Somebody raised the question at the end of this morning’s session about instinct, and the instinct for survival, the instinct for procreation, so on. This is fascinating, because we’ve changed recently in academically respectable psychological circles, and they no longer use the word “instinct,” they prefer the word “drive.” And this is highly significant. First of all, there was a critique of the whole notion of instinct, in that it was some mysterious force brought in to explain things that we didn’t understand. We do this in very, very funny ways. The prime historical joke about this is that there was a time when a physician observed something irregular that he didn’t understand, some symptom beyond his comprehension, he would say very learnedly, “Well, that’s illusus naturae.” And everybody said, “It’s illusus naturae. He knows what he’s talking about.” Which means, simply, a “game of nature.” So, in the same way, when something is done all the time, we feel it has to be explained. People actually go on surviving until they don’t. And during the period between when they start and when they stop, it’s rather difficult to stop them surviving, because the strength of life is so powerful. So somebody says, “Well, why is it that people have this power?” And so somebody says, “Well, it’s an instinct.” And this doesn’t explain anything at all!
Now, why has it been changed to “drive?” Because—there’s a double reason for this. Instinct goes with a school of thought where human characteristics are hereditary. And for a long time heredity has been unfashionable. It’s coming back with genetics. But there was, for a while, a long period in which behavioral psychology in particular put down the whole notion of instinct and said our conditioning is rather social and environmental. And so then they picked up drives. But the very word is significant, because drives—if you ascribe your sexual urges and your wish to survive and your wish to eat to drives—you are assuming no responsibility for them. You are describing yourself as a driven person. And this I find gloomy. I will not acknowledge that my sexual instincts are drives, because I fully approve of them. I’m not being driven, this is the way I want to go! And so, also, if I have a gusto for life, I’m not going to say that I have a pitiful urge to survive, that I am a poor fellow that would live. Watch out! You know? I’m sure going to live if I can manage it!
And so what has happened here is a sense of irresponsibility for one’s own emotions. All of it is the result of a division. I mean, you can work along one of two tacks: “I am nothing but nothing, and it all works by itself,” but that is really the same thing as saying, “Well, I do it all.” They’re just two ways of looking at the same thing; of a holistic view of your life. It all happens to me—I do it all. That’s two fours and four twos.
So if you, however, are determined to take a disgruntled attitude to the world, and to say to your ancestors, “God damnit, it’s your fault that I was put in this ridiculous situation,” and to say, you know, to your father, “Well, you were a bungler. You got me into this world simply because of bad rubber goods, or because you were a lustful man.” But then you fail to acknowledge that you were the evil gleam in your father’s eye when he pursued your mother. That, in other words, the continuity of our biological heritage going backwards is as—we are the branches, and there is a trunk, and there’s one sap going through the whole thing—right back to the big bang with which the whole universe started. You did that, but you won’t admit it because you say, “Oh no! We’re just poor helpless little things out here, way out on the edge. We can’t help being what we are. We were driven by the big bang.” It pushed us. You pushed me!
So that’s the story of the Garden of Eden. Because when the lord God said to Adam, “Hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” And instead of saying, “Yeah, boss,” he said, “This woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me, and I did eat.” And he looked at Eve and said, “Hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” And she said, “The serpent beguiled me and tempted me, and I did eat.” She passed the buck. And God looked at the serpent. And the serpent—he ain’t say nothin’. Because the serpent is the left hand of God; mustn’t let your right hand know what your left is doing. And that’s why the role of the serpent in the divine comedy is not acknowledged. It’s sub rosa.
But, of course, before the whole thing started, God and Lucifer got together and said, “Now look: we’re going to arrange a drama on the most fantastic scale. But we must not let ever out the secret that we agreed about it. It must seem an implacable hostility. It must seem to be that I, God the father, am the good guy. And you, Lucifer, the bad, bad guy. You’ve got to make this a real tragedy. You’ve got to be a real good villain,” see? And so they worked the whole thing out. But, you see, that’s esoteric. That’s secret. And if you let that muse out, that’s giving the show away.
