The trouble is that we have one-sided minds and we notice the wave of life when it is
 at its peak or crest.
 We don't notice it when it's at the trough, not in the ordinary way.
 It's the peaks that count.
 Take a buzz saw.
 What seems important to us is the tips of the teeth.
 They seem to do the cutting, not the valleys between the teeth.
 But do you see, you couldn't have tips of teeth without valleys between them.
 Therefore the saw wouldn't cut without both tips and V-shaped valleys.
 But we ignore that.
 We don't notice the valleys so much as we notice the mountains.
 Valleys point down, mountains point up, and we prefer things that point up because up
 is good and down is bad.
 But seriously, we don't praise the peaks for being high and blame the valleys for being
 low.
 But it is so, you see, that we ignore the valley aspect of things.
 And so all wisdom begins by emphasizing the valley aspect as distinct from the peak aspect.
 We pay plenty of attention to the peak aspect.
 That's what captures our attention.
 But we somehow screen out the valley aspect.
 But that makes us very uncomfortable.
 It seems that we want and get pleasure from looking at the peaks, but actually this denies
 our pleasure because secretly we know that every peak is followed by a valley, the valley
 of the shadow of death.
 And we are always afraid because we are not used to looking at valleys, because we are
 not used to living with them, they represent to us a strange and threatening unknown.
 Maybe we are afraid the principle of the valley will conquer and the peaks will be overwhelmed.
 Maybe death is stronger than life because life always seems to require an effort.
 Death is something into which you slide effortlessly.
 Maybe nothing will overcome something in the end.
 Wouldn't that be awful?
 And so we resist change, ignorant of the fact that change is life and that nothing is life.
 Nothing is invariably the obverse face of something.
 Most people are afraid of space.
 They ignore it and they think space is nothing.
 Space and solid are two ways of talking about the same thing.
 Space solid.
 You don't find space without solid, you don't find solids without space.
 If I say there's a universe in which there isn't anything but space, you must say space
 between what?
 Space is relationship.
 And it always goes together with solid, like that goes with front.
 But the divisive mind ignores space and it thinks that it's the solids that do the whole
 job, that they're the only thing that's real.
 That is to put it in other words, conscious attention ignores intervals because it thinks
 they're unimportant.
 Consider music.
 When you hear music, what you really hear when you hear melody is the interval between
 one tone and another.
 The steps as it were on the scale.
 It's the interval that is the important thing.
 So in the same way, in the intervals between this year's leaves, last year's leaves, this
 generation of people and that generation, the interval is in some ways just as important,
 some ways more important than what it's between.
 Actually they go together.
 But I say the interval is sometimes more important because we under-emphasize it, so I'm going
 to over-emphasize it as a correction.
 So space, night, death, darkness, not being there is an essential component of being there.
 You don't have the one without the other, just as your buzzsaw has no teeth without
 having valleys between the tips of them.
 That's the way being is made up.
 This concludes Session 11 of Out of Your Mind, essential listening from the Alan Watts
 Audio Archives.
 Our program continues with Session 12.
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