So we're going to start out with Alan Watts.
 You're going to hear this timeless moment, one of my favorites.
 Alan Watts talks with Laura Huxley about her biography of her husband Aldous Huxley.
 And this interview was recorded by KPFA at the home of Alan Watts in Sausalito.
 Laura, I've been reading your book, this timeless moment, with extraordinary fascination.
 I don't think I've ever read a biography quite like that, because it's not a complete biography.
 It's the story of the last days, in a way, or the last years of Aldous Huxley.
 But I can't think of anybody else who has been written about by his widow,
 and a case where the book was so very largely concerned with the process of death,
 and with a highly intelligent form of dying.
 There is, I remember, a story which is supposed to have been told of Goethe,
 that when he was dying, somebody called, wanted to see him,
 but the maid answering the door said, "But the master is busy dying."
 And our culture is one in which death is invariably something swept under the carpet.
 We pretend it doesn't really happen, and therefore there is no realization that dying is an art.
 And it's an adventure, too, you know.
 Maybe, I don't know, but maybe it's the only chance that we have, that one.
 We don't know.
 It is, and I think as you tell the story, you acted as a marvelous high priestess
 in helping someone through this adventure.
 Well, Aldo had done the same thing for his first wife, Maria, you see,
 and that, of course, gave me the inspiration.
 And he spoke very often of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
 which I haven't read completely, but I mean, I know the basic assumption.
 And I mean, throughout his work, he spoke about this fact of paying attention.
 You remember in Ireland...
 Where the minor birds call out, "Here are now boys, attention!"
 You know, I love so much your seminar, your tapes, and that book.
 It's the best presentation of the book that I could hope to hear.
 Yes, I think that was a very great book, Ireland.
 The problem is that I found in giving lectures, if I announce a title for a lecture
 and then give a lecture on a different subject,
 even though it may be a perfectly good lecture, people are somehow discombobulated.
 I think you always give a lecture on a different subject, Alan.
 You always do that.
 I can talk about the same thing in ever so many different ways.
 But the point is, when Aldo put out "Island," he put it out in the form of a novel.
 And people have very fixed ideas of what a novel is supposed to be,
 and they had identified Aldo to a great extent as a novelist.
 And then when it so turned out that "Island" was a sociological textbook, almost,
 a sociological blueprint in the form of a novel,
 they said, "Well, he's really sermonizing," with a few entertaining bits added,
 "just because of the novel form."
 Yes, I mean, it would have really, I think, been better if he would have written it straight,
 as a manual for living and loving and dying.
 Because then the public would not have expected a novel,
 which apparently, as a novel, it's not at its very best.
 No.
 No, but that's ridiculous.
 It's quite obvious to anyone who reads it that it wasn't really intended to be a novel.
 Well, it's why it's obvious to you, Alan.
 It's different, you know?
 And I mean, in conclusion, very few people have read it.
 And there are so many sequences there, so many methods which are so practical for here and now.
 It would be wonderful if we could apply only a few of them.
 We would all feel better.
 You know, I have really sort of a crusade against useless suffering.
 And in that book, there is so much about suffering, which is not necessary, it's not creative.
 It's just nothing.
 It doesn't bring any enlightenment, any compassion.
 A great number of young people are reading this book today.
 Yes.
 And it has become a sort of inspiration for many of them,
 for experiments in forming new kinds of family, new communities, intentional communities.
 But I heard a story where Aldous was challenged about this book and said,
 "Now, did you mean this seriously?"
 And he said, "Oh, no, it was purely an intellectual exercise."
 Did he say that?
 Well, he's supposed to have said that.
 But what do you think about that?
 You were with him while he was reading it.
 Well, I think exactly the contrary.
 I don't think it was an intellectual exercise.
 I mean, he might have said that as a joke.
 Yes.
 But he really, every sequence in that book, every method, every recipe,
 if you like to call it that way, is something that most of them, at least,
 he experimented himself in his own life.
 And he, I don't know, it was not an intellectual exercise.
 The part of the novel, the writing of the novel,
 it was probably an intellectual exercise because he had to fit it.
 Now, I realize that.
 Yes, but...
 Aldous also once said, "When you are with savages,
 don't fool with them because you will end up in the cooking pot."
 And therefore, he used to know how to be very perspicacious and tactful
 about his public relations.
 But you know, a thing that has often occurred to me
 is that Aldous Huxley was one of the most highly educated men I ever ran into.
 When you study the field of his interests, the scope of his interests,
 especially as revealed in his essays,
 in, he knew a great deal about the history of art.
 An enormous amount about the history of science and technology.
 He was fond of the theater.
 He knew about music.
 He had an encyclopedic mind and he carried all this with a lovely vanity.
 So much so that I think a great many people
 simply didn't know how to understand him because they weren't well educated enough.
 That's right.
 The frame of reference was enormous.
 But for instance, I can tell you about music.
 I am a violinist.
 I've been trained as a violinist.
 It has been the major work in my life.
 And one time he mentioned a concerto, a Viotti concerto,
 that no one knows except violinists who have to study it, you know,
 to work the technique and so on.
 And he knew this Viotti concerto.
 It was absolutely extraordinary.
 He knew as much as specialists really in their field.
 And then of course, he could correlate all of this.
 And in this utopia, in this island, he wanted to put everything in, you know,
 all the chemical study, all the progress in pharmacology,
 and make it into a concrete mysticism.
 Well, I think he, along with that, you see,
 had the difficulty of living in a country
 where that sort of highly cultured intellectuality
 is envied.
 And because it's envied, it's put down.
 People used to circulate stories, for example,
 that before going to a party,
 Aldous would read in the Encyclopedia Britannica
 everything that he'd had to say on the letter P,
 the origins of that.
 Then he would subtly move the conversation around
 to where the letter P in some way became important,
 and then would proceed to be completely encyclopedic upon the subject.