So going back, then, we speak of drives and feel no real identification with these immensely powerful so-called urges which really are ourselves. Nothing is—if the desire to live, go on living, is the most powerful feeling you have, that simply means that you’ve made contact with the most authentic center of your own existence. And it’s not something to which you are pitifully subject, but it’s fully what you are. And so don’t say, “Excuse me, I have these needs.” I remember, once, a psychologist who was trying to seduce one of my students at Northwestern, and was complaining at her that she was denying him fulfillment of his biological needs. Whew! You know, have pity on me! I have these things, and I’m sorry, I apologize, but….
Audience
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Watts
She didn’t know, no. It was the wrong approach. But this, you see, goes hand in hand with the view of Man (or any organism in this world) as the victim of a system. And in the most ghastly super-paranoid views of the world I’ve known cases quite intimately of people who really felt that the world was a sinister trap, a torture machine which thrived off other living beings, and it played cat-and-mouse with them. It chewed them up and beat on them, and then after a while relented so they would recover. Then dangle a few hopes in front of them. And they can recover a little more and stronger, juicier, so as to squeeze them again between its teeth. And the whole thing in this, as it were, diabolical mystical vision appears as this ghastly conspiracy to egg you on only to chew you up. And in this vision everything suddenly becomes mechanical. People look as if they were mockeries of people. Flesh looks as if it were patent leather. Everything looks like enameled tin, plastic; a great mock-up of life. But all it is, really, is a completely cold, heartless, calculating system. Krrck! You see, that is carrying the alienation thing, the split between Man and universe, to an extreme limit.
Audience
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Watts
They aren’t sick, no. They are one end of a great spectrum. You see, this thing which diversifies itself—look at your own body: you are a kind of Rorschach blot with a spinal column as the center, with a few irregularities, such as the hear swings over to one side, and there’s a spleen here and a liver there, and things like that. But, by and large, we’ve got two corresponding sides of the brain with crossing nerves operating the opposite sides of the rest of the body. And as they approach that spinal column the duality finds its center. That’s why all yoga symbolism is connected with a mystery going on along the spinal column.
But then, as we get far out on either side, to the left and to the right, we get further and further and further out in such a way as to create a field of force which is going to tear the center away from itself; tear everything away from the center. Because life is going to go in every direction as far out as it can get. It’s going to experience the garden of paradisal delights and the screaming meemies. The bottomless abysses of all imaginable hells. And do that until it is discovered that the extremes meet. And when that’s discovered, then you’ve got a circle on whose circumference every point may be considered as the center.
Audience
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Watts
What?
Audience
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Watts
Yeah.
Audience
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Watts
Yes. Because that—you see, it’s the great ancient symbol of the snake Ouroboros that devours its own tail. Obviously it doesn’t start eating its tail except on the assumption that that’s something else. It’s good to eat. My, it tastes good! But why do I hurt? You see?
Now, when the snake discovers that its tail is itself, it stops chasing it. But then, after a while, says, “Gee, we had fun back then.” And so the split in the circle occurs again, which is the hide moment and when you forget, you see, that your end is your beginning. And then the thing goes on.
Yes?
Audience
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Watts
Yes, of course.
Audience
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Watts
“I forgot” is always an admissible excuse. I forgot. Now, everybody knows that it’s only an excuse. You didn’t really forget, and none of us have actually really forgotten that each one of us is an aspect of the ground of being. Everybody knows this, but very few can get up the nerve to admit it. Because there’s always the question, you see: if I am the ground of being, will I be able to get away with the challenges that may be presented to me? Supposing I know I’m the ground of being, and yet something comes up that I really can’t take. And then, if I can’t take it, they’ll say: ha! You didn’t really know you were the ground of being. You just pretended. You just were comforting yourself to this, because here comes something you can’t take.
Well, you know, this is like the problem of what they call living Buddhas and stone Buddhas. A stone Buddha is a word used in Zen for a man without feelings. You can hit him as hard as you like and he’ll never scream. And all that proves is that he’s no better than a piece of stone. On the other hand, everybody wants to test out a Zen master. Let’s see how much trouble we can put on him and see how long he can take it. And so people always are looking for an opportunity to bang away. See? How much can you take? How much of a man are you? How tough are you? When will you start crying? See? But what does this prove? It never proved anything.
