Alan Watts: Learning the Human Game – Being in the Way Ep. 17 – Hosted by Mark Watts

what would you think of the heavens where the stars were all in arranged at even intervals in concentric circles would you like that would you like to go out at night and see that [Music] no we like the stars scattered as they are we also like to see when the waves break on the shore the patterns of foam and you know the funny thing is you can look at those patterns hour after hour and realize that they never make an aesthetic mistake never they never do anything inelegant just like a cat never makes a bad

move do you make a bad move ever or are you like a cat or like patterns on the phone it's quite a question [Music] welcome to being in the way the Alan Watts podcast and today we're going to be listening to a session from learning the human game this is from a seminar recorded in 1965 at University of Michigan and he talks about some very interesting metaphysical perspectives many of you will know the first session from this seminar well from The Coincidence of opposites which has been part of the Dao philosophy series and now we're

remastering many of those talks and so they'll be appearing on our podcast and also on our new streaming Channel which will begin this fall look for the Alan Watts Channel and also two new Alan Watts apps coming your way but today we're going to hear a talk that has been in the archives for many years part two of learning the human game these podcasts are produced by the Alan Watts organization in conjunction with the romdas be here now Network again this is from learning the human game 1965 University of Michigan and here's Alan Watts in

learning the human game this morning I was talking to you about the problem of our fundamental assumptions about life and health and this of course therefore involved a lecture on metaphysics because what I understand by metaphysics is simply whatever system of axioms we're operating on and I tried to tell you what mine is and you may say it's arbitrary because I can't prove any of these assumptions but I'm just suggesting that they are a fruitful basis for a life that word fruitful is very important in mathematics for example there are certain problems which are considered

fruitful and certain problems which are considered unfruitful you can't for example establish a mathematical system which excludes the rule of consistency there's no future in that No Game No play in it and this you see becomes one of the most crucial questions about the theory of games and trying to decide what are good game rules as distinct from bad game rules and let's say game rules that are fruitful are good games that give us a lot of play and a lot of Adventure and uh because what we want to do apparently is to go on

living in an interesting way and so the nature of productive or unproductive fruit flow unfruitful game rules is extremely important I think there's a parallel between ethics and language some of you have read my book Psychotherapy east and west I don't want to bore you with repeating things that you've already read and I know some of you haven't but let me just go over this a little bit again uh language is a very curious model for problems in ethics and behavior in general not so long ago a new edition of Webster was published in which

the editors took an extremely liberal point of view they regarded their Duty as lexicographers to record the way language is actually being used by most people now and therefore they admitted into the dictionary all sorts of expressions like say the word contact used as a verb which is extremely bad grammar from an old-fashioned point of view that they record all this kind of thing because people are doing it and also to address a clergymen as Reverend Smith his very bad grammar shows you're not educated but uh the dictionary now records this use as something legitimate

and the most marvelous review of this dictionary was written by Dwight McDonald in the New Yorker who said the lexicographers have abdicated their responsibility it's true that language should live and should change but if the lexicographers give in entirely to this there are no standards now this you see is a is an ethical question but it's put in the form of language now what are we to do about that there are certain people who argue that English as spoken in London in 1910 by the upper class people who had public school and University training is

the right English language if you get for example such a book as Fowler's Modern English usage you will find a marvelous guide to a certain Epoch of correct English with very funny and sharp criticism of variations from this for example let's consider just one word to dig which has become extremely common in American speech I dig you what advantage does this word have over appreciate or enjoy or understand now you must admit it does have a little bit of advantage I appreciate you I enjoy what you say I understand what you say man I dig

what you say has a degree more of intimacy it means that you and I have along to the same Club we probably smoke pot so we've got a little secret between ourselves that appreciate doesn't share and joy doesn't share understand doesn't share so it becomes a word of a subculture that has certain practices that are outlawed by the culture at Large now here you see the dictionary people are confronted with the Dilemma they have to be authorities because there must be rules if there aren't any rules of language we can never understand each other if

