So it is announced that the subject of the seminar is Play and Survival. Are they in necessary contradiction? And we are going to examine the subject in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Taoist and Scientific Naturalism.

Living, it seems to me, is a spontaneous process. The Chinese term for nature is ziran, which means “that which is so of itself,” “that which happens.” It’s very curious: because of our grammar that we speak in almost all standard-abridged European languages, we are unable to imagine a process which happens by itself because every verb must have a noun as its subject; a director. And we think nothing is in order unless someone or something orders it, unless there’s somebody in charge. And so to us the idea of a process of nature which happens of itself, by itself, is frightening because there seems to be no authority.

And therefore, in the United States we are in a serious social and political conflict because we think that we ought to be living in a republic. But the great majority of citizens believe that the universe is a monarchy. And you cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States unless you believe that a republic is the best form of government. So we are always seeking for a monarch, for someone else upon whom to push the responsibility. We won’t take it ourselves. We are always complaining that where we are is the result of our past. “My mother and father were neurotic,” you know, “and therefore they made me neurotic. And their fathers and mothers were neurotic and made them neurotic.” And so it goes back to Adam and Eve.

And you remember what happened in the Garden of Eden? God set a trap by saying: there is that specific tree, and you mustn’t eat the fruit of it. If he had really not wanted them to eat the fruit, he wouldn’t have said anything about it. But by drawing attention to it in this way, it was obvious they were going to eat it. So when he saw Adam looking guilty, and he said, “Adam, how is thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” And he said, “The woman you gave me, she tempted me and I did eat.” And he looked very severely at Eve and said, “Eve, have you eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” And she said, “The serpent beguiled me.” Passing the buck, you see. And God looked at the serpent. And this isn’t written in the Bible, but they winked at each other.

Because they had planned long in advance that the universe was not going to be a merely obedient arrangement where I, God, say: you shall do thus and so and you will automatically do it. There would be no fun in that because there would be no surprises. So it is the Hebrew theology that God put into the heart of Adam, at the creation, a thing called the yetzer hara, which means the “wayward spirit.” Just a kind of little—just like when you make a stew, you put some salt in it. You don’t want the whole stew to be salt, but just a touch, see? So God, in creating Adam, put just a touch of wickedness in him so that something surprising and different would happen which God would not be able to prognosticate.

Now this is very important. You see, what we’re going to talk about mainly is our sense of identity, our sense of alienation, and the complications we put ourselves into by regarding survival as a duty. These all connect together. You may not see the connection immediately. But if you imagine yourself in the position of being God, in the literal popular sense of God the Father Almighty, that means you’re a male chauvinist pig and you’re in charge of everything. You know all pasts, you know all futures. You’re completely in control of the cosmos. You have absolute power. And you’re bored to death. So you say to yourself: man, get lost! I want a surprise—and here you are. Only, you mustn’t admit it. The hallmark of insanity is to know that you’re God. That’s absolute taboo, not only in the Christian religion, because Jesus got crucified for knowing that, and the Christians said: okay, okay, Jesus was God, but let it stop right there. Nobody else.

But the gospel was the revelation to us all that the Hindus knew forever: tat tvam asi, “you’re it.” And if Jesus had lived in India, they would have congratulated him for finding out instead of crucifying him. There have been many people in India who knew they were God in disguise. Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Krishna himself, Buddha, everybody. They discovered it. Because it’s not an exclusive claim—“I alone am that”—but you all are. And as I look into your eyes, I see the universe looking back at me.

So we’re in a situation where it’s a taboo. We mustn’t admit that we know who we are so as to have the thrill, the sort of self-goosing effect, of feeling lost, feeling strange, feeling alone, of not belonging. And we say in popular speech that “I came into this world.” You did nothing of the kind. You came out of it just in the same way as the fruit comes out of the tree, the egg from the chicken, and the baby from the womb. We are symptomatic of the universe. We are its nerve endings. Just as, in the retina, there are myriads of nerve endings, so all of us are nerve endings of the universe. And there are many of us so that the universe’s point of view of itself will not be prejudiced. It’ll be many-sided.