So there are all sorts of stories about the stone Buddha and the living Buddha. There was once a monk whose mother died, and he got a letter at the monastery. And he wept. And another monk said, “How should you, a Zen monk who’s supposed to be detached from worldly things, be weeping at the death of your mother?” And he replied, “Don’t be stupid. I’m weeping because I want to.” And here, in this sense, he wouldn’t say it was a drive; “I can’t help it.” Of your drives it may be said: if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. And that’s what I was trying to demonstrate this morning, where you see, on the one hand, that you can’t help being what you are. But that includes a resentment of being what you are. Because it makes no sense to say you are what you are unless there is the possibility that you might be something else. But these are simply two sides. Like the two sides of the human being on the one central spinal column; of a situation that’s really all of a piece.
So we learn the balancing trick of coming to center. But the center is not in a fixed position. The center isn’t something you can go to, because it’s always where you are. You’ve shifted off to the left, but the center has moved. So long as you think the center is a different place from your center, then you can feel off balance. But whenever you turn into the direction you’ve fallen—that is to say, you again identify that with your center—and you come upright.
Yes?
Audience
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Watts
This may be carrying the analogy too far! What you’re really asking me—aren’t you really asking me about death? Well, this is really a very simple problem. Only, in order to understand it you have to go back to the problem of the relationship between space and solid. If you can see that problem—if you can see that space is an effective reality—then you can understand the life and death relationship. Because we don’t need any more information about this problem than we already have. When we watch sparrows, this year’s sparrows really seem the same sparrows as last year’s sparrows coming back again. Because we don’t pay much attention to the unique individuality of each particular sparrow. And so it’s like the story of the fisherman in Germany—kind of German humor—and he was fishing, and somebody came up to him and said, “Isn’t it a terribly cruel thing? How can you do it? To put those poor little worms on hooks?” And he said, “But they are used to it.”
Now, we are looking at our own lives from the standpoint of the very high level of magnification in which we are enormously preoccupied with the uniqueness of each life. Somebody else at another level of magnification, who would be just as right a point of view as ours, would say, “But after all, these human beings are just different ways of repeating the same event.” In other words, whether you call her Jane or Joan or Jean, it’s always the same girl coming back—with slight variations. You know, there always have to be slight variations. No two things are quite the same. As it is said in Pali, nacca so, nacca hani [?]: “each incarnation is not the same, yet not another.”
So when you die—think about it: what it’ll be like to go to sleep and never wake up again? You can’t think about that, because it isn’t like being shut up in the dark forever, buried alive. It’s like everything you remember about before you were born. Maybe it’s the same place! Because, after all, what happened once can always happen again. It’s the same problem as the problem of cosmology. If you want to take the big bang theory of the universe, you get this terrific explosion which eventually peters out, and all the energy eventually fails. And then we return to the way things were before the big bang ever was. Well, what happened once can happen again.
So now, you know very well that after you die, and after everybody else that you’ve ever known about died, babies of all kinds—both human, animal, and vegetable—were born. And each one of them feels that it’s “I” in just exactly the same way that you do; feels that it’s the center of the universe. And therefore, every one of them is you. Only, this situation can only be experienced one at a time. So, you see: you will die and then someone else will be born. But it will feel like you—you, now. It will be, in other words, “I.” There is only one “I.” But it’s infinitely varied. So don’t worry. You’re not going to have to sit and wait out eternity in a dark room.
Now, supposing I put it in another way. Let me make two propositions. After I die I shall be reborn as another baby, but I’ll have no memory of my past life—that’s proposition one. Proposition two is: after I die, another baby will be born. I maintain that they say the same thing. Because if there’s no memory of having lived before, then, effectively, that baby is someone else. But then, wouldn’t you rather be someone else? Because after a while you’ve accumulated all these memories, and they’re like mystery stories: you’ve got a shelf of mystery stories and you’ve read all of them. You want a surprise! You want a new situation; one where you don’t know what the outcome’s going to be. It’s part of the game rules thing. When we know the outcome of a game for certain, we cancel it and begin a new one in which the outcome is not certain. That’s what we want. And therefore we have to have a forgettery as well as a memory, just as well as we have to have a retention aspect of food (the stomach and so on), but also a rejection aspect. We have to have a hole at each end. So it is also with memory. Otherwise the world becomes cluttered, and that sense of being cluttered, of overfilled and stuffed, is satiation and boredom.