I refer to this one minute as a table the next minute is a bujam the next minute is a sub dub can't even spell that you don't know what I'm talking about but because we have agreed rules of language just as we have agreed rules on which side of the road we shall drive on and what kind of things we shall eat our dinner out of and with what implements and what sort of the things we're going to eat anyway we can have a community we can't have a community if that's what we want and

incidentally that's what we are unless we have agreed rules now the problem with ethics in general is this that to find out how ought we to behave people look up the past and they say now Moses gave us ten commands and those Ten Commandments are sacrosanct you've got to go back to those but you know when you come to be I'm 50 years old now and uh so and I and I have five grandchildren and I realize how stupid my grandfather was because I've attained the same age in other words I know how little he

knew although when I was a little boy he seemed to me marvelous Authority so constantly there's a tendency in us to look back to the past and say there are certain tried and true rules which people have followed for centuries and they work and we should adhere to the old rules that's partly true it's very important truth as a matter of fact just so long as it isn't made an absolute truth then it becomes dangerous because while those people themselves who are in our past were adhering to their tried and true rules they were also

inventing things they were trying new experiments and so here here's the the parallel between ethics and language if if a language is dead like Latin it tends not to invent any new words although as a matter of fact at the Vatican Council where all the debates are carried on in Latin they have to have Latin words for things like telephone automobile and so on but on the whole the debate the theological debates in Latin utterly resists new words and so in India where theological debates are carried on in Sanskrit which is likewise a dead language

which is no longer used in living speech but simply a language among Scholars they have no new words but a living language is constantly inventing new words and new forms of grammatical expression you are watching now a time in which the sentence is going out of existence the subject verb predicate form of expressing yourself is not is lapsing from our literature and yet our literature remains perfectly intelligent I mean except guy like Burrows who's now advocating making a manuscript and cutting it in four pieces and rearranging them so that it reads a different way across

and all that jazz but by and large the language must keep moving now then what's the duty of the grammarian and the lexicographer his duty is to keep everybody informed of the changes that are being made he tells you all these new things are current and in terms of what you're used to the old language that's the language he uses for the definitions you know he has dig it has this meaning to make put a spade in the ground and that move the soil that's dig one Dig Two a word used to mean appreciate to

understand etc etc in a certain Amelia of our society what he's doing he's keeping everybody informed of the way the rules are changing and by that by those means we can all keep up with it and know what's happening now we don't feel any violence exercised upon us when we observe the rules of language it is not a crime punishable by imprisonment to speak bad English it may be a crime to tell a lie or to speak a libel but to disobey the rules of English is not a crime all that happens is you're not

understood and this is a very healthy situation because we have very little trouble as a consequence in getting people to be more or less intelligible it's difficult the English is a very difficult language to learn has no grammar it's purely idiomatic but nevertheless an incredible number of people succeed in this very very complex task but we have an attitude to the rules that is completely intelligible and rational if you can't speak the language you can't have fun with your friends if you want to get on with people if you want to have friends you've got

to speak this language that's all there is to it seems to me that problems of Ethics should be approached in exactly the same way as problems in language that uh ethics is not something that should be referred entirely to the Past we should try ethical experimentation what would you like to do what new kinds of behavior would you like to explore do they injure anyone do they deprive anyone or would they be a new adventure we should be creative in ethics we should make our new patterns of ethical Behavior just as we make out new

patterns of language in our effort to describe new experiences that's what it is I mean I've been involved very deeply in the problem of finding language that is intelligible for experiences that people haven't had I've my whole work as a writer has been devoted to the study of the psychology of religion and of religious experiences mystical experiences things that are supposed to be ineffable which means unutterable but I maintain they can be uttled if you're clever enough so I went from that into the study of changes of Consciousness brought about by certain kinds of drugs

and said I will describe what is going to happen because I would love to be able to meet this challenge and so but in doing this I have to invent languages but I have to somehow say in terms of your language this is the old language what my new language means so in the same way why don't we invent new forms of behavior we got to be stuck with all the forms of behavior we've always been accustomed to why not try something different and see if it works now what does it mean works that's the