And so fascinating things happen. We want to find out what it is that’s going on. And we look with telescopes to find the farthest out things, and with microscopes to find the farthest in things. And the more powerful our instruments become, the more the world runs away from us. As our telescopes become more powerful, the universe expands, because it’s ourselves running away from ourselves. The more accurate our physics becomes, and we investigate the nucleus—you know, some years ago we thought we had it. We found the thing called the atom, and that was that. Then, whoops, an electron turned up. Then bang, there was a proton. And then, when we got out of those that came out, all kinds of things—mesons, antimatter—and it got worse and worse and worse because we got sharper.

And so we are a self-observing system, which is like the snake (the ouroboros) that bites its own tail and endeavors to swallow itself to find out what it is. It’s like the whole quest of “Who am I?” I would like to see me, but look at your head. Can you see it? It’s completely invisible. And it isn’t black—it isn’t like there’s a dark spot behind my eyes. It isn’t even blurry. It’s plain nowhere, and thereby ends the tale.

Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing. This is not important. It has no energy. But, as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space. Something comes out of nothing. And in just the same way, if you listen in an unprejudiced way with your ears to find out, you see, I’ve got these sense organs here, and I’m going to trust them to find out what is going on, what really is. And you listen—and you hear all these sounds coming out of silence. It’s amazing. Silence is the origin of sound. Just as space is the origin of stars. Just as woman is the origin of man. She is black. So, also, if you listen and pay real attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You can’t hear yourself listening. So you live in the eternal now, and you are that. Tat tvam asi. That’s really extremely simple. That’s the way it is.

Now then, I started out by saying survival, going on living, is a spontaneous process. Love is the same. But the trouble is that, when we were our children, our elders and betters told us that it was our duty to love them. God said: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” And so our mothers said to us: “You must have a bowel movement after breakfast.” “Try to go to sleep.” “Take that look off your face!” “Stop pouting!” “Oh, you’re blushing!” “Pull yourself together!” “Pay attention!” And all these are commands. The basic rule is as follows: you are required to do that which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. That’s the formula: you must love me. And it’s a double bind. And everybody is completely mixed up because of this. So, you know this stupid story I often tell: the husband says to wife, “Darling, do you really love me? And she says, “Well, I’m trying my best to do so.” And nobody wants that answer. They want to be told: “I love you so much I could eat you. I can’t help loving you. I’m your hopeless victim!”

So we are under the compulsion to go on living. “You must go on living. It’s your duty.” You know? You’re tired of living and scared of dying. You must go on. Why? “Well, I have dependents, I have children, and I have to go on working to support them.” But all that does is to teach them the same attitude, so they will go dragging along to support their children, who will in turn learn it from them, to go dragging along and fighting this thing out. And so I watch with total amazement the goings-on of the world: see all these people commuting, driving cars (like maniacs!) to get to an office where they are going to make money—for what? So that they can go on doing the same thing. And very few of them enjoy it.

Sensible people get paid for playing. That’s the art of life. The whole idea of struggling and beating your brains out in order to go on living is completely ridiculous! Camus, at the beginning his book The Myth of Sisyphus, made this very sensible statement. He said, “The only real, deep, philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.” Think that one over. Must you go on? Because it would be so simple to stop it. No problems. Nobody around to regret that it wasn’t going on any longer.

Well, you know, what is death? Go to sleep and never wake up. “Oh, that’s terrible! To be in the dark forever.” It wouldn’t be like that. Wouldn’t be like being buried alive forever. It would be as if you never had existed. And not only that you never had existed, but that nothing at all would have existed. And that would be just the way it was before you were born—which is another way of demonstrating how something comes out of nothing. Nothing is the essential prerequisite of something. See? Back and front of the same coin, as the Chinese say; the yang and the yin of it.

So like you have an invisible head, your ultimate reality, the ground of your being, is nothing. Śūnyatā, as the Buddhists call it: “the void”—which is space, which is consciousness, which is that in which we live in movement and have our being. The great void. And fortunately there’s no way of knowing what it is. Because if we could know what it is, we would be bored. The little function of interest is mystery.

There was a great Dutch philosopher by the name of van der Leeuw, who said, “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” And fortunately, you see, we have in the middle of all consciousness a perpetual problem, a perpetual question, that we don’t know what it is that is. Therefore, life remains interesting. Because you’re always trying to find out, but it won’t be able to be answered. Because reality—when you say, “What is reality?”—the only way to answer the question of what is by classification. Is you is, or is you ain’t? Is you male, is you female? Are you a republican or a democrat? Are you animal, vegetable or mineral? Tinker, taylor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. We put you in a class. But what it is that fundamentally is cannot be classified. So nobody knows what it is, and you can’t really ask the question in a meaningful way, “What is reality?”

