The Book

is an audio renaissance presentation. 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 you, 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's 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 BC. Saying that this self in each one of you,

just in the same way, each one of those nerve ends is, as it were, a little eye, fundamentally one sense.

Now imagine then, every little nerve end is a little eye. Well, but it sends it all back into the central

brain. Well, in a somewhat similar way, every person, all sentient beings, may be looked upon.

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 A, B, C, 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 0 and 1, 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. 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 distance 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. Thereupon 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 thirty 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. And black, I'll say of someone, that he's an

awful liar, and I could prove the deal. Essentially enough, black is white, in a certain sense, and white

is black. If you take the populating word, is, cause black implies white, or positive implies negative,

and negative implies positive, not the other. It's only by contrast, and white are put together,

that we know black as black, and white as white. Now, when I look at a small white circle,

or disc on a black background, a small black disc on a white background, in my thought, which is

positive and which is negative, represent the negative, because it's dark. I think the black dot is the

thing there, so that must be positive. Negative role. Think of white as light. We are so hypnotized.

Nothing is something. It's important. The thing that we think of as the thing, that we think is bad,

bad, bad, and we're trying to get a world where that side of things, play black and white,

call white the light and the positive. White must win. Having helped white to win. Black loses,

white won't win. There are many ways in which the game of black and white is switched into the game of

white. White must win. And, like the battle for survival, they depend upon ignoring or screaming

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. Contrarywise, 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? 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 sin, 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 had 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.

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 nineteenth 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 mycoscopy

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.

functions underlying far eastern culture, and this is true west as India, in space and ended up as

a thing called the universe. It came right down near me and I put out a finger and I caught it. It

just like catching a daddy long legs, you know, for their struggles to get away. And this thing

behaved just like that. And I thought, well, it was just the wind doing that. It's only abuse the

wind. That is intelligence. A thistledown is a form of intelligence just as surely as the construction of a

house is the manifestation of intelligence. Please fast forward to the end and turn the tape over for proper

queuing of side two.