I wonder what you mean when you use the word "I".
 I've been very interested in this problem for a long, long time, and I've come to the
 conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination.
 That is to say, a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with
 the facts of nature.
 And as a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate
 to our natural environment, and when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by
 a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between
 man and nature.
 As is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result
 of an attempt to conquer it and master it.
 And we have not realized, therefore, that our environment is not something other than
 ourselves.
 In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.
 But most people would agree with the lines of the poet who said, "I, a stranger and afraid,
 in a world I never made."
 Because we have the strong sensation that our own being inside our skin is extremely
 different from the world outside our skin.
 That while there may be intelligence inside human skins, and while there may be values
 and loving feelings, outside the skin is a world of mechanical process which does not
 give a damn about any individual and which is basically unintelligent, being gyrations
 of blind force and, so far as the merely biological world is concerned, gyrations of libido, which
 is Freud's word for blind lust.
 It should be obvious that the human being goes with the rest of the universe, even though
 we say in popular speech, "I came into this world."
 Now it is not true that you came into this world.
 You came out of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out
 of a tree.
 And as an apple tree apples, the solar system in which we live and therefore the galaxy
 in which we live and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live, that system
 peoples.
 And therefore people are an expression of its energy and of its nature.
 If people are intelligent, and I suppose we have to grant that "if," then the energy which
 people express must also be intelligent, because one does not gather figs from thistles and
 grapes from thorns.
 But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilised person to regard himself or herself
 as an expression of the whole universe.
 It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water
 and solar temperature, that all these things go with us and are as important to us, albeit
 outside our skins, as our internal organs, heart, stomach, brain and so forth.
 Now if then we cannot describe the behaviour of organisms without at the same time describing
 the behaviour of their environments, we should realise that we have a new entity of description,
 not the individual organism alone, but what would now be called a field of behaviour,
 which we must call rather clumsily the organism environment.
 You go with your environment in the same way as your head goes with the rest of your body.
 You do not find in nature faces arriving in the world sui generis.
 They go with a body.
 But also bodies do not arrive in a world which would be, for example, a plain ball of scrubbed
 rock floating without an atmosphere far away from a star.
 That will not grow bodies.
 There is no soil for bodies.
 There is no complexity of environment which is body producing.
 So bodies go with a very complicated natural environment.
 And if the head goes with the body and the body goes with the environment, the body is
 as much an integral part of the environment as the head is part of the body.
 It is deceptive, of course, because the human being is not rooted to the ground like a tree.
 A human being moves about and therefore can shift from one environment to another.
 But these shifts are superficial.
 The basic environment of the planet remains a constant.
 And if the human being leaves the planet, he has to take with him a canned version of
 the planetary environment.
 Now we are not really aware of this.
 Upon taking thought and due consideration, it does occur to us, yes, indeed, we do need
 that environment.
 But in the ordinary way, we don't feel it.
 That is to say, we don't have a vivid sensation of belonging to our environment in the same
 way that we have a vivid sensation of being an ego inside a bag of skin located mostly
 in the skull, about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes.
 And it issues in these disastrous results of the ego, which according to 19th century
 common sense feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature, it will
 not be able to maintain its status as intelligent fluke.
 So the geneticists are now saying, and many others are now saying, that man must take
 the course of his evolution into his own hands.
 He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, and unintelligible processes of nature to
 develop him any further.
 But he must interfere with his own intelligence and through genetic alterations breed the
 kind of people who will be viable for human society and that sort of thing.
 Now this, I submit, is a ghastly error because human intelligence has a very serious limitation.
 That limitation is that it is a scanning system of conscious attention which is linear.
 That is to say, it examines the world in lines, rather as you would pass the beam of a flashlight
 across a room or a spotlight.
 That's why our education takes so long.
 It takes so long because we have to scan miles of lines of print.
 And we regard that, you see, as basic information.
 Now the universe does not come at us in lines.
 It comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether
 everywhere at once.
 And it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or of other
 information however fast they may be scanned.
 And that is our limitation so far as the intellectual life and the scientific life is concerned.
 The computer will greatly speed up linear scanning, but it's still linear scanning.
 And so long as we are stuck with that form of wisdom, we cannot deal with more than a
 few variables at once.
 Now what do I mean by that?
 What is a variable?
