Alan Watts | Unlocking the Present Moment

at the end of the question period yesterday I said we had come to something which um I would have to take up today and this arose because we were discussing the problem of prediction which is of course uh related to the problem of control I had made a passing reference in yesterday's uh uh seminar to the fact that the knowledge of time the knowledge of the future what kibky calls man's time binding ability is a 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 the 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 uh with what will happen tomorrow and uh it's so extraordinary that that passage in the St Matthew's gospel where Jesus says don't make any anxiety about the tomorrow what you're going to eat what you're going to drink and I am amazed about that because every Minister I have ever heard discuss this passage says it can't be put into practice is that the church simply never did teach that that's the the the most subversive p message 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 this image of the flowers of the field and the birds that don't make any plans and uh he did another one for example the story of the Pharisee and the Publican this is very interesting because its effect is is is is extremely funny he says here is the Pharisee who goes up to the front row of the church and stands up and uh 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 cuz 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 uh in what I would call gurum manip The Art of 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 if this story has completely deflated uh fake humility uh where you try to be humble it's a Coan so in the same way the P the the passage on be not anxious for the tomorrow really asks you why can't you put this into

practice here's 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 uh 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 not hung up on the idea that the present is this hairline thing which is purely abstract then you have no problem

in uh accepting the idea that we are simultaneously aware of past events and future events because they're all uh 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 might

happen a month from now you see so then the question then comes we we predict those far Futures which are not within our present Vision by calculation it may be astronomical navigational calculation or uh 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 a a fine science of prediction whether it be scientifically respectable like navigation or meteorology which isn't too hot um or whether it be something like astrology uh

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 uh when seeing another dead cat will not necessarily infer that's going to happen to me CU you see uh a true animal a truly functioning entity is not self-conscious in that way for example uh you all know that only other people have heads you don't only uh 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 is the only part of our body that we leave permanently unclosed except the hands even when we put gloves on uh 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 see you can touch it put a good face on it lose face save face all these things indicates uh 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 the the brain is is not sensitive to probes in it so you you would live in terms of all this is going on as 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 uh is in a way always characteristic of the wise man because he's uh 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 you can't 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 [Laughter] 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 the future 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 would know your future you could take practical steps to adapt things to it

if you knew you were going to die uh next Tuesday uh you would immediately put your house in order and make less trouble for your friends and relations face it yeah that sounds all right to begin with it's like all technology is initially a success but the real problem 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 the you see if you think of the cosmos as basically a game of hide and seek where uh the Lord God is creating the universe by forgetting that he's God and imagining that he's you then uh this is the the the fundamental way of getting rid of the Eternal boredom of knowing all about it and of there being no surprises the whole the uh 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 it everything is a miracle that it is highly improbable and really shouldn't have 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 it it 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 prevision such as uh I describ by the analogy of looking out of the window of a train when you go beyond a

certain degree of natural prevision you encounter a law of diminishing returns that the more you succeed the more you failed and then you get into the sort of uh 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 uh Shakespeare's use of the conjunction if uh 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 is ifs ands and buts sub Clauses and so on and nobody can keep track of it and the whole 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 uh trouble for us I'm quite sure that my entire situation is illegal and it's a so for everybody and this is the result you see of wanting to pin everything down in ancient China uh the confusions had a thing they called the rectification of names and they were the the the confusions are

curious people because while they have some marvelous ideas they are certainly lacking in humor and uh they're rather ponderous and puritanical and stuffy the daoists on the other hand have humor and are always making fun of the confusions now the the rectification of names was that confucious said we must be sure when we use words that their meaning is established so this means the dictionary and so they were they were the first real serious thinkers about dictionaries about definitions about laying down what the words mean but the da is 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 what are you going to how are you going to rectify the words you use to rectify the words well they thought about that then they said well their words are self-rectifying that is to say uh you Rectify words with words and the words you use to rectify the words are rectified with the other words so a close 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 uh 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 pres to rule

on whether they cheated in other words whether uh they looked up when they saw uh knowledge uh to observe to record on looked up the word to instead of record or observe or whatever you see uh so uh the the dictionary only gets out of a vicious circle when there is a picture beside the word then it escapes but otherwise um 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 uh well obviously uh it was a good idea to record certain things so we could be sure that people wouldn't be dishonest but all this started from people being dishonest and in if we are 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 eventually you succeed in the short run but once again in the long run you run into a total tangle United States of America is the country in the world with most laws and yet our police are

completely mistrusted by every saying person they have Crooks and Scoundrels and uh violent fascist kind of people with exceptions you know everything has exceptions we have a nice cup on the corner sort of thing and uh but by and large uh through a state in which say 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 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 conceal it find a loophole in the literature uh 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

uh then of course everybody is accountable and that means keeps accounts and uh you I I I'm 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 the symbolic method prediction recording all prediction is based on recording and on uh it's like you take a graph of the movement of of a stock or of any anything you want a 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 cancelled and uh let's begin again that's what we need now we need a new chemical or a you know like people talk about putting um 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 uh I I think on the whole the benefit to humanity from the complete disappearance of paper at this point it wouldn't have been true perhap at some other time but now I think that uh much would be said for it and it would have to include plastic Celluloid film and all that sort of thing as well yes all all recording to disappear in other words the book of the recording Angel is to be eaten up by God Utopia yeah this is

the thing uh now uh that's course I'm being please understand I'm being somewhat factious and that this mustn't be taken quite literally but it is saying that this point look at look at a group of tourists I uh 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's a certain kind of people who never never look at anything except with a camera they go

around capturing reality in this box 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 dawling behind the other people even though we moved at a very leisurely Pace because he was interminably for photographing photographing photographing capturing the world stopping it making a still see with this 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 is a staff or a cane uh to help you climb your hand should otherwise be completely free of incumbrances so should your eyes and your ears and everything then it will really happen but otherwise uh 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 study instead of looking directly at things that were going on participating

directly with people in Social relationship so in the same way when you have a not being just a tour where you're seeing wonderful Landscapes and works of art and Antiquity or also when people have very good times they have a picnic at the beach and it's delightful somebody says oh someone should have 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 invited they are sure that the society reporter comes from the Press 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 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 he'll be headlin there's a great hero and villain and uh 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 it'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 uh there

is all kinds of work done like this foundations invent projects pseudo projects because instead of you see what happens is that uh 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 their 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 uh then they think up a project 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 um 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 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 solv this problem we don't

want to be anxious we want a foolproof system all right back to the recorder back to a closer study of the symbols how can we outwit the future but do you see it's an complete Vicious Circle the more it succeeds the more it fails the more uh 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 planes I tell you there will 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 uh 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 TR 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 technologist to understand that technology is a process like cooking like um polishing which you must do for a certain time and then stop then it's 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 know it's very nice to stroke her but if I keep on stroking her I'll rub her skin off [Laughter] up to a point it's fine you see beyond that too much that is 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 for