I will have the really cranking David Mitchell on.
 And this has been the Station of the Nation, the Fun 91, WFMU, East Orange, WXHD, Mount
 Hope, heard worldwide on the Internet at www.wfmu.org.
 I'm Terry T. See you next week.
 Thanks for listening.
 And it's 6 o'clock.
 And this is WFMU, East Orange, WXHD, Mount Hope.
 And welcome to the Alan Watts Lecture Series.
 Tonight we have a much anticipated lecture, The Game Theory of Ethics.
 If you want some more information and a schedule here, send a self-addressed stamped envelope
 to WFMU, care of Alan Watts, P.O.
 Box 2011, Jersey City, New Jersey, 07303, or email WFMU@wfmu.org.
 And now we're going to hear the lecture, Game Theory of Ethics, by Alan Watts.
 In the talk of this series, I was putting forward, so as to have all my cards on the
 table, what my metaphysics are.
 That is to say, what are the basic assumptions from which I approach this question.
 And I stress two points in particular.
 Number one, that as I feel this universe, I think we are under an illusion with regard
 to the nature of ourselves.
 This arises from the superstition that there are really separate things and events.
 And I pointed out that that is actually a way of thinking, rather than a state of affairs
 in the physical universe.
 In order to think, one must thing.
 That is to say, divide this astonishing cosmic Rorschach plot into bits and give the bits
 names.
 This is a kind of calculus.
 And we break the world down into these separate things and separate events.
 They're really thing events, you might call them, in order to calculate about it, in order
 to describe its behavior, in order to think.
 And but just as something that costs five dollars, if you buy a loaf of bread or a,
 let's say, it wouldn't be five dollars, let's say fifty cents, it isn't fifty separate things
 that you buy, although you pay fifty cents for it.
 And so in the same way, when we talk about the multiplicity of things in this universe,
 this is just a way of measuring it.
 Measuring it with words, as you measure the value of something with money, or the length
 of something with inches.
 But we are so accustomed to, so I would say hypnotized by the usefulness of thought, that
 we come to imagine that the way the world is thinked is the way it's thinged, is the
 way it really is.
 But I rather see it as a continuous process, a single vast field of activity, a single
 pattern of which every single one of us is an expression.
 But when you think about, say, a series of events as being separate events, it's the
 result of a kind of myopia.
 If you watch through something going on, through a narrow slit, you see the event broken down
 into bits, and you see bit following bit, whereas if the crack were enlarged, you would
 see that the separate bits were all one event.
 So in much the same way, our custom of attending to our experience with concentrated attention
 cuts it down into things we call separate events.
 The other basis of my metaphysics was that we tend to ignore the polarity of the world.
 That is to say, to use a simpler word, the go-withness of things and events.
 That just as in a series of waves, to have a complete wave you must have both a crest
 and a trough, you can't have a half-wave.
 Half-waves are never manifested in this cosmos.
 Just as you must have the crest and the trough, so also there is a go-withness of subject
 and object, self and other, and of course those great fundamental physical polarities,
 being and non-being, solid and space, light and darkness, life and death.
 But when this is not perceived, when we are not aware of the total unity of the world,
 of the fact that one's actual self is not something in the world separate from it, but
 the whole works, and when you are not aware that self and other go together, inside and
 outside, in such a way as to constitute one total body, then because of this feeling of
 separation, of not really belonging, we feel alienated from our total environment and from
 other people, and so act towards it in a predominantly hostile way.
 Now during the question period, there arose some discussion of the purpose of this universe,
 and I think I stirred up a little bit of trouble by suggesting that I didn't think it had
 a purpose in the ordinary sense of the word purpose, that is to say, action directed towards
 a future, striving for a goal.
 I felt rather that the design of the world was playful as distinct from purposive, and
 furthermore therefore, that being itself, existence, is not fundamentally and finally
 serious.
 Of course you see, if you think, if you really believe that you are this lonely little separate
 being confronted by a world that doesn't give a damn about you, and is mostly hostile, then
 it is pretty serious, you're in a trap now.
 But one might ask in conventional Christian terms, if there is a God, is God serious?
 And one would say, I hope not.
 Because let's look at this word, serious.
 If some attractive young woman says to me, "I love you," ought I to come back to her
 and say, "Are you serious, or are you just playing with me?"
 I don't think I should ask that, because I hope she isn't serious, and that she will
 play with me.
 I don't really go for serious girls.
 So I should ask instead, "Are you sincere, or are you just toying with me?"
 And you see, that gives an entirely different meaning.
 Because seriousness is a kind of gravity, and a gravity is a kind of weight, and that
 which is heavy is a drag, it sinks.
 And GK Chesterton once very rightly said, not only that there was


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