 A variable is any one linear process.
 Let's take music.
 When you play a Bach fugue and there are four parts to it, you have four variables.
 You have four moving lines, and you can take care of that with two hands.
 An organist using two feet can put in two more variables and have six going.
 And you may realize if you've ever tried to play the organ that it's quite difficult to
 make six independent motions go at once.
 The average person cannot do that without training.
 The average person cannot deal with more than three variables at once without using a pencil.
 Now when we study physics, we are dealing with processes in which there are millions
 of variables.
 This however we handle by statistics in the same way as insurance companies use actuarial
 tables to predict when most people will die.
 If the average age of death is 65, however, this prediction does not apply to any given
 individual.
 Any given individual will live to plus or minus 65 years.
 And the range of difference may be very wide indeed, of course.
 But this is all right.
 The 65 guess is all right when you're doing large-scale gambling.
 And that's the way the physicist works in predicting the behavior of nuclear wavicles.
 But the practical problems of human life deal with variables in the hundreds of thousands.
 Near statistical methods are very poor.
 And thinking it out by linear consideration is impossible.
 With that equipment then we are proposing to interfere with our genes.
 And with that equipment also, be it said, we are trying to solve our political, economic
 and social problems.
 And naturally everybody has the sense of total frustration.
 And the individual feels, what on earth can I do?
 We do not seem to know a way of calling upon our brains.
 Because our brains can handle an enormous number of variables that are not accessible
 to the process of conscious attention.
 Your brain is now handling your total nervous system, to be more accurate, your blood chemistry,
 the secretions from your glands, the behavior of millions of cells.
 It is doing all that without thinking about it.
 That is to say, without translating the processes it is handling into consciously reviewed words,
 symbols or numbers.
 Now when I use the word thinking, I mean precisely that process.
 Translating what is going on in nature into words, symbols or numbers.
 Of course, both words and numbers are kinds of symbols.
 Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth.
 You cannot quench anybody's thirst with the word water, just as you cannot eat a dollar
 bill and derive nutrition from it.
 But using symbols and using conscious intelligence, scanning, has proved very useful to us.
 It has given us such technology as we have.
 But at the same time it has proved too much of a good thing.
 At the same time, we've become so fascinated with it that we confuse the world as it is
 with the world as it is thought about, talked about and figured about.
 That is to say, with the world as it is described.
 And the difference between these two is vast.
 And when we are not aware of ourselves, except in a symbolic way, we are not related to ourselves
 at all.
 We are like people eating menus instead of dinners.
 And that's why we all feel psychologically frustrated.
 So then we get back to the question of what do we mean by "I"?
 Well first of all, obviously, we mean our symbol of ourselves.
 Now ourselves, in this case, is the whole psychophysical organism, conscious and unconscious,
 plus its environment.
 That's your real self.
 Your real self, in other words, is the universe as centered on your organism.
 That's you.
 You say, let me just clarify that a little for one reason.
 What you do is also a doing of your environment.
 Your behavior is its behavior as much as its behavior is your behavior.
 It's mutual.
 We could say it is transactional.
 You are not a puppet which your environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet
 which you push around.
 They go together.
 They act together.
 In the same way, for example, if I have a wheel, one side of it going down is the same
 as the other side of it going up.
 When you handle the steering wheel of a car, are you pulling it or are you pushing it?
 No, you're doing both, aren't you?
 When you pull it down this side, you are pushing it up that side.
 It's all one.
 So there's a push-pull between organism and environment.
 We are only rarely aware of this, as when in curious alterations of consciousness, which
 we call mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, an individual gets the feeling that everything
 that is happening is his own doing, or the opposite of that feeling, that he isn't doing
 anything but that all his doings, his decisions and so forth, are happenings of nature.
 You can feel it either way.
 You can describe it in these two completely opposite ways, but you're talking about the
 same experience.
 You're talking about experiencing your own activity and the activity of nature as one
 single process.
 And you can describe it as if you were omnipotent like God, or as if it were completely deterministic
 and you hardly existed at all.
 But remember, both points of view are right, and we'll see where that gets us.
 But we don't feel that, do we, ordinarily?
 What we feel instead is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves, or
 I would rather say with our image of ourselves, and that's the person, or the ego.
 You play a role.
 You identify with that role.