Now, there are many philosophical theories about what reality is. Some people say: “Well, reality is… there’s material.” You know, there’s a thing called “stuff.” And philosophers, because they’re always lecturing in front of tables in the university, you know, they always bang the table and say: “Now, does this table have reality or not?” See? And they bang the table. When Dr. Johnson heard about Bishop Berkley’s theory that everything is in fact mental, he disproved it by kicking a stone, and said, “Surely, to every person of common sense, this stone is really material and physical.” See? Whereas, on the other hand, more subtle thinkers say: “No, there is nothing material. It’s all a mental construction. The whole world is a phenomenon of consciousness.”

In the Bishop Berkley’s time they didn’t know much about neurology. Now we know a great deal about neurology, and we can state the same position in a much more sophisticated way: that the structure of your nervous system is what determines the world that you see. In other words: in a world of no eyes, the sun would not be light. In a world of no tactile nerve ends, fire would not be hot. In a world of no muscles, rocks would not be heavy. In a world with no soft skin, the rocks wouldn’t be hard. Because it’s all relationship. So the old question: “When a tree falls in a forest and nobody is listening, does it or doesn’t it make a noise?” The answer is perfect, isn’t it? Noise is a relationship between vibrations in the air and the eardrums. Look: if I hit a drum which has no skin on it, no matter how hard I hit it, it won’t make a sound. So the air can go vibrating forever, but if there’s no drum and no auditory nervous system, there’s no noise. Because the noise is a relationship. So we, by virtue of our physical structure, evoke the world from vibrations that would otherwise be void. So you’re creating the world, but you’re also in the world. See? Your body, your nervous system, is something in the external world. You are in my external world, I’m in your external world. See? So it’s an egg-and-hen situation. It’s perfectly fascinating.

So we are—from a very hard-boiled, neurological point of view—evoking the world in which we live, and we are something that the world is doing. Now, what you are from the point of view of physics, the physicist will explain that you are a buzzing of electronic substances and processes just like anything else. It’s all one jazz. But marvelous, because it is aware of itself through you.

So existence, however, has two aspects. We’ll call one of them on and the other off. Because all existence is a vibration. If I am sitting next to a girl in the movies, and I feel attracted to her and I put my hand on her knee and I leave it there, she will notice at first but she will become unaware of it if I don’t move my hand. So ,instead of just leaving my hand there, I start stroking her or patting her knee. See? Then I go on and off, on and off, on and off, and she realizes that I’m paying attention. See? So everything that is happening to us is going yang-yang-yang-yang-yang. But, you see, take with the sense of sight: the vibration of light is so fast that the retina doesn’t register the off. It retains the impression of the on. And so, with our eyes we see things as relatively stable. But if we close our eyes and listen, we hear on and off—especially in the low registers of sound. See, in the high register—ooooooooh—you can’t hear the off. You hear the on. But when you get the low register—aaaaaaaaaaah—you see, you hear the on and off; the vibration.

Now, actually, everything that is physically existing is a throbbing, because it is positive and negative electricity. Incidentally, read the article on electricity in the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Just the first two paragraphs. Learned scientific article with all kinds of formulas and stuff, but it starts out with pure metaphysics. “Electricity,” says the author, “is an absolute.” We do not know anything else that is like it. It is a fundamental—you know, he’s talking pure theology. So this is it, you see? The thing, it goes on and off. Male and female, yang and yin. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Well, we’ve been brought up with our nineteenth-century background to think that this energy which goes on and off is inherently stupid, that it is a mechanical thing. Freud called it libido. Ernst Haeckel called it blind energy. And therefore we feel that we, as human beings, are flukes. A million monkeys working on a million typewriters for a million years might statistically type a Bible. Of course, thereafter, as soon as they got to the end of it, they would dissolve again into nonsense. But we’ve been brought up to feel, you see, that we are flukes in that sense. We are simply accidents. And that is alienation, you see. That is the great problem.