 You know, they tell me before going to a party,
 Aldous only discussed what I was going to wear,
 and how he liked it, and this and that.
 Well, I think that sort of story expresses the envy
 and the resentment which people feel for such high culture.
 But I don't think he was aware of that, really.
 It would have been very amusing.
 I never saw, in all that I knew of him,
 any kind of awkward self-consciousness about these things.
 He had a kind of reserve,
 which is very natural to Englishmen of his upbringing.
 A lot of people, for example, I had a rather similar upbringing,
 and a lot of people think that I'm a bit isolated and difficult to reach.
 Well, it isn't that at all.
 It's really consideration for other people,
 fundamentally, which makes English people reserved.
 We don't want to, you know, throw ourselves at everyone.
 And so it's very difficult to transplant yourself to the United States,
 where that's more or less what you're expected to do.
 Yes, and yet, you know, he would live very much in the American way and enjoy it.
 You know, we, as I said in the book, we were married in a drive-in chapel.
 Well, now, less English than that, and less Italian than that,
 you can find it, and he enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it very much.
 And he did all the things that were done in America, you know.
 He didn't try to transplant his own way of living here.
 Yes, but of course, there is still a fundamental style of life.
 Oh, a style of life, an inner style, yes.
 An inner style, exactly.
 Oh, yes, very much so.
 But I mean, he would, if I was not there for lunch or something,
 he would make his own lunch very well.
 And this is rather more American.
 You mean he was a good cook?
 Oh, yes, he was a very nice cook.
 He particularly liked to make soups.
 We had a whole, he once even thought of writing a little book about making soups.
 Well, I never--
 How is your own book going on?
 Oh, I tell you, I have abandoned that for the time being,
 because I felt that writing about gourmet cookery at this moment
 would be like fiddling while Rome burns.
 Well, so what are you doing about Rome?
 I'm writing a book instead about ethics called The Rules of the Game.
 And I think that's an extremely important subject for young people.
 Oh, yes.
 And as you see, in the same way, you could say from a certain point of view
 that as his life went on, all of Aldous' books became more serious,
 or I would prefer to say sincere and concerned with profound matters.
 And this is what you're doing.
 But you know, there's a--
 Critics have tended to say about the later work of Aldous Huxley,
 which begins with a book called Ends and Means.
 I remember reading an article by Charles Savage in the Siouan Review some years ago,
 discussing the change in his work,
 and saying that we are really seeing two different sides of the same man.
 He pointed out that Aldous is at his best when he is destroying,
 when he is satirizing, when he is poking fun and contempt at various things.
 And so in all his early satirical novels, he proved himself to be a master of this.
 Now, said Savage, he shifts to a certain kind of mysticism.
 But the message of this mysticism is really the same as that of his earlier novels.
 Namely, that the human world, the world of personalities, the world of differentiation,
 the world of multiplicity of nature, is really fundamentally contemptible,
 and should all be dissolved in the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum,
 in the Brahman, in the ungrund, in the what have you, you know?
 Oh goodness, interpreting is a terrible thing. It should be one of the great crimes.
 Isn't it? Because I was astounded when I read this.
 I mean, how can one come to such a conclusion after all that it tries in every paragraph,
 you know, to say the importance of each person, of each thing in nature, even of things as such.
 But he saw that. But these people can't see that he saw it.
 You see, I had met Aldous just about the time, just a little before I read that review,
 and that was back in, oh, 1947. And he had then written Grey Eminence and the Perennial Philosophy.
 And in Grey Eminence, I feel that at that time,
 Aldous was somewhat under the influence of Gerald Herd's more ascetic period.
 Possibly, yes.
 That was when Gerald Herd was running the coeducational monastery of Tribuco.
 Yes, that's right.
 And they were trying to take the kingdom of heaven by storm.
 They were going there.
 And they were all very much, in a way, mystically uptight.
 And I felt a little reflection of that in Aldous at the time.
 Of that, yes.
 But then, when his attitude began to change, he became less and less the Manichean.
 Yes.
 And more and more a, what I would call, a tantric type.
 Yes, concrete type.
 You wrote me a wonderful letter when he died about that.
 How you have felt this development in Aldous, especially in the later years,
 in all his way of being, even of dressing.
 I mean, the outer signs, of course, that can be made.
 Well, to tell you the truth, Laura, when I first met him, it was in Hollywood.
 And he came out in the most decrepit old pants and a run-down shirt.
 And of course, he was vastly entertaining.
 But he was looking pretty shabby.
 And I met him again after he married you.
 And suddenly, he was nattily dressed.
 He was wearing a beautiful queen jacket, with a handkerchief in the breast pocket, just so.
 He was beautifully groomed.
 And I thought, my goodness, something has changed.
 I had a wonderful collection of ties, you know.
 I must send you one.
 But you don't wear ties, because it's a magnificent collection.
 And they would be called psychedelic ties.
 Well, I wear ties when the occasion requires.
 You must remember, I'm a sort of joker or comedian, who adopts the guy suitable to the occasion.
 But no, I always had the impression, you see, that this criticism of savages was absolutely
 ridiculous, because I never met a man who had so many interests.
 In other words, he was profoundly interested in all the diversities.
 Yes, and he was so curious.
 And in everything, really, timeless moment.
 I mean, it's true, he was living moment by moment.
 And he had, I suppose, disciplined himself to that.
 Or maybe that was why he enjoyed life so much.
 Yes.
 He was-- another thing, I mean, people think sometimes that he was a depressed man.
 He was hardly ever a depressed man.
 Very, very seldom.
 He was preoccupied, but he always tried to do something about this preoccupation, you know,
 the state of the world and all that.
 But I think all writers tend to get moods of preoccupation.
