[Music] The following is an Audio Renaissance presentation. [Music] Hello, I'm Bill Hartley, President of Audio Renaissance, and I'm very pleased to present to you our adaptation of "The Book" by Alan Watts. It's a brilliant synthesis of the teaching of this beloved 20th century philosopher. And at different points throughout the tape, you'll actually get a chance to hear the voice of the late Alan Watts himself, recorded live on location during lectures and seminars. And now, "The Book," read by Ralph Blum. Inside information. Just what should a young man or woman know in order to be "in the know"? Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo, some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers either don't know or won't tell? In Japan, it was once customary to give young people about to be married a "pillow book." This was a small volume of woodblock prints, often colored, showing all the details of sexual intercourse. It wasn't just that, as the Chinese say, "one picture is worth ten thousand words." It was also that it spared parents the embarrassment of explaining these intimate matters face to face. But today, in the West, you can get such information at any newsstand. Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults. But if sex is no longer the big taboo, what is? For there is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos like the skins of an onion. What, then, would be the book which fathers might slip to their sons and mothers to their daughters without ever admitting it openly? Surely the book I have in mind wouldn't be the Bible, the Good Book, that fascinating anthology of ancient wisdom, history, and fable. It's been treated as a sacred cow for so long that it might well be locked up for a century or two so that people could hear it again with clean ears. The book I am thinking about would not be religious in the usual sense, but it would have to discuss many things with which religions have been concerned. The universe and our place in it, the mysterious center of experience which I call I myself, the problems of life and love, pain and death, and the whole question of whether existence has meaning in any sense. It might seem, then, that our need is for some genius to invent a new religion, a philosophy of life and a view of the world that is plausible and generally acceptable for the late 20th century, and through which all people can feel that the world as a whole, and their own lives in particular, have meaning. But this, as history has shown repeatedly, is not enough. Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. We do not need a new religion or a new Bible. We need a new experience, a new feeling of what it is to be I. The lowdown on life, which is of course the secret and profound view, is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or at best a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing, with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent and isolated ego. The sensation of I as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and so commonsensical and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth, that is, through special metaphors, analogies and images, which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds. Where did the world come from? Why did God make the world? Where was I before I was born? Where do people go when they die? Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this. There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place where a circle begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time. It goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so too there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, winter and summer. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side by side with white, or white unless side by side with black. In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't. For if the world went on and on without rest forever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. So it comes and it goes. Now you see it, now you don't. Because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath. It goes in and out. And if you try to hold it in all the time, you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide and seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place. God also likes to play hide and seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one to play with but himself. He gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. That is his way of hiding from himself. God pretends that he is you and I, and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way, he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up, they will disappear. Now, when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it, just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single self, the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins, and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape, because there isn't any outside to him. The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as he and not she, God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say it, because we usually say it for things that aren't alive. God is the self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that without a mirror you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your own head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God in hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people or pretends to be people who suffer from great disease and pain. Remember first that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy, there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game, we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world. But the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again. And so it goes with the world. This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that worn-out word "God" for the player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. Any student of religions will know that this story comes from ancient India and is the mythical way of explaining the Vedanta philosophy. Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back at least to 800 B.C. It's saying that the self in each one of you is really at root one. Just in the same way that you have all over your body millions of nerve ends, each one of those nerve ends is, as it were, a little eye, because all the senses are fundamentally one sense. Now imagine then every little nerve end is a little eye, and it gets its impression of the world, and it sends it all back into the central brain. Well, in a somewhat similar way, every person, every animal, every what the Hindus call "sentient being," all those forms that we see may be looked upon as the eyes that look out of one's central self. But going yet deeper, we find that it's somehow a necessity of thought that there be some sort of a something, which is the common ground of all these universes, all these galaxies, and that ground is the self, as Hindus understand it, the Atman. Now that's quite a startling point of view, because what it's saying is, you see, that you are basically the works. But the self of the world, as taught in Vedanta, must not be confused with our usual ideas of selfishness or the practice of unselfishness, the effort to identify with others and their needs. Such unselfishness is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group, which plays the game of "We're more tolerant than you." If, then, I am not saying that you ought to awaken from the ego illusion and help save the world from disaster, why the book? Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply, that it is a part of things taking their course that I write. As a human being, it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this the same way that some birds are eagles and some are doves, some flowers lilies and some are roses. I realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard. The Game of Black and White When we were taught 1, 2, 3, and ABC, few of us were ever told about the game of black and white. It is quite simple, but belongs to the hushed-up side of things. Consider first that all your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense, something like touch, but the complex patterns and chains of neurons which constitute these senses are composed of neuron units which are capable of changing between just two states, on or off. To the central brain, the individual neuron signals either yes or no. That's all. But as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are zero and one, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvelous patterns. In this respect, our nervous system and the computers are much like everything else. For the physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough. We never find a particle without an interval or space between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half-wave or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down. [Music] Hearing melody is hearing the intervals between the tones even though you may not realize it, and even though these particular intervals are not periods of silence but steps of varying length between points on the musical scale. These steps or intervals are auditory spaces as opposed to distant spaces between bodies or time spaces between events. Yet the general habit of conscious attention is in various ways to ignore intervals. The point is that they are different but inseparable like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart and the cat dies. Take away the crest of the wave and there is no trough. A similar solution applies to the ancient problem of cause and effect. We believe that everything and every event must have a cause that is, some other thing or event and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects. So how does a cause lead to an effect? This is a problem which comes from asking the wrong question. Now imagine someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence when a cat walks by on the other side. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk and then the tail. Extraordinary. The cat turns around and walks back and again he sees the head and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable yet again the cat turns around and he witnesses the same regular sequence first the head and later the tail. Later on he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that the head and tail go together. They are all one cat. The cat wasn't born as a head which sometime later caused a tail. It was born all of a piece. A head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit and couldn't see the whole cat at once. Similarly, a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits and these he calls separate things or events. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes and effects. We do not see that the world is all of a piece like the head-tailed cat. We also speak of attention as noticing. To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception or some features of the world as more noteworthy, more significant than others. To these we attend and the rest we ignore. For which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance. That is, ignorance. Despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice. Physically we see, hear, smell, taste and touch innumerable features that we never notice. You can drive 30 miles talking all the time to a friend. What you noticed and remembered was the conversation but somehow you responded to the road, the other cars, the traffic lights and heaven knows what else without really noticing or focusing your mental spotlight upon them. Of course to perceive all features and vibrations of the world at once would be pandemonium as when someone slams down all the keys of the piano at the same time. But there are two ignored factors which can very well come into our awareness and our ignorance of them is the mainstay of the ego illusion. The reasons for our failure to know that we are each the one self in disguise. The first is not realizing that so-called opposites such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and off, inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect are poles or aspects of the same thing. The second, closely related, is that we are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of perception is the real way of seeing the world that we are fully hypnotized by its disjointed view of