And it seems to me completely obvious that we are not accidents. When we say, you know: you’re nothing but a little bacterium that crawls around on a ball of rock which circles and unimportant star on the outer fringes of a minor galaxy. You know, why do people say things like that? I tell you why. They want to say, “I’m tough. I look at the facts, and they’re hard facts” The idea that there’s somebody up there who cares is for little old ladies. Weaklings. And I think this universe is a bunch of shit. So I’m a real, realistic guy.” See? That’s the message you get from these people, you see. Always look in a person’s philosophy as to what he or she is saying about himself. Because your philosophy is your role, the game you put on, you see.

Now, I admit, you see, that my philosophy is my game that I put on. It’s my big act. Well, I think if I’m going to put on a big act at all, I’m going to put on the biggest one I can put on! And say: “Ah, to hell with all that nonsense! I know very well that, although I’m impermanent—which is just the way I want it, because I, hell, wouldn’t like to be permanent! What a bore that would be. But I’m an impermanent manifestation of the which than which there is no whicher, of the root and ground of the universe—which, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say, is what all men call God, Atman, Brahman.

And I think it’s fun to know that—not merely as a theory, but as a positive sensation which you can actually feel. And so, therefore, my function in conducting this seminar with you is, if at all possible, that you should share this feeling and not need any more psychotherapy, not need any more gurus, and not need any more religion. Just take off! Except, I mean, there is something called religion for kicks. My favorite church is the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris, where they really live it up. They have gold, incense, icons, masses of candles, and gorgeous music. And priests come out from the secret sanctuary—you know, behind the royal doors, the iconostasis divides the main church from the inner sanctum. And the doors open, and somebody comes out looking like God the Father, you know, and beautiful robes. And he sings. And the choir goes. You know? It goes on and on and on. And when you get bored, you go across the street to a vodka shop, where they sell vodka and caviar, blini, bublicki, pirozhki, and everything, you know, and everybody lives it up. Then they go back to church again. That kind of religion is like dancing. It’s a joyous expression. And it’s not telling God what to , because all this thing is in the old Slavonic which nobody understands, and it’s just making great and glorious noises. This is essentially music.

So now, what I would like to suggest is that we have a brief intermission so that you can stretch for about five minutes. And then I would, instead of monologuing at you, would like to talk with you, have your reactions, questions. Don’t feel that you just have to ask questions if you want to react in any way. The whole point of this seminar, incidentally, is that it is a free-for-all instead of a big public lecture where, you know, it has to be restricted so that I can give as much of myself to you as is possible. So please help yourselves.

Now, since we are dealing with play, our next step is—there are two steps now to follow. We’ve got some more theoretical matter to go through, and after that we get into nonverbal practical matter. But I want to talk about music for a while. Do you realize that music could be defined as the greatest vice and addiction in the country? It’s a colossal industry. People are utterly dependent on it. Lots of people can’t do without music at all. Billions of dollars go into the making of records, into the artistry of playing instruments, and all this kind of thing. And it’s completely and utterly useless from a practical point of view. Everybody gets excited about people being alcoholics, being heroin addicts, being marijuana smokers, being this, that, and the other. But you could say there is a disease called chorditis, and that chorditis is addiction to melodious noise. It’s absolutely fascinating. Because people, they go to these concerts, you know, where the most elaborate productions are put on. And then compulsively they have to clap when it’s over, you see? They’re complete idiots!

And herein lies one of the great mysteries of being. Because music, like survival, doesn’t really have to happen. Now let’s look, you see, therefore; take music as a model of the universe. Music is a fantasy with no destination. Dancing is the same thing, only in motion. And when we dance, we’re not going anywhere except round and round. And the universe, according to the Hindu theories, is going round and round. But according to Saint Augustine of Hippo, the universe is going along in a straight line. And this was one of the most disastrous ideas that was ever visited upon Western civilization. Saint Augustine said: if time is cyclic, Jesus Christ would have to be crucified again and again. And there would not be, therefore, that one perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. And therefore time had to be a straight line, from the creation to the consummation to the last judgment.

Of course, then everybody stopped thinking. Because they didn’t know what they were going to do when they got to heaven. They knew what they were going to do in hell. And it’s perfectly clear, if you look at Jan van Eyck’s painting of the Last Judgment in the Metropolitan Museum—a superb work of art—everybody in heaven is completely bored. They’re sitting there looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. Rows and rows and rows of them, and the Lord God Almighty is presiding and looking equally bored. But down below there is a bat-winged skull, spreading out those ghastly wings. And there are all nude bodies writhing and being eaten by snakes and chewing each other. They’re having an orgy. But all those stately people in heaven are in church forever. And that is the ultimate boredom.