So by being able to lose ourselves utterly, everything that you’ve clung to— everything that you’ve built up, all your pride and all this—goes whhzht, to dust, like that. Wowee! And that’s as good as real now. Everybody here, you see, is under sentence of death. And we’ve no idea how long it’ll take, but we’re as good as dead. So if you come to face with this, come to terms with it, and regard yourself as a dead man who has nothing to cling to except patterns of smoke in the air—you’re dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping, and there’s nowhere anything to hold on to; you’re as good as dead; give up, because there’s really nothing else to do—then immediately we discover in a mysterious way that this revives us. Through not clinging to your own life you acquire an enormous amount of courage. Because actually, the whole thing’s a dream. Phantasmagoria. And you are putting it on, and you are goosing yourself with this thing because you’re making it so real.
You see, there’s a kind of compromise here—secret conspiracy, rather—between the actor and the audience. The more beautifully the actor puts it over, the more the audience believes it. And the more the audience believes it, the more the actor believes that he is his part. It’s the way movie stars begin to believe their own publicity. And this is the way in which all kinds of confidence men, tricksters, magicians, always say people really want to be fooled. So the vivid reality of the other, the thing that stands over against you, the thing that you think’s really going to clobber you—where does its energy come from? Why, from you. Invest in all that reality in it.
Audience
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Watts
About children? Oh dear. Well, the thing is that I really shouldn’t talk about children, because I’ve never regarded myself as a good father and more of a tomcat. And I lose interest in children when they go to school, because then they’re brought up by other children and they accept the mediocrity.
Audience
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Watts
It’s terribly difficult. You have to start a commune, you have to have your own school in this. You have to have an intentional community with its own built-in school. And it’s practically impossible. One can only hope that they will be able to recover as well from their childhood as you have from yours.
Yes?
Audience
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Watts
I really don’t know. Well, let’s see. I’ve known some very unproblematic families. Just occasionally. The difficulty is that we have created a class of people called children. And, as a matter of fact, we didn’t start doing this until some point in the nineteenth century, before which there were no children. There were just people. Large adults and small adults. And the difficulty was that industrial revolution, the various problems—number one, children were terribly exploited in the factories. Number two, it was necessary to keep them off the labor market, because they could undercut the prices of adult labor. So it became necessary to erect dams through which the flow of population would be arrested, and these are called schools, where you’re simply delayed in growing up. Every healthy child wants to grow up. And therefore, a little girl or a little boy will immediately be interested in what its father and mother are doing, and will want to handle the tools, all the appurtenances of its parents’ lives. And that’s very natural and proper, and in certain so-called primitive civilizations this is positively encouraged. And little boys go hunting with their fathers. You can still see this among Indians in Mexico. Little boys working alongside their fathers, little girls working alongside their mothers, getting a true apprenticeship in whatever it is that their father or mother does, what is their vocation in life.
But in industrial civilization this isn’t very easy. Because imagine a banker’s clerk bringing a little boy along to the office with him to the bank, and looking over daddy’s shoulder and seeing what he’s doing, and helping him out. We don’t want children around here! And then mothers, when they come home to cook in the evening, are pretty harassed. Because what happens in the ordinary American suburban family in the late afternoon when the children return from school? All sorts of things. It may be that the mother has to chauffeur not only her own children, but stacks of others as well—to a dancing class, to a painting class, to a party, to a something or other. Or else she’s got a job part-time, or else she’s got a bridge club, or a meeting of some kind—League of Women Voters. And she manages to make home shortly after the children are back from school.
And by that time what has been done, see, to keep the children away from adult concerns is to propitiate them with toys, which are fake adult instruments. These toys are are increasingly made of plastic and are extraordinarily easy to break. So in the late afternoon any good suburban house is totally littered from end to end with broken plastic. You know, disemboweled dolls, wrecked tinker toy sets strewn all over the place. And so mama knows that all this has to be cleaned up before the tired husband gets home for dinner. So she has a knock-down drag-out battle with all these children to put this stuff away, to fling it into the bottom of a closet mixed up with sucked lollipops and bubblegum. And then her disposition is absolutely worn out. She has no heart for cooking dinner.