 I play a role.
 It's called Alan Watts, and I know very well that that's a big act.
 I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts, if necessary, but I find this one is better
 for making a living.
 But I assure you, it's a mask, and I don't take it seriously.
 The idea of my being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the world just breaks me
 up, as I know me.
 So it's very difficult to be holy in the ordinary sense.
 So I know I'm not that, but most of us are taught to think that we are whom we are called.
 And when you're a little child and you begin to learn a role, and your parents and your
 peers approve of your being that, they know who you are.
 You're predictable, so you can be controlled.
 But when you act out of role and you imitate some other child's behavior, everybody points
 the finger and says, "You're not being true to yourself.
 Johnny, that's not you, that's Peter."
 And so you learn to stay Peter, or to stay Johnny.
 But of course, you're not either, because this is just the image of you.
 It's as much of you as you can get into your conscious attention, which is precious little.
 Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your nervous system.
 It contains no information about your blood chemistry.
 It contains almost no information about the subtle influences of society upon your behavior.
 It does not include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all taken for granted
 and unconscious.
 And you can't find them out unless you study other cultures to see how their basic assumptions
 differ.
 It includes all kinds of illusions that you're completely unaware of, as for example, that
 time is real, and that there is such a thing as a past, which is pure hokum.
 But nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us, and they are not included in our image
 of ourselves, nor, of course, included in our image of ourselves.
 Is there any information about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe?
 So this is a very impoverished image.
 When you ask a person, what did you do yesterday?
 They'll give you a historical account of a certain number of events in which they participated
 and a certain number of things which they saw, used, or were clobbered by.
 But realize at once that this history leaves out most of what happened.
 In trying to describe what happens to me this evening, we'll never be able to describe it,
 because there are so many people here that if I were to talk about everyone whom I've
 seen, what they were wearing, what color their hair was, what sort of expressions they had
 on their faces, I would have to talk till doomsday.
 So instead of this rich physical experience, which is very rich indeed, I have to attenuate
 it in memory and description to saying, oh, I met a lot of people in Philadelphia.
 And there were men and there were women, and lots of them were young and some of them were
 old.
 You know, it's a most utterly impoverished account of what went on.
 So therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did yesterday, what I did
 the day before, in terms of this stringy, mangy account, all I have is a caricature
 of myself.
 And you know the caricaturist doesn't draw you all in.
 He just puts certain salient features whereby people will recognize you.
 It's not a skeleton.
 So we are, as it were, conceiving ourselves as a bunch of skeletons.
 And they've got no flesh on them, just a bunch of bones.
 And no wonder we all feel inadequate.
 We're all looking for something to the future, to bring us the goody.
 We know we ought to have.
 There's a golden goody at the end of the line somewhere.
 There's a good time coming, be it ever so far away, that one far off divine event to
 which all creation moves, we hope.
 And therefore, we say of something that's no good, it has no future.
 I would say it has no present.
 But everybody says it has no future.
 Now, here we are, as it were, psychically starved, and always, therefore, looking for,
 looking, seeking, seeking, seeking.
 And this confused seeking is going on everywhere.
 We don't know what we want.
 Nobody knows what they want.
 We say, yes, we think of what we want in vague terms-- pleasure, money, wealth, love, fulfillment,
 personal development.
 But we don't know what we mean by all that.
 The person really sits down to figure out, write a long essay, 20 pages, on your idea
 of heaven.
 It'll be a sorry production.
 You can see it already in medieval art, whether it's depictions of heaven and hell.
 Hell is always much better than heaven.
 Although it's uncomfortable, it's a sadomasochistic orgy.
 Wowee, you know, hell is really rip-roaring, whereas all the saints in heaven are sitting--
 [LAUGHTER]
 --like they were in church.
 And you see also the multitudes of the saved.
 Instead of this writhing, wormy thing, you can see all their heads, which the artist
 has drawn to abbreviate them, just the tops of their heads in masses.
 They look like Cobblestone Street, flattened out.
 So what has happened then is this, that our I is an illusion.
 It's an image.
 And it is no more our self than an idol is the godhead.
 But we say, it can't be so, because I feel I really exist.
 It isn't just an idea in my head.
 It's a feeling.
 I feel me.
 Well what is it that you feel when you feel I?
 Bye.


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