 You get completely fascinated with writing, and then you may suddenly have to have a meal,
 and you turn up and sit down and eat.
 And you can't get off your mind off the various ideas or themes you're playing with.
 Then your wife may say to you, what's the matter with you?
 Can't you make any conversation?
 Are you angry with me?
 Or something of that kind.
 No, no, no.
 That really only happened with Aldous when he was writing "Island," because of this contest,
 you know, of the novel and the essay.
 Otherwise, he's writing-- yes, he fascinated him.
 But he was very ready to change, you know, to change the course of his thought.
 But with "Island," two or three times he was like that.
 And then, of course, when he was ill at the end.
 Because there were so many things still that he wanted to do.
 And he wondered, you know, how much, how long would he--
 how long a time would he have, how much energy.
 There was a period there like that.
 And yes.
 It took a long time to write "Island," didn't it?
 Yes, he wrote it in two or three periods.
 He left it sometimes and then went back again.
 Of course, that's the hardest thing to do.
 In a way, it's easy to write "Brave New World."
 Because there, the point of view is, in a way, critical.
 But in "Island," where you want to paint the vision of what you really believe in
 and what you would like to happen, that's the hardest thing to do.
 Yes.
 And then, as you said, who is it that said that the--
 the movie, "Bad Sentiment" make good novels?
 Yes.
 "Bad Sentiments" make good novels.
 Yes.
 Yes.
 Because when everything is fine and nice and everybody's good and happy,
 it's very difficult to write about it.
 Yes.
 And in the same way, I think that the imagery of paradise in the history of Western art
 has been artistically inferior to the imagery of hell.
 If you take, for example, Gustave Doré's illustrations to "The Divina Comedia."
 Yes.
 Those for hell and purgatory are fascinating.
 But the illustrations for "The Paradiso" are just these streams of angels in white nighties
 flying around the sky.
 And they're very uninspiring.
 I know.
 Well, because that's right.
 But then he should have seen that in different ways, you see.
 Now there is all kind of different illustration because the photography,
 for instance, photography, there is in your book, "The Joyous--
 "Joyous Cosmology."
 "The Joyous Cosmology."
 And the photography of flowers or things of nature, it is so magnificent.
 But I think that maybe this is changed now.
 Don't you think?
 Yes, I think so.
 I think we are seeing the reemergence--
 We're seeing more and more, yes.
 --in Western art of sheer glory.
 Yes, absolutely.
 Which we haven't seen since the stained glass and the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
 And it is the same thing, you see, the mystical experience which brings this expression about.
 I think that the best illustrations of paradise are to be found in Persian miniatures.
 Ah, yes.
 Was Aldous interested in those?
 Yes.
 Yeah, we had-- well, we had some books.
 Yes, he was always looking with the enlarged glass, you know, to look at the details of this.
 Now, I must to some extent attribute the change in his attitude and also in Gerald Heard's attitude
 to the time when they first encountered LSD.
 It seemed to me that in both of them, there was a marked shift of attitude.
 I suppose that those who would be unfavorable to all this would say,
 "Well, that's the time they got their brains damaged."
 But it was highly interesting damage for both of them because
 I felt that the attitudes of both of them became somehow enriched.
 Oh, yes.
 Well, of course, I knew Aldous very little before that.
 In fact, I only met him a few times.
 But when I saw him after that experience, which was in Rome,
 it was this tremendous vitality and this tremendous interest in looking and seeing and experimenting.
 Of course, he didn't do this experimenting so often as people thought, you know.
 It was done very, very rarely.
 Oh, well, that's the way I think in any intelligent use of this kind of thing.
 A single experience gives you so much that it takes several months to digest it.
 Yes, exactly.
 And, you know, to go on week after week or worse day after day with this sort of thing
 is to give yourself mystical indigestion.
 Yes.
 Yes, and all this had not happened, you see, by the time that Aldous died.
 It was just beginning in 1963.
 I remember in the last few months or even weeks of his life,
 he began to hear about abuses.
 And so I think it would be horrifying to see what...
 I wonder what he would have done, you know, to prevent this.
 Of course, he would have done all that he could.
 And I wonder how much he could have accomplished in preventing this misuse and abuse.
 And the sensation, there is so much sensation about this.
 All that kind of thing seems to me to be inevitable in a world where there are no secrets.
 In other words, scientific knowledge has to be public knowledge
 because the community of scientists has to know all about it in order to work.
 Therefore, there are no secrets and therefore everything gets broadcast around.
 And I felt that when Aldous had let the cat out of the bag with the doors of perception
 and later with heaven and hell, that I ought to write something about it too.
 I was reserved about writing anything about it much before,
 but I felt that he had let the cat out of the bag and that more needed to be said.
 Now, of course, the cat would have been let out of the bag eventually,
 there's no doubt about it.
 Well, I think so and probably not as well in such a good manner.
 No, right.
 But now, when was it approximately that he first experimented with LSD?
 In 1953.
 In 1953?
 '53, that's right.
 And the doors of perception came out then in '54.
 As early as '54?
 Oh, yes, doors of perception is 1954.
 Oh, I had no idea it was that early.
 Wait a second, I was going to Italy and I read it on the plane.
 No, it came out in 1955.
 '55, yes, that might be.
 No, no, no, '54.
 '54, still.
 It was in the summer of '54 that I read it.
 Because you see, I didn't run into this until 1958.
 Oh, I think that we met here in San Francisco one time, yes.
 Yes, that's right, at the Tokyo Sukiyaki restaurant, that's right.
 But I hadn't encountered it until that time.
 You got married in what year?
 In 1956.
 1956.
 Uh-huh.
 Well, anyway, I felt that this had fully opened his eyes to see
 that the mystical world or the mystical dimension of unity behind the whole cosmos
 was no longer something that required for its vision a turning away from the diversity of
 the material world, but you could see this unity, this underlying unity, right in the
 multiplicity of the material world.