So what she does is: she gets the children out of the way by sitting them down in front of the television with hotdogs and ice cream and Coca Cola. You know, great education! They have barbarous taste in food, you see. They’ve no taste at all, because that’s just what they’re brought up with. And no wonder they go for a macrobiotic diet later on! You know, it’s just the most terrible stuff! And so then she’s got really no heart to cook. You can’t cook on a frazzled disposition, because you have to approach it with great love and delight. So the husband gets home, and he’s supposed to be a real pal for the kids, and they hardly know each other. And maybe he reads them a story while she’s getting together a warmed-up TV dinner so that they can watch the thing.
But, you see, in all this the children have absolutely no part in their parents’ life. They live in a dormitory building. They’re brought up by other children. They go away to school where they’re taught everything and nothing. A purely cerebral education which trains them to be bureaucrats, and which doesn’t train in any of the really essential arts of life, which are farming, cooking, clothing, house-building, and lovemaking. These are five fundamental relationships to the physical world which we absolutely neglect in education.
So the thing is, then, that the children are taught there is a distinction in life between work and play. And you, as children, are really basically playing. Childhood—so many mothers say, “All I want for my children is that they be happy.” One long, sunny childhood, you know? And so a lot of people who got thrown into life quickly start griping that they never really had a childhood—you know, that sort of thing. Lucky for them they didn’t!
But all this thing now is finally epitomized in Disneyland. Disneyland is what we think of our children, of what they ought to have and what’s good for them. Disneyland is an absolute compound of fakes from beginning to end. Even the birds on the trees are made of plastic and warble through tiny loudspeakers which go through their hinged beaks. There are plastic animals all along the banks of the artificial rivers monotonously wagging their empty heads. There are plastic Indians who are chopping like this for ever and ever and ever. Why, you can go on a jungle voyage in the waters and thrill to the spectacle of a plastic hippopotamus rising its head out of the waters and being killed with a blank cartridge. There is a papier-mâché varnished model of the tree of the Swiss Family Robinson’s house which vibrates constantly to an umm-pa-pa band going boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity boppity forever. It’s on a loop tape. And there is nothing in the whole area in the way of—you know, it takes hours to get through the exhibits. And there isn’t a bar in the place! It’s all strictly popcorn, soda pop culture. And it’s a grizzly place! You know, it’s all plastic! But it’s all cutey-pie. It’s all tweetie-tweetie. It’s all kind of a cultural baby talk. The whole thing!
And so this is what happens, then. You get a child. And instead of facing this thing and saying: now listen. How do you do? Welcome to the human race. We’ve been here around for some time, and we’re playing this game. And it’s only fair that we explain you the rules of what we’re doing. Because when you get bigger you may think of better ones. But instead of being straight with a child like that, we say, “Tweetie, tweetie, tweetie, tweetie,” and make it into a doll, a bauble. Well, this is absolutely ridiculous, because the children can’t make out what’s hit us. You know, they come into the world wide-eyed, and then find they’re greeted by somebody who says, “Tweetie, tweetie, tweetie.”
You know how it is when you make up to a child. You say, “Well, fella! How are you?” And all that. The child looks like…. You know, they’re so straight in the ordinary way, and so simple. But adults feel that they have to make this sort of big act. You know, I’ll never forget that movie in which Laurel and Hardy were involved. They got loaded on some train with a squawling brat, and here was Hardy, a great fat fellow, playing with his necktie, waving to this baby, who wouldn’t be pacified at all. But that’s it, you know—wave a necktie or something.
Children, you see, are not taken sincerely. They are treated as toys; given toys. The whole world is toyland, Disneyland. But this a way, you see, then, of postponing their participation in life, of frustrating their great eagerness to do what we’re all doing and to get mixed up with it. And, as I said, this pretty much seems to have begun with the nineteenth century, because it wasn’t long before that that there was a prime minister of England at the age of 22. That’s just about unthinkable today.
Audience
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Watts
It may. And yet, you see, in those days, those people who survived until 27 or whatever it was usually went on. If they got that far, they usually went on to quite an old age. It was a higher death rate in the earlier period of life.
Let’s take a break.