the universe. In other words, we do not play the game of black and white, the universal game of up-down, on-off, solid-space and each-all. Instead, we play the game of black versus white, or more usually, white versus black. [Music] Now, obviously white and black are as different as different can be. When we say of someone that he's an awful liar and a conman, we say why he could prove a view that black was white. But strangely enough, black is white in a certain sense, and white is black. If you take the copulating word "is" to mean "implies". Because black implies white, and white implies black. Or positive implies negative, and negative implies positive. Because you can't have the one without the other. It's only by contrast, when black and white are put together, that we know black as black and white as white. However, now, when I look at a small white circle, or disc on a black background, or a small black disc on a white background, I once get this in my thought, which is positive and which is negative? Does black represent the negative because it's dark? Like night. But when I look at the black dot on the white background, I think the black dot is the thing there, so that must be positive. It was put on. And therefore the white represents negative because it suggests nothing. No mark. Isn't this mysterious, you see, that both white and black can play the negative role? But then let's think of white as light, and it's playing the positive role. And when we think of black as the thing, the mark, then it's playing the positive role. See? Both can play the negative and both can play the positive. But still, you can't have one without the other. But we are brought up, we are so brainwashed, we are so bamboozled, we are so hypnotized, that we don't know that. That's the whole trick that we play on ourselves. We don't know that nothing is something. But it's important. So everything that we think of as nothing, space, empty space, death, sleep, dissolution, decay, any sort of weakness, anything that goes against structure, that is against the thing, that we think is bad, bad, bad. And we're trying to get a world where that side of things is rendered infinite. Nothingness must no longer constitute a threat to somethingness. In other words, we want to play black and white, and we'll call white the light and the positive. White must win. That's the game we're trying to play. Not realizing that there cannot be winning without losing. If white must win, black must lose. But if black loses, we can congratulate black for having helped white to win. Because unless black loses, white won't win. And so, in every sort of human enterprise, we are trying to help white without black. There are many ways in which the game of black and white is switched into the game of white must win. And, like the battle for survival, they depend upon ignoring or screening out of consciousness the interdependence of the two sides. In a curious way, this is, of course, part of the game of black and white itself. Because forgetting or ignoring their interdependence is hide in the game of hide and seek. And hide and seek is, in turn, the game of black and white. By way of illustration, we can take an excursion into an aspect of science fiction, which is very rapidly becoming science fact. Applied science may be considered as the game of order versus chance, or order versus randomness, especially in the domain of cybernetics, the science of automatic control. By means of scientific prediction and its technical applications, we are trying to gain maximum control over our surroundings and ourselves. The trend of all this is toward the end of individual privacy, to an extent where it may even be impossible to conceal one's thoughts. At the end of the line, no one is left with a mind of his own. There is just a vast and complex community mind, endowed, perhaps, with such fantastic powers of control and prediction that it will already know its own future for years and years to come. But suppose the human race develops an electronic nervous system outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body. This is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. The science fiction in which we have just been indulging has, then, two important morals. The first is that if the game of order versus chance is to continue as a game, order must not win. As prediction and control increase, so in proportion the game ceases to be worth the candle. We look for a new game with an uncertain result. In other words, we have to hide again, perhaps in a new way, and then seek in new ways, since the two together make up the dance and wonder of existence. Contrary-wise, chance must not win, and probably cannot, because the order-chance polarity appears to be of the same kind as the on-off and up-down. Taking, therefore, a longer and wider view of things, the entire project of conquering nature appears more and more of a mirage, an increase in the pace of living without fundamental change of position. Thus, for thousands of years, human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white. Nothing, perhaps, ever got nowhere with so much fascinating ado. As when Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle, the essential trick of the game of black and white is a most tacit conspiracy for the partners to conceal their unity and to look as different as possible. If, then, there is this basic unity between self and other, individual and universe, how have our minds become so narrow that we don't know it? [Music] How to be a genuine fake The cat has already been let out of the bag. The inside information is that yourself as "just a little me" who came into this world and lives temporarily in a bag of skin is a hoax and a fake. The fact is that because no one thing or feature of this universe is separable from the whole, the only real you or self is the whole. The rest of the book will attempt to make this so clear that you will not only understand the words but feel the fact. The first step is to understand as vividly as possible how the hoax begins. We must first look at the form and behavior of the hoax itself. I have long been interested in trying to find out how people experience their own existence. For what