 And he seemed to be feeling that more and more strongly as time went on.
 I remember he was writing to me that summer before we were married, he was in New York,
 and he wrote to me that he went to see a musical comedy, and it was a very poor and vulgar thing.
 And he said, yet, even there, if one would look with attention and look deeply,
 one could find some kind of an essence of beauty.
 Well, I had exactly the same experience in listening to a terrible Baptist preacher on the
 radio.
 Well, that's the same thing.
 And it was really awful.
 Yes.
 And it was as phony as it could be.
 Yes.
 And it was concerned with money, send in your dollar, you know, if you want to copy this
 address, be sure to send in your dollar.
 But as I listened deeply into that voice, it sounded like someone saying, well, I'm just
 alive and I got to eat too.
 And it was a little baby calling for its mother in the dark.
 But it was coming on like, you know, all this God and Jesus and salvation and everything,
 and saying it as if it knew all about it.
 But you could see this was a big front on quaking terror underneath.
 Yes.
 Well, the same thing, you see, there was nothing that all this really was a very fine musician
 and musical comedy for him was not his type of music.
 And particularly this one, I don't know which one it was, but it was particularly bad.
 And yet, and yet, you know, if you listen, he said he would find something.
 Did he ever discuss these experiences with Krishnamurti?
 He did.
 He told me that the very first time that he had it with Maria and Dr. Osmond, then he
 went up to OI and spoke about it to Krishnaji.
 And Krishnaji was very familiar with the whole thing.
 So, yes, yes, yes.
 Oh, yes, that's right.
 That's so.
 He was he knew exactly what all this was speaking about.
 I have a feeling that Krishnaji is there all the time, except when he has to come back
 and talk a little bit.
 And I think that is the merit of Krishnamurti to do this speaking to people, because probably
 he would have a much better time not to.
 Would you say that all this was greatly influenced by Krishnaji?
 Yes, I would say that he was influenced by Krishnaji probably more than by any other
 single religious man.
 Well, I, in a way, could say the same thing.
 Only one is always very hesitant in acknowledging any debt to Krishnaji because he so hates
 the idea of having any disciples.
 But I, for my part, feel that he is one of the most original and profound thinkers in
 the world because he's always a bit unexpected.
 He's never in the ordinary ruts of a religious or psychotherapeutic thinking.
 Well, the trouble is that he, I mean, the trouble is not the trouble.
 The point is that that is what he is, but he does not give any way to get there.
 And that is the great thing, you see.
 People say, "Well, how am I going to do that?"
 And you know that he really was very, very angry at me when I wrote that book, you know,
 "You are not the target with recipes of techniques."
 I was very innocent and I told him about it with great pleasure.
 And, oh, he was quite violent.
 Oh, you tell that story in your book, don't you?
 Yes, yes.
 And yes, because I spoke about this during lunch and then we were alone and he looked
 at me very, very intensely and he said, "You know, all these people that go around helping
 other people, I think they are a curse looking at me."
 I was so shaken, but after a few seconds I found myself and I said, "What do you think
 you are doing?"
 And his answer was so delightful.
 He said, "Oh, but I don't do it on purpose."
 And that was something that all this just, you know, this thing, "I don't do it on purpose,"
 you know, it was so clear to all this what he meant.
 But it's not clear to everyone because it's not easy, really.
 That was the conversation, wasn't it, that, again, it's reported in your book, where he
 ends up on this extraordinary note that the state of consciousness that he is trying to
 describe as in himself is one which has no center.
 No center, that's right.
 And it is just the opposite of what we find, you know, we always try to find the central
 core of ourselves.
 Yes.
 And go to the center, find it, be the center.
 And he said, "No center."
 Yes, that was very strange.
 Very strange.
 One can feel that for him it's all so natural, for Krishnamurti all this is so natural, so
 obvious, that it seems to him preposterous even to have to say these things.
 But I must say it's not natural and easy for many people that I know.
 It's not easy for me, certainly.
 Did Krishnaji in any way disapprove of Aldous' use of psychedelics to see these things?
 Well, this I don't know.
 He never told me that, and I don't think that he ever said anything like that to Aldous.
 No, I think the two men were so nice together, I don't know, they didn't speak much.
 You know, we once visited Krishnaji in India for three days, and I don't think that they
 ever talked very much about Aldous' deep philosophies or modes of existence.
 They just were very nice together.
 One felt a tremendous liking for each other.
 It was a very special atmosphere when they were together.
 But I don't know that he told him, you know, directly, "You shouldn't do this."
 In other words, when they got together, they didn't discuss deep matters, but just enjoyed
 themselves.
 I must tell you about those three days, because we were living in the house of this great
 mystic, and he had a marvelous cook.
 And we always looked forward to the next meal.
 It was the most refined food that you could imagine without any animal food, you know,
 completely vegetarian.
 And the variety of tastes and the delicacy, I mean, great refinement, really, of the way
 that Krishnaji lives.
 He's, in a way, he could have been, maybe he is an hedonist, you see, because he appreciates
 all the things of perception.
 We say hedonist.
 Hedonist.
 I remember him once speaking about materials, and everything, his perceptions are so cleansed,
 you know, the doors of his perception are very, very clear.
 And it was marvelous, I was waiting for the next meal.
 You see, this is fascinating, because this doesn't come out in Krishnamurti's lectures.
 No, I know, I know.
 Nor does humor come out.
 No, and he has a great deal of humor, although he's very, very preoccupied about the world.
 He was, I haven't seen him lately.
 He was preoccupied about the world, because the world had so many churches, and priests,
 and psychologists, and all that.
 That was, which probably he equates in a way with politicians and all the rest of it, you
 know, people that are being followed, that have followed.
 He has that, but do you think that one can be without leaders?
 Do you really think so?