You also observe Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Divina Commedia. He was a magnificent engraver. And while he’s on the theme of the inferno he is full of imagination. In the Purgatorio, his imagination declines a little bit, And when he gets to the Paradiso, it’s shot. Because all he has is ladies in white knighties trailing in circles through the skies. No, angels. He has no idea what an angel is. The only man who really understands angels is an Austrian artist. What?

37:27

Watts

Yeah—who has fantastic imagination as to what an angel really looks like. But they’re very rare people who have—the Persian painters had a true vision of paradise. Persian miniatures, with their lovely gardens and jewel-like trees and people sitting around, smoking hookahs and observing the birds. They really have it. But it is extraordinary that our idea of paradise is weak. That’s why I said earlier that students should write about their idea of heaven, and to get the imagination going.

Well, anyway, the point that we reach, and that’s never been admitted, is that heaven is the perfectly useless state. What is God for? What purpose is served by God? Obviously none at all. I mean, imagine some use for God. It’s inconceivable.

39:04

Watts

Yes. But that again, you see, returns to uselessness. You see? Like everything else. And like children, when they’re little and wise, they’re blee-bwebble-blwee-blwebble-blebble-blwebble-blwee-blwoo-blwubble-blwubb, you know? They love it. And adults say: “Stop that! Behave yourself. Be useful. Be purposive.”

But the universe is not. And here you see giraffes, hippopotamuses, ferns. Have you ever looked at a high magnification of viruses? They’re insane! And especially radiolaria, which you find in the depths of the Indian Ocean, are the most magnificent pieces of jewelry that you could ever conceive. They have in the New York Museum of Natural History glass models of these, blown up to be so big. And you can’t conceive anything so beautiful. There are tiaras, there are spheres with spines coming out that look like, you know, the thing you always wanted and that you want to give your best girlfriend is a Christmas present. Gorgeous things!

Why is it, too, that when human beings want to symbolize the ultimate, they will almost invariably pick a flower? You get the rose windows of the great medieval cathedrals. You get the Buddhist lotuses. You get the mandalas. They are all floriform, stellar beings. We somehow look to the flower with more reverence than we look to the human face. That is odd. Because eyes are really, in my opinion, the world’s most beautiful jewels. You look in somebody’s eyes, and really look—we always avoid eye contact in the ordinary way because they’re taboo. If you really got some friend and you can sit in front of them and look deep, deep, deep into the eyes, this is absolutely fascinating. But flowers are eyes. Iris. And the circularity of the eye is the same principle as the circularity of the flower. The color, the beauty, the depth, the transparency. My mother used to say, showing me a morning glory: “Doesn’t it make you feel jazzy inside?” Interesting. We do that.

So the point is, then, that the music is life for its own sake where we’re living in an eternal now. When we listen to music, we’re not listening to the past, we’re not listening to the future. We are listening to an expanded present. Because to hear melody is to hear the interval between tones. If you can’t hear the interval, you’re tone deaf. So just as we have a field of vision which is so wide, so the present moment is not, as the clock indicates, a hairline—click! The present moment is a field of experience, which is not what we would call instantaneous. Much more than that. So that within the present moment we can hear intervals between tones and rhythms, so that we get the feel of a sequence going on. So when I talk about the eternal now, please don’t confuse it with a split second. It’s not the same kind of thing. The eternal now is roomy, easy. Lots in it. Rich. But frivolous.

There’s a wonderful tale that reminds me of it. There was a clergyman in Christchurch, Oxford, who had terribly bad handwriting. So bad he couldn’t read it himself. He was preaching a sermon, and he started out looking at his notes and said, “You who are frivolous, of course...” “You who are frivolous, of course…” “You who are followers of Christ.” But! But, but, but! Do you see the connection? “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” Do not be anxious for the morrow. You, who are frivolous, of course. [???] And I told someone over lunchtime that G. K. Chesterton said, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” See? There is a divine frivolity. The love that moves the sun and other stars is frivolity.