question isn't it did we get down to what games work now let's take an illustration I'll give you three games first is tic-tac-toe the second is something of the level of Chess or Bridge or poker and the third is three-dimensional chess now tic-tac-toe is a game that reduces itself to tossing a coin who's going to start because if you know how to play Tic-Tac-Toe you win every time you have the first stop so it becomes boring again as we say with no future let's go to The Other Extreme which is three-dimensional chess I don't know

if you've ever tried to play this you play it on eight boards representing the eight levels of a queue see a chessboard is eight by eight all right pile eight boards as it were on a high rise and then play the men the same set of men through the boards imagine a night's move inside a cube for most people say this is absolutely too complex for me to follow I can't keep up with this at all you have to be a super intellect to do this I mean it's chess is a complicated enough game on

a Surface they put it in a cube and only the Masters can even begin to understand it so while as tic-tac-toe fails because it's much too simple therefore boring three-dimensional chess fails because it's too complicated now why is tic-tac-toe so boring because it reduces itself to tossing a coin and according to probability laws the more times you toss a coin the more is the probability that heads and tails will turn up in a 50 50 ratio so what in other words the way in which although each time you toss it you've got a if a

50 50 chance of which will turn up see might be one or the other there's no way of predicting it you can predict that in 500 times of tossing you will approximate to 250 times heads in 250 times tails and in a thousand you'll be even closer to 500 times heads and 500 times tails in 2000 still closer now as a game becomes predictable it becomes boring that's why people don't want to know their future if you could go to a fortune teller or astrologer who would tell you just exactly what was going to happen

to you we all have a certain reluctance I think to do that because if we know what the outcome of something will be it's not worth doing it this is one of the very marvelous things that is a result of some research going on today the Rand Corporation is extremely interested in a method for predicting the outcome of a war starting at any given moment they're trying to find systems for assessing the military potential and saying now if a war starts now the Russians will win The Americans will win or whatever so that if you

know what's going to happen you don't have to do it so in the same way if you know the result of a certain course of action you will lose the inclination to take it the fascination of Life the fascination of games is the unknown result not the known result so then between the unintelligible complexity of three-dimensional chess and the all too intelligible non-complexity of tic-tac-toe they're lie games like Bridge checkers chess poker wherein we get a certain kind of blend of chance and skill games of pure skill tend to work themselves into a blind alley

we get people who are monsters of skill the great Chess Masters the great golfers great shooting people who you know bounced a ping-pong ball on the ground and suddenly shoot it through with an arrow I can't compete with that I think it's fascinating and it's marvelous but I can't play with that so what we're all looking for is an element of randomness and an element of order some skill in relation to some Randomness so we get optimal games in the middle and we feel that these are games which have a future you can go you

can get interested in them and you can go on and on and on and on playing them because on the one hand you will never Master them and on the other hand they will never seem to you absolutely beyond your ability as three-dimensional chest might so you've got here a possibility of challenging the disorder of pure chance and yet you will never arrive at the point of conquering it and for some reason the human being finds this to be a beautiful situation let me switch immediately the whole analogy to another field altogether field of gardening

in the 18th century there was a fashion for formal Gardens where all the Tulips formed Falls where trees were clipped in the art of topiri to resemble peacocks and sundial and uh elephants and all kinds of things and where all Gardens were arranged on a symmetrical plan at that time in history there was even somebody who complained that the Lord God had not properly arranged the stars in the sky that if he had made symmetrical patterns the heavens would be far more beautiful than they are with the scattered but don't we recognize today from our

aesthetic point of view that the scatter of stars is lovely what would you think of the heavens where the stars were all in arranged at even intervals in concentric circles would you like that would you like to go out at night and see that no we like the stars scattered as they are and we also like to see when the waves break on the shore the patterns of foam and you know the funny thing is you can look at those patterns hour after hour and realize that they never make an aesthetic mistake never they never