specific sensations do they use the word "I"? Few people seem to use the word for their whole physical organism. "I have a body" is more common than "I am a body". "I" usually refers to a center in the body, but different peoples feel it in different places. For some cultures it is in the region of their solar plexus. The Chinese "xin", the heart, mind or soul, is found in the center of the chest. But most Westerners locate the ego in the head, from which center the rest of us dangles. The ego is somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears. It is as if there sat beneath the dome of the skull a controlling officer who wears earphones wired to the ears and watches a television screen wired to the eyes. Before him stands a great panel of dials and switches connected with all other parts of the body that yield conscious information or respond to the officer's will. Wherever people may feel that the ego is located, and however much or little of the physical body is identified with it, almost all agree that "I" am not anything outside my skin. The skin is always considered as a wall, barrier or boundary which definitely separates oneself from the world, despite the fact that it is covered with pores breathing air and with nerve ends relaying information. This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking, in the images, models, myths and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. It is then as if the human race has hypnotized or talked itself into the hoax of egocentricity. Millennia ago, some genius discovered that wiggly things such as fish and rabbits could be caught in nets. Much later, some other genius thought of catching the world in a net. But now, if you look at this world wiggle through a net, you see that the net has cut the big wiggle into little wiggles, all contained in squares of the same size. Order has been imposed on chaos. We can now say that the wiggle goes so many squares to the left, so many to the right, so many up or so many down, and at least we have its number. Centuries later, the same image of the net was imposed upon the world for other purposes, as the lines of both celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, as graph paper for plotting mathematical wiggles, as pigeonholes for filing, and as the ground plan for cities. The net has thus become one of the presiding images of human thought. But it is always an image, and just as no one can use the equator to tie up a package, the real wiggly world slips like water through our imaginary nets. However much we divide, count, sort, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is only a way of thinking about the world. Our world is never actually divided. [Music] Another powerful image is the ceramic model of the universe, a model in which we think of it as so many forms of substances, just as pots are forms of clay, and as God is said to have created Adam from the dust. This has been an especially troublesome image, bewildering philosophers and scientists for centuries, with such idiotic questions as, "How does form, or energy, influence matter?" "What is matter?" "What happens to form, the soul, when it leaves matter, the body?" "How is it that mere matter has come to be arranged in orderly forms?" "What is the relationship between mind and body?" Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together. So with form and matter. Because no one ever discovered a piece of formless matter, or an immaterial form, it should have been obvious that there was something wrong with the ceramic model. The world is no more formed out of matter than trees are made of wood. The world is neither form nor matter, for these are two clumsy terms for the same process, known vaguely as "the world," or "existence." Yet, the illusion that every form is made of some kind of basic stuff is deeply embedded in our common sense. There is nothing in the words to suggest that the material or physical world is made of any kind of stuff according to the ceramic model, which must henceforth be called the "crackpot model." But the crackpot model of the world as formed of clay has troubled more than the philosophers and the scientists. It lies at the root of the two major myths which have dominated Western civilization, and these, one following upon the other, have played an essential part in forming the illusion of the real person. If the world is basically mere stuff, like clay, it is hard to imagine that such inert dough can move and form itself. Energy, form, and intelligence must therefore come into the world from outside. The lump must be leavened. The world is therefore conceived as an artifact. Someone must have made it, and someone must also have been responsible for the original stuff. That, too, must have been made. In Genesis, the primordial stuff without form and void is symbolized as water, and as water does not have waves without wind, nothing can happen until the Spirit of God moves upon its face. The forming and moving of matter is thus attributed to intelligent spirit, to a conscious force or energy in forming matter so that its various shapes come and go, live and die. Yet in the world as we now know it, many things are clearly wrong, and one hesitates to attribute these to the astonishing mind capable of making this world in the beginning. We are loath to believe that cruelty, pain, and malice come directly from the root and ground of being, and hope fervently that God, at least, is the perfection of all that we can imagine as wisdom and justice. We need not enter here into the fabulous and insoluble problem of evil which this model of the universe creates, save to note that it arises from the model itself. The peoples who developed this myth were ruled by patriarchs or kings, and such super kings as the Egyptian, Chaldean, and Persian monarchs suggested the image of God as the monarch of the universe, perfect in wisdom and justice, love and mercy, yet nevertheless stern and exacting. I am not, of course, speaking of God as conceived by the most subtle Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians, but of the popular image, for it is the vivid image, rather than the tenuous concept, which has the greater influence on common sense. The image of