You’ve Been Missing It All Along – Alan Watts On The Secret Behind Life’s Dual Nature

the basic transformation of Consciousness which comes about through the use of psychedelic chemicals is probably best described as one of polar feeling you feel that everything outside is not the opposite of or contradiction of the inside but it just goes with it you feel that the figure always goes with its [Music] background therefore you see in a funny way that all human behavior goes together in such a way that you cannot have saints without Sinners you cannot have cups without robbers you cannot have failures without successes and vice versa you cannot have a uh the

good and the valuable in life without the background contrast of the failure and the evil and also you cannot have life without death that's a rather shocking realization because you see our culture is geared to the idealism of having the good without the evil of using medicine to bring us to the point where we don't need to die so that we can have life without death and of reforming and psychotherapies people so that we can have all good law abiding citizens and no criminals all San people and nobody in the asylums and yet and yet

and yet and yet from another point of view you can see that were there no sick [Music] people there would be no incentive for the study of Medicine were there no crazy people there would be no incentive to the study of psychology finding out about the human mind and were there no Wicked people there would be no puzzle and thinking about the problems of Ethics so that you arrive sometimes at this funny point of view where you see that everybody however bad has an essential contribution to the totality of [Music] life but at any rate

that is a point of view which is very largely brought about by the use of these chemicals and therefore you can very easily see why any kind of government would be uneasy about that is to say it enables people to feel not so guilty about themselves and every government manages people by exploiting and working on their sense of guilt because everybody in this room has a private [Music] secret and any good psych ologist can worm it out of you and brainwash you and exploit your peculiar Temptation or your peculiar psychosis and make you hate yourself

because of it and therefore expiate for your sins by going along with his particular designs his particular form of punishment to relieve you of your guilt so exploitation of guilt is the primary method of dictatorships of wangling you into obeying the directives of an authoritarian government watch it because the idea that all men are equal in the sight of God becomes under the administration of dictators the idea that all men are equally inferior you're all criminals and therefore the police can be rude to all of you everyone's a crook until proved innocent so there is

then a kind of a threat in this sort of experience and now let's go on to consider is it a fantasy or is it in any way true let's suppose I experience that my own individual existence is completely continuous with the existence of everything else that I'm a part of nature not merely a part but an expression of the whole activity of the universe is that a hallucination how am I to judge the criteria by which we judge today are the ideas of our scientists and if I go to the biologist the physicist the chemist

I find out that his description of me as a human being fits better with this so-called hallucination than does my normal State of Consciousness in my normal State of Consciousness in which I am a product of a certain culture which believes that every individual is a separate Soul or Freudian ego inhabiting a physical vehicle I feel myself alienated from and separate from everything else that goes on but if I'm described by a biologist I'm nothing of the kind a biologist describes me as an organism environment not an organism in an environment but an organism hyphen

environment the way that he describes my behavior he describes my behavior as the same thing as the behavior of my environment you'll go further than that you'll describe the behavior of my environment as the same thing as my behavior we are a single field of process or what is sometimes called a transaction in other words the fact that the sun is [Music] light is the result of my nervous [Music] system my nervous system turns the sun into light and the sun would not be light unless my nervous system and your nervous system made it so

so in a way way you make the world at the same time your nervous system is in the same physical world as the sun and likewise sometimes under the influence of psychedelic chemicals you feel that everything that's going on is simply inside your head the next moment you feel that your head is inside everything that's going on on and then you feel that everything that's going on inside your head it sort of caps itself like this like a game that Children Play from both points of view are true so upon that sort of Criterion I

feel that the change of Consciousness induced by such a chemical fits the facts of scientific observation better than the normal kind of Consciousness which I've been taught in my family and my schooling where I've been given a feeling of my own existence that is simply the mythology of a particular culture so then in in basically young people have become interested in these so-called drugs it's not that they're just out for kicks it's so easy to dismiss the adventures of the Young by saying they're out for kicks they're just goofing off if young people are just

the kind of people who are irresponsible and are just goofing off and out for kicks why assign them with the terrifying responsibility of fighting with the Armed Forces if you can say they are responsible enough to do that you must not dismiss them as immature uh little kids if you think they are as adults you fight your own battles so the position is not that young people today are just looking for kicks they are out for trying to find out what the hell this universe is about and they are very confused because the answers of

the old standard brand religions while they are in a way respected they're not plausible the answers of science also aren't plausable because they're sort of uh lacking in a sense of wonder but if you disallow the whole thing it'll just go ahead in a completely undisciplined and crazy fashion and very naturally there will be all kinds of disasters and bad trips grasp this nettle danger don't pretend it isn't there e