 Well, I suppose you could argue that the presence of churches, and priests, and psychologists
 were like the presence of spots on a person who has chickenpox.
 Of course, these spots are in a way letting off infections inside the body, and therefore
 they fulfill some sort of function.
 But they go with a diseased condition.
 After all, if we were living in harmony with the way of nature, the Tao, as the Chinese
 call it, we wouldn't need churches, and priests, and psychotherapists.
 I know, but we don't live in the Tao.
 No.
 And, but perhaps, well, I think you know, this is a bit off the subject, but when you
 get into a real jam, and you realize it's useless to call the psychiatrist, you're undergoing
 a very creative experience.
 Yes, if you go all the way to the end of it.
 Yes, yes.
 And you don't call the psychiatrist, you see.
 I have a kind of terror of calling a psychiatrist into any situation, because I know what it
 might lead to.
 And so I always try to leave it alone.
 And I don't want to offend my psychiatric friends by saying this, but I mean, some of
 them know how to handle things, and some of them, I was just talking to one the other
 day, who wouldn't dream of getting one of his patients into a mental hospital.
 And...
 Who would not dream?
 No, he wouldn't dream of it.
 He does everything in his power to avoid that sort of a solution.
 Well, of course, yes, yes, yes, absolutely, yes.
 But, and I think in a way, this is Krishnaji's attitude to all the people who are trying
 to help others, is that a lot of people are doing that kind of work to try and help other
 people.
 But I know in my own case, I'm not really trying to help the world.
 And I think that's what Krishnaji is saying when he doesn't do this on purpose, when he
 says he doesn't do it on purpose.
 And I think that Aldous had a very similar attitude, that he was writing about mysticism
 and philosophy and religion, not because he was, or he was even writing about the alarming
 state of the world.
 But you never felt in him the fanatic.
 No.
 He was so extraordinarily interested in what was going on, that that seems to me the primary
 reason why he wrote.
 Oh, yes, well, that is, was his life, was his way of living, to write, you know.
 But I ask Aldous, when, when Krishnaji told me that, you know, and so violently, I said,
 "What do you think?
 Should I do this?"
 And he said, "No, everything should be done.
 What Krishnaji does is marvelous, but what you do, giving tools and giving recipes, that
 is also necessary."
 I mean, he included everything.
 He didn't think that, you know, only one thing, that it was only one panacea, that is, of
 course, was completely different from his way of being.
 He couldn't have been so restricted.
 But why did you, what did you say just a minute ago about yourself, that you...
 Well, I often say, half-chokingly, when I'm asked in a student audience, "Why do you go
 around lecturing on these things?"
 I say, "Because I'm a philosophical entertainer."
 After all, when you, not all entertainment is frivolous.
 You do pay entertainment's tax when you go to a concert by a pianist who's going to play
 Mozart and Beethoven sonatas.
 You could hardly call that frivolous.
 And so there can be philosophical entertainment in the same spirit.
 And then also, I mean, everybody has to express himself the best way, and it seems to me you
 are such a marvelous virtuoso of words, like all these words.
 Naturally, you must use your virtuosity.
 It would be bad for you and for everybody else if you wouldn't.
 Now, here's the thing that's fascinating.
 You see, I, in using words, I've been accused of being a word man.
 Well, of course you would.
 I mean, but I mean, that is beside the point.
 You can't be accused of everything.
 Well, of course you can.
 But you know, people, especially when you get into this whole new domain of emphasis
 upon the experiential.
 Not ideas, not theories, but getting down to the nitty-gritty, the real experience.
 And so this is true with the encounter groups, with the tea groups, with the, all that kind
 of thing.
 And I remember once Fritz Perls saying to me, he said, "The trouble with you is you're
 all words.
 You are a dancer.
 You dance around with words."
 And I said, "Now, listen, Fritz, don't you put down words."
 No.
 Words are a pattern of life, just like a fern, just like a snow crystal, just like a cloud.
 And if I play with that kind of a pattern, am I any really less experiential than the
 fern that plays with the chlorophyll and such things to become a fern?
 It's marvelous when you think of words.
 If you just take any one word, not just thinking about how it came about in the expression,
 but just what your mouth does to pronounce that word, it's the most fascinating thing
 that you can do.
 Oh, yes.
 I love to write nonsense, you know, where the words don't have any meaning.
 But they are just the fact.
 But it's just, "I went to get the bucket of ducks, bucket of ducks, bucket of ducks.
 I went to get the bucket of ducks all on a summer's day.
 Kalakity bucket, lickity bucket, snippity, snappity, snickity bucket, ploppity, flippity,
 flippity bucket," all in the same old way.
 You know, things like that.
 Wonderful.
 You see, what your tongue and your mouth and your lips have to do to that is a miracle,
 you know.
 It's absolutely a miracle.
 I got a pellet, you got a polo, pitch and a pallet, a pellet, a polo, a polly, a polo,
 a gaffer, a pallet, a pellet, a polo, a patella, a pellet, a pill, a polo.
 That is an Italian one, you see.
 But I know, I think that the only people that can do without words are people like yourself
 and Aldous.
 You know, Aldous began to speak about nonverbal education and gave it an enormous importance.
 And it's just like, you know, like a millionaire that can say, "Well, money is not important
 because there is so much of it."
 And you can say it and Aldous could say it, but for the rest of us, I think that we have
 to have the appropriate words.
 I know how difficult it is for me, you see, because words is not my mean of expression,
 you know.
 I like other things.
 And I know that it's very good to have them.
 And I believe that I notice very many young people here, they get in so much trouble just
 because they don't express themselves right.
 They say the wrong words, you know.
 They just have never had either the thought or the opportunity, I don't know which, you
 know, but they want to say something not very nice, like to say, you know, "I would like
 to go away.
 I would like not to do this."
