You do what I tell you or else.
 Now maybe I'll be a beneficent despot and say to you, well I'm going to try and persuade
 you by sweetly reasonable activity or even by really putting myself out and the principle
 of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you.
 But I'm just going to convey that if you don't do what I'm persuading you to do, you're going
 to fry in hell forever.
 So then if man conceives of himself in the image of this tyrant, he attempts to govern
 the world by attack.
 And so we speak of the conquest of nature, the conquest of space.
 And of course naturally we're going to conquer cancer and all this kind of thing, see?
 So out comes a thing like DDT, conquest of pests, and we suddenly find it's a disaster.
 And we don't realize, you see, that we are on a spaceship already.
 We don't need any rockets.
 We're going zooming through space faster than any rocket could be imagined to go.
 All you need is sensitivity.
 It comes to you through radar astronomy.
 You don't have to go zooming out with these great phallic symbols, which may be satisfactory
 to the sexually unsatisfied males who concern themselves with such things.
 We don't have to go out with bulldozers and attack nature in ghastly fulfillment of the
 prophecy that every mountain shall be laid low and every valley exalted and rough places
 made plain.
 We need to realize, you see, that we, our body, is nature.
 That everything, that the air, that the temperature, the grass, the plants, they're all us.
 The grass is just as much you as your own hair.
 You can't live without it.
 Just as you can't be a solid without a surrounding space.
 Well, you say the space isn't there.
 It's just nothing.
 But supposing the space around me disappeared.
 Could you see me?
 Where would my outline go if there were no background space?
 How could I move without it?
 Maybe space is more real than solid.
 Could be.
 When scientists start to talk about properties of space, curved space, expanding space, the
 average layman can't understand what they're talking about because he thinks that space
 is nothing.
 It's all been overlooked.
 So then.
 When you concentrate, therefore, on the solid against the space and want to take all facts,
 say as being hard facts, people don't talk about soft facts.
 And all this is an attitude of aggression.
 You see?
 Based on the theory that success is false.
 And the crisis we are in is the complete blowing up, the complete debunking, or self-contradiction
 is the best word to use, of the notion that success comes through force.
 Look at the war in Vietnam.
 Shooting mosquitoes with machine guns.
 And we think, you know, we're going to just kick the shit out of them.
 That sort of attitude, that sort of nasty, over-specialized male attitude, which is exemplified
 in so much of our population.
 How worth it?
 You're not going to move anything that way.
 Real power is not force.
 Real power is thawing.
 Is using your weight.
 All comes to him who waits.
 Look, when in judo you want to move something towards you, you don't crawl like this.
 You do this.
 So you use your weight.
 And if the enemy attacks you and pushes at you, you just drop to the floor and he spins
 right over your head and lands against the wall.
 That's his problem.
 The earth is falling around the sun.
 All energy follows the line of least resistance.
 Water is the most powerful thing in the world, but it always takes the course of least resistance,
 using its weight.
 You can't cut water.
 It doesn't resist you, but you can't wound it.
 You know, you can push your finger into it, but the moment you withdraw it, the hole's
 gone.
 And that is, in a way, a feminine property.
 So Lao Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher, said, "While being a male, retain in yourself
 always a female element, and so you will become a universal channel."
 And that is the problem of this whole paternalistic, God-the-Father conception of the ground of
 being, it's aggressively male.
 And it needs modification with the symbol of the female.
 The earth mother, the lover of the earth, and women are always fundamentally concerned
 about whether the vegetables are grown, and whether the children are nurtured.
 Of course, we've tried to masculinize our women to an enormous extent, with a good deal
 of success, and it's really tough on us, the lack of real female women, to civilize our
 men.
 But that's where we stand, you see, in this whole ecological crisis.
 Now again I repeat, to those of you who are devout Christians or Jews, I'm not trying
 to knock your religion.
 I'm merely saying that you've got the wrong symbols, and you've got a choice of others.
 Besides the symbol of the kingdom of God, you have the symbol of the body of Christ,
 which is an organic, as distinct from a political symbol.
 You've got the idea, I am the vine and you are the branches, which is a vegetative symbol.
 Instead of this notion of God who is above, and has a mallet and goes bang, like that,
 and puts order into everything, like a sculptor with a chisel, think of it the other direction,
 like a flower, where the energy comes through the stalk, out into the petals and the leaves.
 See?
 You have an expansive, non-forcing, but rather growing organization.
 And in those terms, we can conceive a kind of still-formed universe, where the center
 of the whole thing is also the center of each one of us.
 Where we don't force creative action, but allow it to happen through us.
 Just as you cannot force yourself to circulate your blood, you cannot force yourself to sleep,
 you cannot force yourself to breathe or to digest your food, you have to allow it.
 And so in exactly the same way you have to allow yourself to love, not only other people,
 but also this whole universe, which is your own body.
 And instead of regarding yourselves as poor, frustrated, angry little outcasts, infesting
 a ball of rock that revolves round an unimportant star on the outer fringes of a minor galaxy,
 it's a big put-down.
 As if to say, "That's the way things are, baby, and I'm a real tough guy because I recognize
 that."
 You may believe in God and someone up there who cares, but that's for little old ladies
 and children.
 But actually, any place in space can be considered as the middle of all space, because it's curved
 like the surface of a sphere.
 Any point on it is the middle of it.
 Everybody's in the middle.
 The tiniest little amoeba thinks it's human.
 So don't lose center.
 You're it.
 Another way in which we lose center is to explain ourselves away as mere results of
 the past.
 Based on the analogy of billiards, which is Newtonian mechanics, you're just a billiard
 ball that's been hit by a cue called motivation.
 Why did you do it?
 "Oh, my mother had a complex.
 It works the other way round.
 The ball hits the cue.
 The weight flows from the ship.
 But if you want to insist that the past controls you, that's your privilege.
 But you're in the middle.
 And the middle isn't just ego.
 It's the whole energy of the universe.
 And the most important thing we can do is to realize that.
 Because if we don't, we can't deal with the ecological problem.
 That's why the solution is religious.
 If we try to deal with it in a spirit of panic, you just make a mess of it.
 Because when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.
 And the wrong man is the person you see who still confuses himself with his idea of himself.
 This is KPFK Los Angeles.
 We have just heard Alan Watts with a 1960s discussion before a live audience on ecology and religion.


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