And God therefore might be described as being sincere, but not serious. If some lady says to me—who’s beautiful and attractive—and she says, “I love you,” and I say to her, “Are you serious or are you just playing with me?” That’s the wrong answer. Because I hope she’s not serious and that she will play with me. So I should say to her, “Are you sincere or are you just toying with me?” So that playfulness is the very essence of the energy of the universe. Blwee-blweeble-blwooo-blwee-blwoobble-bwoo. See? That’s what’s happening. It’s music. And bad music, like written by Tchaikovsky, has a meaning, you see? Good music, as written by Bach, has no meaning. Bach is just making marvelous patterns of sound. Whereas Tchaikovsky, with the 1812 Overture, is imitating the noises of the Napoleon retreat from Moscow. And even—what’s his name?—Debussy, with this Engloutie Cathédrale, is trying to represent with music something other than the music itself. But the classical music, whether it be of the West, of the Hindus, of the Chinese, has no other meaning than its own sound.

Now words, you see, have meaning. Words are noises. And they represent and point to something other than themselves in the same way as dollar bills represent wealth, as maps represent territory. Words represent something else. “Water.” The sound “water” will not make you wet. That’s very important. You can’t drink that noise, “water.” Therefore, the word is symbolic and points to something other than itself. And so we say of words: they have meaning. Now, people get all fouled up because they want life to have meaning, as if it were words. You know, Goethe was hung up on this. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis: “All that is mortal is but a symbol.” Of what? See? Confusing reality with words.

What does this mean? Squeak! What do you mean? You know? Oh, it’s an insult to ask you what you mean—as if you had to have a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning. This is the point, you see: that the meaning, the goodie about life, is exactly here and now. We’re not going anywhere. Could you get this point of view? Look out in the street and you will see people frantically thinking they’re going somewhere, that they have important business. And they have a far-out look in their eyes and their noses stick way out in front of them. And they are going somewhere! They are on purpose! They have something to achieve! Here and now, sitting around here, you realize we don’t have to go anywhere. I mean, you’re (in a way) a captive audience, but we don’t have to go anywhere at all [???]. And this is where it’s at. That’s why the Hindus call the true self of us all the Ātman. “The man where it’s at”—that’s a terrible pun! It’s horrible! Horrifying!

I’ll tell you another one. There is a being in Buddhist iconography called Avalokiteśvara, who’s also known as Kannon in Japanese, and Guanyin in Chinese, Chenrezig in Tibetan. And this is usually interpreted as the goddess of mercy. She is represented with 1,000 arms, all radiating, because she is the cosmic millipede and the embodiment of compassion. However, she is not completely a she. She is hermephroditic; male/female. Avalokiteśvara. And Avalokiteśvara means the watchful lord; one who is always caring. And you can remember it because, as the Cockneys say, “Have a look at it.” And there it is. Beautiful. Take a look at it. “Have a look at it.” It’s Cockney. Language is simply fascinating. We could go into this and play all kinds of games with words and their music and magic.

But now, here is—the thing that we’re getting at is that a culture which excludes frivolity has lost the point of life. And this is where the Chinese communists are an extreme danger. They are the most earnest, dedicated to survival. They were in an awful mess and it probably had to happen. But the style of life in China and also in Russia is drab, because they think that the point of life is to go on living. And so long as you get by—no matter how horrible the food is, how drab your dress—you’re getting by. And this is completely missing the point.

52:57

Watts

My spies inform me. I think they still have good food if you’re the commissar.

53:15

Watts

Well, I have to go there to be persuaded. But when I look at Mr. Mao Zedong—even Zhou Enlai, who was obviously a fellow of enormous competence and brains—I wish they’d used more imagination.

53:50

Watts

Yes, the trouble. The mistake is on page 224 of Mao Zedong’s Red Book. Now, I tell you exactly—

54:00

Watts

No, no, I tell you the mistake. Where he says, “It is essential to have a furrowed brow to think.” And there is the error I pointed out this morning: to think that straining the muscles of the forehead has anything to do with clear thinking. That is against Lao Tzu, who is the greatest of all the Chinese philosophers; the father of wisdom. And so Mao Zedong says, “You must have a furrowed brow.”

See? There’s a little slip there. No, look, my dear, I don’t want to pick an argument with you because you’re beautiful. You are so naturally without any effort. See? Without a furrowed brow. See? Nature does it.