 And they say, "Drop dead."
 Well, people don't like to hear that, you see.
 Yes, I've been astounded at the inarticulateness of many young people today.
 And also it goes with a kind of strange, slightly dead-sounding quality of voice, which I can
 immediately detect on the telephone.
 Yes, yes.
 Somebody calls and says, "Like Mr. Watts, I was just wondering if there's any chance
 of your being so that I could come and rap with you."
 You know, and there's a sort of dead voice.
 And, you know, at once I'm inclined to reject such an encounter.
 Well, those are the people that must see you.
 You must see them.
 That is the very signal.
 Because, I mean, you might inspire them to get a little bit more alive.
 I think there are many people that are not quite alive.
 Do you find that?
 Oh, sure.
 Zombies.
 Yes, but I mean, also among the people that have taken drugs and so on, that you expect
 them to be more here and now.
 Yes, but they didn't bring anything to it.
 You see, that experience with LSD doesn't really do much for anyone who doesn't bring
 something to it.
 But if you bring a lot to it, it enlivens all that you have.
 The people who have the best LSD experiences are those who say before they take it, "Oh,
 but I don't need that kind of thing.
 What you're telling me about is the state of consciousness I'm in all the time."
 And they have the best results.
 That is very true, but those people sometimes are put in a mental hospital, too, you know,
 because they see too much.
 Maybe.
 Yes, you can see too much.
 Yes.
 Well, the impression may be so overwhelming.
 I mean, I'm getting here in your house, here on the boat, I'm almost getting in that place,
 you know, because this water and these hills and the light changing, it's so beautiful.
 Do you work here right on this window?
 No, I do sometimes.
 You do sometimes?
 No, I usually work where the books are.
 Yes, because here it's very inducing to just be with it.
 Well, you should see the changing quality of light.
 When the dawn hits that mountain, Tammalpais, even those Air Force radar domes get transformed,
 and they look like the domes of a mosque.
 And I feel I'm in some strange oriental world, and the way the house lights up,
 all these houseboats across here, I mean, the sun lights up all these houseboats.
 They become rich and golden and bejeweled, and people would say, "Well, this is a dirty old slum."
 But you should see it at dawn.
 It's a paradise.
 Well, you see it.
 This transformation is really the keynote, isn't it, to our living, to be able to transform.
 Yes, well, it's that sentence which Aldous Huxley uses for the doors of perception from Blake.
 If the doors of perception were cleansed, we should see everything as it is, infinite.
 Tell me, what was Aldous' attitude in the whole process of delight in words?
 I mean, would you feel while he was working on something that he was completely delighted
 with the whole sort of triumph of being able to get some extremely subtle emotion,
 or some personal attitude in a character that he got just the mojus to the right word for it?
 Yes, yes, oh, yes, he was delighted in that way, and he was delighted with words of others.
 You know that he read poetry aloud.
 I have a lot of tapes, beautiful tapes, where he read poetry aloud in English and Italian
 and in French, just for the pleasure of hearing these words back again.
 Yes, oh, yes, he had this thing of the word.
 And then when he helped me write in "You Are Not the Target," I would read to him.
 He had such patience, you just have no idea.
 I would read to him these recipes.
 And once, if he ever changed a paragraph, my editor would reject it somehow.
 Evidently, it was too good, you know, it was a different style.
 So that never went into the book.
 But one word here and one word there, and one word there.
 He would just get that word, or a quotation.
 The quotation was very extraordinary.
 Yes, well, he had this enjoyment of words, and at the same time, he thought one should
 let them go, you know, they are not so important.
 What did he say?
 Words are good servants, but bad masters.
 That was his attitude.
 Well, he had an astounding facility in getting the flavor of human character.
 This is a thing that I admire enormously, because I would never be able to write a good novel.
 I think people who write novels are absolute geniuses.
 He felt himself not to be a very good novelist.
 Especially in delineating the characters of women.
 It's so easy to make a rather stereotype of women when writing, and it's very bad.
 I think that's why he liked D. H. Lawrence so much, I suppose, because he does that so well.
 But he could get, by a curious turn of phrase, he could get the sort of feeling about another
 person where you say, "Now, I want to tell you what this kind of person this is, but I just
 somehow... they're a very distinct, they're a very particular kind of person, and I wish I could
 give you the flavor, but I just can't find the word to pin down the kind of individual that is."
 I like the story in which somebody was saying, "Well, I don't know how to tell you
 what sort of person she is, but she's the sort of person who would say serviette instead of napkin."
 Somebody said, "Some other lady person."
 "Well, I always say serviette instead of napkin."
 And he said, "Well, you must know just the sort of person I mean."
 But in the final stages of his life, he was, wasn't he, about to begin another novel
 and had written some of it?
 Yes, he wanted to write a sort of autobiography, semi-autobiographical novel.
 That's what I gathered, yes, from reading as much as you published.
 And because he felt that there was so much intermingling, you know,
 intermingling his own life with the events of the century, it was so extraordinary
 what had happened since he was an adolescent or a child, that he thought it would be very,
 well, it would have been a very big work, you know, because that was starting,
 that novel started in 1900, the first chapter that is in my book.
 Yes.
 And about himself as a child, I think that he was very much like that child that he describes there.
 Yes.
 I remember he speaks, also in his lecture, he spoke about Queen Victoria
 riding on a carriage about two or three miles an hour.
 And now similar ladies of similar dignity and age go around the Corniche or in the highways here
 at 70 miles an hour.
 He used that to show how we can really develop our potentialities in so many different ways,
 in so many different directions.
 That was one of his constant thoughts, the development of human potential.
 Of course, his lifetime spans the most startling change
 of the speed of human history that has ever existed.
 And he simply, his lifetime bridges it.
 Yes, exactly.
 He's got one foot in the Victorian era and one in the 1960s.
