on Earth. When we set up independent colonies, then disaster on one won’t necessarily wipe out the whole human race.
There’s no such thing as garbage—only raw materials that we’re too stupid to use.
As a Buddhist, I’m not really interested in philosophy, I’m interested in states of consciousness. Philosophy be damned! That’s just conceptualization, that’s trying to explain the music in words, whereas the important thing is to participate in the music and dig it. If you do, then there’s energy available.
The educational system must always be at least a generation behind the times, because the teachers are out of phase with the students to that extent. This really didn’t matter, of course, until about 100 years ago. We run into a feedback problem here; the time delay is now just too long.
My idea of a free university is not one that’s free from discipline but one where absolutely nobody has to go; you’re there only if you’re really interested. To pass the admissions examination, you would have to prove not only that you could perform certain intellectual disciplines but also that you liked doing them very much and that you would be happy belonging to a community of scholars.
Life has become so much more complex; the number of interconnections and the rate at which everything happens have increased enormously; it’s almost a quantum jump. What worries me is how we can increase the rate of our input to cope with it.
The major educational problem of the future will be educating people for leisure. We live in a world that’s heading for full unemployment, but unfortunately the uneducated will be unable to survive in a world with complete leisure: they won’t know what to do with their lives. Work fills most of the life of the average man: going to work, working, going home from work.
Work is a fairly new idea, invented some 5000 years ago. Primitive men don’t work, hunters don’t work. They live short, nasty, brutish lives—but they don’t work. It’s only farmers who work, who invented work, and it has grown more and more dominant in our lives ever since.
The whole purpose of a machine is to do ever so much more than one man can do. It should at least pay its designer for his labor, but he has designed an ineffective machine if it pays only him. If it pays other people as well, then he has designed a truly effective machine; he has made a real contribution to society. But people still have ideas of a scarcity economics, of an age in which there simply wasn’t enough to go around. But the designer’s machine has changed all that, and now there’s enough to go around.
In principle, there’s enough to go around. As far as materials and energy are concerned, there are unlimited resources. We’re messing them up now—we have this pollution problem and power shortages—but those are temporary problems. Certainly, as long as the Sun shines, there’s no question of a power shortage. What there is a danger of is an intelligence shortage.
When the time lag is reduced between any two places, the two places tend to become the same place in space. So Tokyo has become a mixture of Los Angeles and Shanghai, and Los Angeles has also become Tokyoized to some extent, and so has San Francisco. We’re getting this weird kind of jet-aircraft culture in which every place has become pretty much the same, so there’s less and less point to going anywhere.
Conceivably, we could wind up with a pathological society where people avoided all physical contact and communicated only through electronics.
Once when I took LSD on a Sunday evening, a group of us were listening to a religious service on the radio. A Black revival minister made sense because he was pure, exuberant emotion, but the problem we faced was with a fundamentalist Bible preacher who was a real phony. He had an echo chamber so as to sound as if he were talking in a cathedral, and after his terrible moralistic preachments from the Bible, he always had a commercial: “If you want a copy of this address, send in a dollar to this station. Be sure to send in your dollar.” But as we listened to his voice, we could hear this anxious little person saying: “I’m human, too, I have to live. Send in your dollar.” Then we listened further into the sound and we could hear a frightened child crying for its mother. We listened further and heard the primordial blow of wind through a tube. We listened still further and then we heard the voice of God, the alpha and the omega. The basic vibration of the Universe was in this poor little preacher. And then we forgave him, saying, “What hath God wrought! What an extraordinary manifestation that it comes out in this weird little character.” In this way, LSD has made me much more open to variations in human behavior and life style.
Instead of sweeping these drugs under the carpet with legal prohibitions and horrors, we should bring them out into the open and let our best scientific and philosophic minds go to town on them. If we have to regulate the use of hallucinogenic drugs, then what we should do is license them the same as we do alcohol and have legally sanctioned centers where people could use them under careful supervision.
Some of the hypocrisies of our society are so appalling that it’s no wonder the young are disillusioned and rebelling against them.
It all comes back to personal freedom, doesn’t it? There is more and more of a thirst for personal freedom at the same time that we seem to be passing more and more laws that restrict it. Yet it’s obvious to any lawyer that the more law proliferates, the less intelligible it becomes.
Freedom is a gamble. There cannot be a community without mutual trust, and yet not everybody is trustworthy. But the only alternative to taking the risk of mutual trust is the super police state. So, naturally, we’re going to get burgled and we’re going to have a certain number of accidents; but if you don’t take that gamble, then life isn’t worth living.