55:09

Watts

But it is really basic to our psychophysical functioning. You cannot make your mind, your nervous system, efficient by straining. See? So he makes that mistake. And that indicates an excessive seriousness. This is the point we’re getting at, you see: that life is not worth living if it is compulsive.

55:58

Watts

No.

56:02

Watts

Because—well, the answer to that question isn’t simple. You have to answer it in a kind of double way. The vast majority of people could be said not to commit suicide. (A) Some of them enjoy going on.

56:21

Watts

Yes. Some of them are terrified of committing suicide, of death, and feel therefore they must go on; that it is an absolute necessity to go on as long as possible. While there is life there is hope. That’s a terrible motto. But some of us like to go on simply because we’re enjoying the dance. Even if we are not very rich and live in a fairly simple way, nevertheless the companionship with other people, the sight of the sun, the stars, the grasses, the sound of water is its own explanation. A haiku poem says:

The long night,

The sound of the water

Says what I think.

And therein we have this thing which I am trying to describe as play. Play, in Sanskrit, is līlā. Līlā is our word “lilt.” And the universe is called Vishnu-līlā: the sport or play of Vishnu. And we can go into that very deeply because, when we talk about play, we also talk about the theater. And the theater is a very curious phenomenon because it is defined by a stage and a proscenium arch. And behind the scenes is a green room. Green room—where the actors dress up. And they know who they are in reality before they assume their persona. The word persona means a mask: “that through which sound passes”—per-sona—because the masks worn in the open-air theater of Greco-Roman drama had megaphonic mouthpieces so that the sound would be projected out of doors.

So the person is the fake. Your personality is your image of yourself—which is not you at all. It’s your mask. So the actors come on and the strategy is that the actors want to convince the audience that it’s real; what’s happening on the stage. The audience knows—by virtue of the proscenium arch, and the kind of fencing off of the stage from the spectators—that what is going on on the stage is not really for real. But the actors are going to act so well that they’re going to have people weeping, laughing, crying, sitting on the edge of their seats in anxiety, because they’ve almost persuaded them that this show is for real.

Now imagine pushing this to a far extreme: the very finest actors with the most appreciative audience. And here we are. See? We believe it’s real. And it’s a play. And we take it seriously, and therefore—because we take it seriously and we don’t see through—we kill each other and are mean to each other and we exploit each other. No real reason whatsoever. If we understood, we saw through that, and we knew that this whole life was a joke—after all, what is the joker in the deck of cards? The wild card that can play any role. The Joker is the symbol of God in the pack. Therefore, kings in ancient times would always have a jester at court. And what was the jester? The man who was crazy. He was a schizophrenic who would make unpredictable remarks, and everybody roared with laughter because he said things out of context. Schizophrenics basically are, in a way, liberated people because they don’t give a damn. You get a schizophrenic child, and the schizophrenic child doesn’t care whether it’s knocked down by a car. Whatever happens, happens. And everybody says, “Oh, you mustn’t do that. You’re valuable. We must preserve you.” This child doesn’t care. Bleeah. So they got these schizophrenics who were funny people, and they sat at the foot of the king’s throne to remind the king not to take himself seriously.

You know, in Richard II:

Within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of the king

Keeps death his watch. And there the antic sits,

—the antic means the jester—

There the antic sits,

Scoffing at his state

And grinning at his pomp.

Allowing him a little space to monarchize,

Be fear’d, and kill with looks.

And then at the last comes death,

And with a little pin bores through his castle wall,

And farewell king!

You know, Shakespeare’s full of this kind of wisdom of the transience of life.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the solemn temples,

The glorious palaces, the great Earth itself,

Aye, all which inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Whew! See? The most fantastic things in poetry work on the theme of insubstantiality, of transience. It’s all fading away. Everything. We are, each one of us, not a substantial entity, but we are like a flame. And a flame is a stream of hot gas. Whzzt! Like a whirlpool in a river. Everyone of us is a flowing.

Now, if you resist that you go crazy. You’re like somebody trying to grab water in your hands. And the harder you squeeze it, the faster it slips through your fingers. So the principle of the enjoyment of life is—this is not a precept, this has nothing to do with moralization, it has nothing to do with what you ought, should, et cetera; it is completely practical: Don’t hang on to it. Let it go.