 That's right, that's right. That's what he wanted to do.
 Yes.
 And I don't think any other, any other people at any time have spanned such enormous change.
 And he was so much with it all the time, all these changes in different fields.
 Well, the critical period of change, you see, was just before the Second World War.
 You see, he published...
 Yes, just before the Second World War, because you see, he published Ends and Means
 just before he left England, didn't he?
 That book comes about the same time as "Ilis in Gaza."
 And that was when he knew Gerald Hurd first.
 Now, what prompted him to move to the United States?
 Well, he was traveling, you remember?
 First of all, he lived in Italy a long time.
 And then in Italy, the fascist regime came about.
 And Gerald Hurd moved to America.
 And somehow this whole group of Englishmen moved here.
 And then he was here, and actually for his eyesight,
 he found a teacher that helped him a great deal in overcoming this blindness.
 And they climbed, and then they went to live in the desert.
 But I think that Gerald Hurd was quite...
 was... gave the incentive to move here and leave Europe.
 So it was primarily just his interest in Gerald Hurd and the group around him?
 Yes, and what was happening in Italy and in Germany and so on that made him...
 In England, he couldn't leave because of the climate.
 He would get the bronchitis, just like that.
 Oh, really?
 Yes.
 That's interesting.
 I couldn't live in England because I couldn't make a living.
 Well, he lived there, you know, remember when he was a critic on some newspaper as a young man?
 Yes.
 But he never really wanted to live there.
 As soon as he could, he moved into Italy, and then in France, and then here.
 He always went back. He liked to go there for a month or two every year.
 Well, I do the same thing.
 But the trouble with England is that it pays very little for books and nothing at all for lectures.
 Whereas the United States is quite different.
 I remember Aldous saying to me once, shortly after I came out to the West Coast,
 which must have been in about 1952, and he said...
 we were making an appointment, and he said, "Yes, we're all so busy these days."
 He said, "It's simply appalling."
 Because nowadays it costs you $12,000 a year simply to breathe.
 And if you want to do something more than that, it costs about $18,000.
 Yes.
 But why did he settle on Southern California, do you know?
 Well, I think that the first day he and Maria went up to the desert,
 because Maria had a touch of TB.
 I think that they thought that she might have TB.
 And then they went up there, and they liked the desert,
 and they lived in the desert for several years,
 and then it became too difficult to live there, and they came down to Los Angeles.
 Well, I was expecting, in a way, your answer to be,
 "Because California is the nearest thing in the United States to the Mediterranean."
 Well, I think California is everything, you know.
 Yes, I know, but if you're looking for sun, and for cypress, and for palm trees,
 and there's a certain... and also, of course, in the Spanish flavor, it still lingers.
 And then he liked to walk. He took every day long walks, and this is a wonderful place to live.
 You see, that kind of thing has a fascination for some kind of Englishman.
 There's a saying, you know, that an Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate.
 Oh, yes! I didn't know that!
 This was originally said about Frederick Corvo, who wrote Hadrian VII, I remember.
 And Aldous, having spent many years in Italy, has the same...
 The same feeling, yes.
 ...feeling, you see, for that magic of the Southland, of the Mediterranean, that I have myself.
 And so the reason I came here was that I could sort of mix both worlds,
 and have a Mediterranean climate with a standard of living
 that I couldn't possibly maintain in Italy, since...
 Well, I don't speak Italian, I could learn, but...
 It wouldn't be the sort of place I could flourish economically without depending on outside things.
 No, we thought about moving back to Italy, but we went almost every year.
 And then the way that we lived here was very, very good,
 because it was very free on top of a hill, where there are deers and all kind of natural life.
 And yet, if you wanted to go to university or to go to New York, it's so simple and so easy.
 It's a very convenient place to live, from any point of view.
 Well, again, you know, those Europeans don't pay for lectures.
 Yes, again, yes, oh yes, surely.
 The economy of an author.
 Now, it's a very curious thing about Aldous Huxley, because when I first knew him,
 he couldn't lecture for love or money.
 He used to put his nose in a manuscript and mumble.
 Goodness, I never seen him do that.
 But this is something you must be responsible for,
 because after he married you, he turned into a fantastic lecturer.
 Fantastic lecturer, but I don't know that I was connected in any way with that,
 but he was a fantastic lecturer.
 But it's incredible, because what happened was that
 right when I first was out in California, let's see, this was in 1951,
 at that time, Felix Green arranged for him to give a lecture at a high school auditorium in Palo Alto.
 And he was still in the mumbling stage.
 Then after Maria's death, he married you.
 I went down to Santa Barbara and there was a concert being given
 in which Stravinsky was interested of...
 - Gesualdo. - Gesualdo's madrigals.
 And in the intermission, he gave an extremely amusing talk.
 Yes, and he loved it.
 I mean, he really enjoyed doing that.
 Well, now, what had happened was that always he had been a fantastic conversationalist.
 Yes.
 Even though he was apt to sort of take over the conversation,
 nevertheless, he was invariably fascinating.
 And he used to fill his conversation with the most amazing anecdotes.
 He was particularly fond of kind of horrendous happenings and details.
 You remember that time we were talking about when we had lunch at the Tokyo sukiyaki restaurant?
 There were four of us sitting at the table and all the neighboring tables stopped talking.
 Stopped talking, because it's...
 And they listened in because he was talking about subliminal advertising.
 Yes, oh, yes.
 Oh, that really impressed him.
 How you could look at President Eisenhower, but it really was Marilyn Monroe.
 - Yes, yes, exactly. - Everybody would vote for...
 - So you associated the beautiful girl... - ...for General Eisenhower.
 ...with General Eisenhower or with somebody's toothpaste.
 And he was going on and enlarging on the horrendous possibilities of this.
 And I remember once the conversation going on at great length about
 the appalling nature of fashion in medicine.