do anything inelegant just like a cat it never makes a bad move do you make a bad move ever or are you like a cat or like patterns on the phone it's quite a question but there seems to be somewhere an optimal situation everything arranged symmetrically and in an ordered way we understand and we feel safe there but we don't like it it's confining everything purely chaotic we can't make out at all but the somewhere a middle ground in relation to whatever degree of humor of complexity the human nervous system is attained there is a

middle ground which we feel comfortable in because it's orderly and yet at the same time it contains an element of excitement and unpredictability and the balance of these two things is what we call the good life so this is a practical application of the theory of games Behavior you've got to have two ingredients you see the ingredient of control and the ingredient of No Control and always be sure you have both now we're living in a culture that is opposed to this which believes that life can be controlled that once or thinks it once it

doesn't really want but thinks it once to cut out the random element and so we constantly say there should be a law against it whatever it is and we are by doing that by working in that direction we are going to create for ourselves a society a culture in which everything is regulated it will be safe that way today in Beverly Hills California you can't go out at night and take a easy easy stroll for several blocks before a police car will overtake and say what are you doing they said I'm just taking a walk

well you're a suspicious character what are you working for don't you own a car get off the road we don't want strangers wandering around here so whenever you want to go anywhere you have to get in your damn car and go okay you're not allowed to walk so in the same way you want to start a business you want to make shoes you sell them somewhere to someone you want to raise avocado pears and put them mildly on the market just to make a little money what happens I have a friend who raised avocado pears

a man came from the Department of Commerce with a 500 page form to fill in he said I don't have a secretarial stop I don't have like the Carnegie Institute has a vice president in charge of relations with the government he said I won't fill your Foreman take me days I haven't that kind of time and they came back and said you must feel this woman he said I can't fill it in so he made the representative of the Department of Commerce sit down and fill in the form himself he said here are my records

you said on the phone in the man's day there several days and filled in this form well now you know the the fact that all these controls had to exist was the result of people complaining about all the people who broke the rules and so they worked out a form that if you had you could fill that in you see uh you you would be controlled you wouldn't be breaking the rules but the society which is foolproof well the laws are really efficient so that they are properly enforced and there's the minimum opportunity for anyone

to make a mistake that Society is the complete 1984 Big Brother set up nobody enjoys it the game is no longer worth the candle there's no risk there's no Adventure to be completely safe is to be completely dead on the other hand you can see that the opposite of that is equally absurd where there isn't any regulation well you have a kind of Anarchy and where everybody has to carry a sword as it's becoming in New York today you have to go around armed in New York because of the proliferation of Street crimes that's nobody

wants that either so we're always looking in the problem of government the problem of law the problem of control for an optimal balance between Liberty and license and between control and spontaneity and exactly the same problem exists for the painter the sculptor the musician you see let's take one of the very greatest of Western musicians is uh JS Bach to our ears he appears symmetrical orderly stately but every so often Bach actually introduces a trick he has some wonderful control of dissonances he lets things happen and so combines his formality with little touches of informality

just Little touches just a bit so much salt in the stew and keeps you constantly fascinated so the in in painters say let's take a Chinese calligraphy which I was talking about earlier is very very strictly disciplined in formal art but what they love is a real master calligrapher allows accidents to happen his brush Runs Dry suddenly and you get a sweeping of a line like a horse's tail but the ink ran dry and there's a kind of interesting texture an interesting Dynamic pattern in that which is much appreciated lovely it livens the whole thing

up so they call this the art of the controlled accident you see the element in an artist which differentiates a very competent technician from an inspired master is it an inspired Master is first of all a competent technician and then he lets go of himself and allows things to happen Beyond his control but he introduces the elements Beyond his control into the context that he has under control so he can show you something that is a mess but he'll put it in a context that makes it look marvelous how a photographer can alter his framework