In the next quarter century, you’ll see the development of more and more international organizations that do such vital jobs that everybody will have to cooperate with them. In the past, we’ve had the International Postal Union and the International Telegraph Union and today, of course, we have Intelsat, an organization of some 70 countries cooperating in the global communications system. We also have the organizations of the airlines, the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. These independent bodies and others like them will become so essential and supranational in the next few decades that they will be running the world. The nation-state will find itself a postal division, a cultural subsection in these organizations. This is how we’ll merge into a world society.
The concept of Spaceship Earth may be cliché now, but it was no coincidence that from the moment we first saw that photograph of the Earth hanging in space, we became aware of our human unity and of the problems threatening the survival of our planet.
In another generation it will seem incredible that intelligent men ever questioned the value of the space program. Anybody who can’t see the value of it is a fool. The program has already paid for itself in terms of lives saved alone, the most dramatic example being the use of satellites to track hurricanes, particularly Hurricane Camille off the Gulf Coast in 1969. On the basis of what such storms did 30 or 40 years ago, the death toll on a single night might have topped 45,000, our entire death list in the Vietnam war to date.
The most valuable thing we may have gained from space flight is a new perspective on the Earth.
The photographs they’ve taken of the Earth from outer space leave you with the feeling that it is the most beautiful of all jewels.
The chances that extraterrestrial intelligence exists are overwhelming; it may be a long way away, but it’s obviously there. A thing that can happen here can certainly happen elsewhere in a Universe this big.
The exploding stars, the neutron stars, are probably where all the action really is, because these storms of radiation and energy might be where very high-grade organisms or intelligences thrive because there’s pure energy to live on. We say that organic life is possible only on the cold planets, where carbon-based reactions can take place. Well, we may be a very low type of organism, a statistical accident. The really spiritual beings might be in the centers of cosmic activity, right in the hearts of exploding stars and novae.
In looking at a galaxy, we might be looking at an intelligent organism.
You wouldn’t call a human being a cell-infested skeleton any more than you would call a planet a people-infested planet, as if the biosphere were a bunch of germs that came from elsewhere.
The Universe wasn’t designed for our comfort.
I feel that mechanical intelligence has fewer variables in it than biological intelligence. A biological intelligence contains a principle of randomness, so that it is an ever-fecund source of surprise. I think the preservation of that randomness is very important.
Electronic intelligence represents the next step in evolution. The fact that we don’t feel happy about it means no more than the fact that the Neanderthals probably would have felt pretty unhappy if they had known about us.
Anything that can be done with biological systems can, in principle, often be done much better with nonbiological systems.
The biological system is the only way you can get from a lifeless planet to an electronic intelligence. I can’t imagine all the metals in a dead planet organizing themselves eventually into an IBM computer; I think they’ve got to pass through something like us, and this is our role in the evolutionary sequence. We are a transitional stage in the development of a high-powered, swift intelligence that is probably going to be electronic and that probably won’t live on planets at all. It may live either in space or, as I suggested, in the real centers of energy in the Universe, where there are tremendous quantities of radiation and electronic activity.
The fact that we may be superseded by electronic beings upsets most people; because from a human point of view, anything that supersedes us is bad, period. But this is a self-centered, short-term point of view. We all know we’re going to be succeeded by our children someday. We accept that without too much hysteria and we do our best to make them better than we are.
I think it’s much better to have a nostalgia for the future than for the past; it has better survival value.
There is only the present; there never was anything else and there never will be. Most people live for the future, and make all sorts of plans for it, but when those plans mature, they won’t be able to enjoy them, because they’ll be living somewhere else in their minds.
I seem to be congenitally incapable of understanding any scheme of the Universe that involves the notion that I, at the deepest level of me, am no “what’s happening.” When I look out a the galaxies, I see me—oh, not the Alan Watts me; that’s only a superficial social game. But I see the same sort of me out there that is functioning in my molecules and cells, my blood and my nerves. All that to me is electronic unity.
As Confucius said, “The man who understands the Tao in the morning can die content in the evening.” I can’t spell it out much better than that; when people ask to have the meaning of life explained to them, it’s like asking Bach to explain his music in word. Only inferior music can be explained in that way. A Bach fugue doesn’t have anything to say except itself. I want to look at the Universe in the same way.
The purpose of the Universe is the perpetual astonishment of mankind.