 Oh, yes.
 So that you would never really know at the present time
 whether it was as ephemeral as an operation he once described
 where they removed the long intestine.
 The long intestine, yes.
 And he said it completely disappeared, that nobody ever had such an operation.
 You see, the only trouble about it was people used to have to go to the bathroom like birds.
 - Every 20 minutes. - Every 20 minutes.
 But then you see, he started to get the idea of lecturing
 in just exactly the same tone of voice and spirit as he carried on ordinary conversation.
 It was absolutely like a conversation.
 - I never saw it that way. - And suddenly he got released from the manuscript.
 Yes, and well, he said to me, he said, "Well, I just decided that
 what I was saying was really not so important after all, you know.
 The world was not going to be changed by my lecturing."
 And so it was, I mean, I've been with him, you know, before the lecture.
 And usually before someone goes on the stage,
 there is all kind of little ritual and things.
 He never had anything like that.
 No, all that's a nuisance.
 - Yes, all that's a nuisance. - Yes, yes.
 He just would be at dinner with other people and then walk out on the stage.
 Yes.
 He would go sometimes and mumble and somebody say, "May I go to the men's room before you?"
 That was all that he asked.
 No, well, it was a very strange transformation,
 especially for somebody at that time of life.
 Yes, but he was changing all the time.
 I mean, after the fire, you know, we went to live with this friend of ours.
 When the house was burned down.
 Yes, we went to live with this friend of ours who had two children,
 and two little children, and it's a completely different ambience,
 you know, when there are two children.
 He never seemed to mind or to make an effort or to exercise patience.
 And one does need patience, you know, for children.
 But it was a natural thing for him, I guess,
 or maybe a training thing to take things as they came.
 Mm-hmm.
 Moment by moment without sort of referring to old experiences.
 I think that he had probably more than anyone else this paradox, you see,
 where he had this terrific amount of information, informational memory.
 And then it was freedom of emotional conditioning from the past.
 How so?
 Well, because the emotion of the past did not interfere with his presence.
 In other words, he was present.
 He responded to the present with new reaction.
 I mean, he reacted to the present with fresh reaction
 and not with a conditioned reaction from the past.
 Do you think he was in some respect helped by that, by the fire?
 After all, all his past, all the records of his past, practically, were wiped out.
 Yes, everything, yes.
 No, I don't think that the fire did that for him.
 I think more his meditation and his work with psychedelic
 and his constant vigilance in that sense.
 He was really very, very aware that that should be stopped, you know,
 that one should stop this reacting to the present in terms of the past.
 Yes.
 That was very much in his consciousness all the time.
 Well, of course, that's central to Krishnamurti's whole presentation.
 Yes.
 But that fire, I had a friend who underwent the same sort of experience
 where she had luckily built herself a new, smaller house.
 And just after she'd moved into it, she'd kept a lot of records in the old house
 and it was burned down.
 And there were all these souvenirs and letters and photographs and paintings and books
 which are suddenly wiped out.
 And they're ordinarily things you cling on to
 and you feel you really can't do without that.
 And then suddenly it all goes.
 Oh, yes.
 We had really several thongs on this thing.
 And so we went.
 But he did rescue, didn't he, the manuscript of "Island"?
 Yes, he rescued "Island" and three best suits, the suits that we had made in Italy.
 And three suits?
 Yes.
 He said, "Don't you think we should take some suits?"
 I was in a completely useless state because the fire had so fascinated me
 that I was just looking at the fire all the time and I would not even have thought of that.
 And all of a sudden I said, "Oh, I must take 'Island.'"
 So he went upstairs and took "Island" and then he said, "Shouldn't we take some suits?"
 So I said, "Yes, let's take some suits."
 But did he sort of risk his life doing this?
 No, no, no.
 Because our house was not in fire yet, but all around.
 Oh, I see.
 The fire was approaching at the time.
 Yes, it would approach.
 Oh, yes, I saw it approach.
 I saw it approach from the garden.
 In fact, the walls were illuminated so beautifully, you have no idea.
 It was just the right illumination.
 But I was looking so much that I would not even take in the suit, you see.
 Well, that's certainly not reacting to the present in terms of the past.
 No, that's right.
 We want the past.
 I was just not reacting at all.
 It was just so beautiful, you know.
 Yes, it's so fascinating how in moments of crisis
 we do tend to become much saner than we are normally.
 Well, maybe that was saying, I don't know.
 I mean, people accomplish the most.
 We can become geniuses in crisis.
 Yes, but I didn't accomplish anything, you see.
 I just looked.
 Oh, well, I know, but you were contemplative instead of active.
 Yes, exactly the contrary of my nature.
 Absolutely the contrary.
 I'm very active.
 And there it was, this fire all around.
 But who said that the fire...
 I remember Aldo saying in his lecture on visionary experience that...
 Is it Plotinus that says the fire is the most beautiful thing in the world?
 Yes.
 In connection with precious jewel, you know, which contains the fire.
 Christians still worship fire because for many people the most important time in a church service
 is watching the final extinction of the candles after the service is over.
 And they'll all wait on their knees until that's been done.
 Yes, it's like seeing the sun going down at the moment.
 Yes, watching the sunset.
 Are there any materials of Aldo's left over which will yet see the light of publication?
 Well, the letters.
 Oh, that is going to be a marvelous volume.
 Yes, it's coming out next year.
 It's coming out next year and there are letters since the age of 14 to the last days, you see.
 And there are really...
 It's a marvelous biography there.
 You see all the passage in this man's life.
 So he wrote a great deal of letters.
 Was this true all through his life?
 Was it true after you got married?
 Oh, yes.
 He wrote...
 He answered mail once a week and he wrote an enormous amount of letters.
 He's doing his letters.
 He's writing letters and I always use the telephone.


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