in a certain way so as to take a filthy old ashtray or a pile of garbage and make it look gorgeous he'll alter the light just thus and so and he'll get the color absolutely marvelous and correct you'll use all that technique and you'll Focus that technique on a heap of junk have any of you played with a gadget called a kaleidoscope a kaleidoscope is a um not it's like a kaleidoscope but a kaleidoscope has pieces of glass set into it so that as you turn it and look through it the pattern orbitals tell idoscope

has instead of pieces of glass and lens which shows you anything in the surrounding area and you look at it and it turns it into an octagonal repeating pattern in other words there are eight there's a circle made up of eight triangles Each of which reflects the other now if you look at a bookcase which is an orderly thing it's relatively uninteresting if you look at uh any kind of symmetrical field what you get in the Kaleidoscope will be rather boring but look at a mess so a Dirty Ashtray a messy desk that's where you

get the most beautiful results so apparently the the the the way we human beings tick is that that's what we want to see we want to see the junkie and the orderly thrown together and either one of them we either one extreme will horrify us but if you put them together it swings because that you see is exactly what we all are we are a combination see we as we look around the room all of us look regular [Music] we're just used to each other we think that the way we are is is a rational

way but if you took a human being and put him in front of somebody who had never seen a human being before I just took one of these things you think well what kind of a mess is that what a wiggly object that is doesn't make any sense but because there are enough of us and it keeps repeating the pattern two eyes each time I begin to say oh well that's order but I don't want to see just that I don't want to see the same face each time I want these eyes to be Brown

These Eyes to be blue these eyes to be serious these eyes to be comical these eyes to be critical these eyes to be Amorous these eyes to be joking finding fun at me or whatever you see then I get there feeling in the midst of regularity so I think this is our problem in trying to arrive at an idea of what is mental health mental health is a good game and a good game is what keeps a certain balance between Randomness and Order and a healthy Society therefore is one which keeps the proper balance between

law and Whimsy but this always escapes our capacity to enforce it do you see that we to to have a society like that we've always at a certain point got to trust the other fellow and give up control take a risk take a Gamble so you see now in in the Chinese Theory of human nature they disagree with us we are apt to feel that people can't be trusted because we say the veneer of civilization is very thin and when really critical events come up even the most respectable people turn out and be Savages little

children I've often heard people say they are nothing but animals and if you want to get these animals to have culture and to behave themselves you've got to whip them and this is of course the philosophy of original sin but in the Confucian philosophy in China they have a completely different idea which is that the fundamental virtue of a human being is defined as human-heartedness which is a higher virtue than righteousness a higher virtue than propriety and fine manners to be human-hearted and when Confucius was asked for a definition of human-heartedness he refused it he

said you know what it is now what is human heart look we know we all have passions we are greedy we are Lusty we are like to be comfortable and try and wangle ways in which other people do the work for us and so on and we know very well we all do these things now Confucius idea was that this kind of human nature is very trustworthy you can rely on it you can rely more on people's natural passions than you can on their virtues for example if I want to wager War and I want

to do it in order to capture somebody else's wealth and his women I'm going to be very careful in waging that war that I don't destroy his wealth and as women I want them in top condition so I'm going to wage a very skillful war that will paralyze my opponent but not destroy and not spoil the things that I want to get from it but if I wager War not because I am greedy but because I am righteous and that enemy that Nation has done something wrong morally I'm going to demand unconditional surrender and I'm

going to use atom bombs and every kind of annihilation against him until he gives up I will wreck his whole situation in the name principle and Confucius 600 Years BC wagged his finger at that and said that's not humane it's two virtuous he said the goody goodies are the thieves the virtue so we suffer you see in our culture from righteousness you've been listening to Alan Watts in a talk from the seminar learning the human game this was the second session and this podcast was co-produced with the ramdas be here now Network for further information

about the spoken word recordings of Alan Watts please visit Alan watts.org and also thank you to moment records for use of our theme music by Zakir Hussein from his rhythm experience album again I'm Mark Watts this has been being in the way and you'll find more information at the Alan watts.org website [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music]