God as a personal being, somehow outside or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence, that the laws of nature are everywhere consistent, in that they proceed from one ruler, and that we could let our imaginations go to the limit in conceiving the sublime qualities of this supreme and perfect being. The image also gave everyone a sense of importance and meaning, for this God is directly aware of every tiniest fragment of dust and vibration of energy, since it is just his awareness of it that enables it to be. This awareness is also love, and, for angels and people at least, he has planned an everlasting life of the purest bliss, which is to begin at the end of mortal time. But of course there are strings attached to this reward, and those who purposely and relentlessly deny or disobey the divine will must spend eternity in agonies as intense as the bliss of good and faithful subjects. The problem of this image of God was that it became too much of a good thing. Children working at their desks in school are almost always put off when even a kindly and respected teacher watches over their shoulders. How much more disconcerting to realize that each single deed, thought and feeling is watched by the teacher of teachers, that nowhere on earth or in heaven is there any hiding place from the eye which sees all and judges all. To many people it was therefore an immense relief when Western thinkers began to question this image and to assert that this hypothesis of God was of no help in describing or predicting the course of nature. If everything, they said, was the creation and the operation of God, the statement had no more logic than "everything is up." But as so often happens when one tyrant is dethroned, a worse one takes his place. The crackpot myth was retained without the potter. The world was still understood as an artifact, but on the model of an automatic machine. The laws of nature were still there, but no lawmaker. According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms, like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time, in virtually infinite time, they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and the typewriters. In this fully automatic model of the universe, shape and stuff survived as energy and matter. Human beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus they were possessed of intelligence and feelings as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms. But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encyclopedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the merely random processes of nature. It must be strongly emphasized in this myth that matter is brute and energy blind, that all nature outside human and some animal skins is a profoundly stupid and insensitive mechanism. Those who continued to believe in "someone up there who cares" were ridiculed as bully-minded, wishful thinkers, poor weaklings unable to face our grim predicament in a heartless universe where survival is the sole privilege of the tough guys. If the all-too-intelligent God was disconcerting, relief in getting rid of him was short-lived. He was replaced by the cosmic idiot, and people began to feel more estranged from the universe than ever. This situation merely reinforced the illusion of the loneliness and separateness of the ego, now a mental mechanism, and people calling themselves naturalists began the biggest war on nature ever waged. In one form or another, the myth of the fully automatic model has become extremely plausible, and in some scientific and academic disciplines, it is as much a sacrosanct dogma as any theological doctrine of the past, despite contrary trends in physics and biology. For there are fashions in myth, and the world conquering west of the 19th century needed a philosophy of life in which real politic, victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts, was the guiding principle. Thus, the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the fully automatic model of the universe as bleak as possible. Nevertheless, it remains a myth, with all the positive and negative features of myth as an image used for making sense of the world. It is doubtful whether western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models. A made universe, whether of the crackpot or fully automatic design, is made of bits, and the bits are the basic realities of nature. Nature is therefore to be understood by microscopy and analysis, to find out what the bits are and how they are put together. But it is not enough to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out how they are made. This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is most difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. Eastern philosophy has understood this basic unity for thousands of years. The assumptions underlying Far Eastern culture, and this is true as far west as India also, is that the whole cosmos, the whole universe, is one being. It is not a collection of many different beings, who somehow floated together like a lot of flotsam and jetsam from the ends of space and ended up as a thing called the universe. They look at the world as one eternal activity, and that's the only real self that you have. I never forget once I was out in the countryside and a piece of thistle down, flew out of the blue, came right down near me and I put out a finger and I caught it by one of its little tendrils. And it behaved just like catching a daddy longlegs, you know, when you catch one by one leg it naturally struggles to get away. This thing behaved just like that, and I thought, well, it was just the wind doing that. And it only appears to look as if it was doing it. Then I thought again, wait a minute, it is the wind, yes, but it's also that this has the intelligence to grow itself so as to use the wind. You see that? That is intelligence. That little structure of thistle down is a form of intelligence just as surely as the construction of a house is a manifestation of intelligence. [Music] Please fast forward to the end and turn the tape over for proper cueing of side two. [Music] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.68 sec Decoding : 1.73 sec Transcribe: 3725.01 sec Total Time: 3727.42 sec