Alan Watts - World As Play (Partial)

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what's called the young yang. I think maybe I do know why. You would think it would be

a yin with two yins and one yang, but it counts as the young yang, and that's the bottom line

of the hexagram. And by being a young yang, it means it's a fixed line. It doesn't change.

That's the reason why that's called the young yang, is that when you've got two yins and

one yang, it means the yin is weakening and the yang is coming up. Because when you reach

a point at which the yin force comes to a maximum, there is in it the seed of the yang

force, and vice versa. And you see, you have to do this six times to get six lines. And

so this time we have two yangs and one yin, which gives us the young yin. And that again

is a line which doesn't change. And we get two yins and one yang, which gives us another

young yang, and has made the hexagram of water. No, fire. And this time we get three yin,

which gives us a changing yin line, which is written like this. That means that after

you consult the hexagram in its first form, you consult the hexagram which is, so far

as that line is concerned, the opposite. Again, two yins and one yang, giving us the young

yang. And we get here two yangs and one yin, which gives us the young yin.

And so we get fire over water.

Fire. No, water over fire. Water over fire. Cool it, baby. So that is fire over sway,

sway, sway. Here we are. Lee. Conner of the Lee, 63. Let's see, the oracle is often very

surprising. 63. GG, meaning after completion. This hexagram is the evolution of tai, or

the hexagram number 11, meaning peace. The transition from confusion to order is completed,

and everything is in its proper place, even in particulars. The strong lines are in the

strong places, the weak lines in the weak places. This is a very favorable outlook,

yet it gives reason for thought. For it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached,

that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder. The one strong line that has

moved to the top, thus effecting complete order in details, is followed by the other

lines, each moving according to its nature. And thus suddenly there arises again the hexagram

P, number 12, which is standstill. Let's see, we are going to move to 47. Now, here comes

the oracle itself. It says, "After completion," which is the name of the hexagram. "Success

in small matters, perseverance furthers, at the beginning good fortune, at the end disorder."

Then following the judgment comes another part of the oracle called the image. "Water

over fire." The image of the condition in after completion. Thus the superior man takes

thought of misfortune and arms himself against it in advance. And then there is a comment

on the lines. And we have an eight in the, no, a six in the fourth place. And the oracle

here says of this line, which is a moving one, "The finest clothes turn to rags. Be

careful all day long." Now, there are many comments on this, but we should look first

at the hexagram it turns into, which is number, what did I say, 43, I think I said. No, 47.

Well, the one it turns into indicates the direction of the motion of the, it turns into

kun, which means oppression or exhaustion, with the lake above and the water below. The

judgment is oppression, success, perseverance. The great man brings about good fortune, no

blame. When one has something to say it is not believed. The image, there is no water

in the lake. The image of exhaustion. Thus the superior man stakes his life on following

his will. There is a comment on this one. It says, "The lake is above, water below.

The lake is empty, dried up." In other words, the water flows out. "Exhaustion is expressed

in yet another way. At the top a dark line is holding down two light lines. Below, a

light line is hemmed in between two dark lines. The upper trigram belongs to the principle

of darkness, the lower to the principle of light. Thus everywhere superior men are oppressed

and held in restraint by inferior men."

Now the commentary on the judgment of the original hexagram reads, "The transition

from the old to the new time is already accomplished. In principle everything stands systematized,

and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved. In respect to this,

however, we must be careful to maintain the right attitude. Everything proceeds as if

of its own accord, and this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let things take their

own course without troubling over details. Such indifference is the root of all evil.

Symptoms of decay are bound to be the result. Here we have the rule indicating the usual

course of history, but this rule is not an inescapable law. He who understands it is

in position to avoid its effects by dint of unremitting perseverance and caution."

And then the image, which is water over fire. "When water in a kettle hangs over fire, the

two elements stand in relation and thus generate energy. But the resulting tension demands

caution. If the water boils over, the fire is extinguished and its energy is lost. If

the heat is too great, the water evaporates into the air. These elements here brought

into relation and thus generating energy are by nature hostile to each other. Only the

most extreme caution can prevent damage."

You've been listening to the late Alan Watts with Part 3 from a seminar entitled "World

as Play."

===== World As Play 4 Inc =====

Well now, I said that one of the aspects of cosmic gamesmanship that we were going to

deal with would be group theory. And of course I don't mean exactly by that a sort of mathematical

meaning. But the relationship that's tremendously important and that is not sufficiently recognized

between in groups and out groups. You know how you've heard about little birds where

they're cold and they're all huddling together, the idea being to see who can get most inside.

And human beings are just like that, and so also is everything else. Because this is an

absolutely basic requirement of having an identity. To have an identity is in some way

or other to be in. I often try the experiment in giving a lecture of drawing a circle on

the blackboard and asking the assembled multitudes what I have drawn. And people will almost

invariably say that I have drawn a circle, a ring, or a ball. Only very rarely does some

bright person suggest that I have drawn a wall with a hole in it. Because the Gestalt

theory of perception shows us that our attention is captured by enclosed areas as against open

areas and by moving objects rather than still. And so always therefore we tend to prefer

the in situation. That is something, you see. The star is an in situation with respect to

space. The space is the out situation. And so we feel that space is not important, it

is nothing, it is just unimportant in a way. But the in situation is something. So then

whenever human beings get into an out situation, like being a rejected minority, living on

the wrong side of the tracks, they will find reasons for convincing themselves that their

situation is the truly in one. And that the people who claim to be in are really out.

So as I have sometimes said before, I hope this doesn't bore too many of you, but in

Sausalito we have exactly that situation. We have the hillbillies, who are the old-time

people, who regard themselves as in, because they have the money and they live in the fancy

houses up on the hill. And then we have the waterfront people, whom they regard as out,

as a nefarious bunch of beatniks and bohemians and scallywags. And so the people at the hill

top fortify themselves at their cocktail parties with conversation about how awful the people

are down on the waterfront. And at the cocktail parties down on the waterfront, people fortify

themselves by discussing the squares on the hill. And we believe down here that we have

the true way of life, that we are not beating our heads out making money to buy pseudo-rocket

ships. Although I do own a pseudo-rocket ship, but it was wished on me. Because you see,

I try to be a bridge person. That's what's called a pontifex. One who, between opposed

classes, points out the connections. Because the connection is that neither class would

know who they were without the other. So it's tremendously necessary to have an outgroup

in order to know that you're an ingroup. In other words, if you belong to the church,

which is the assembly of the elect of God, or if you belong to the synagogue, which is

to be a member of the chosen people, an outsider, all those goys, then you know you're in. You

see? But you must have the outsiders to know that you're in. There must, in other words,

be beyond the pale of the village, the howling waste. And then you feel cozy, you feel protected,

you feel you're there. And so in that way, bodies have skins, eggs have shells, and so

on all through nature. Inside versus outside. But this versus must be understood as a form

of symbiosis. And this is the crucial matter. This is absolutely of critical importance

to anyone who wants to understand politics or military strategy or any of the real hard,

tough games of life. That social conflict or conflict between the various biological

species is a form of symbiosis. Now ordinarily we consider the symbiotic relationship to

be one of mutual support, as is obviously the case between bees and flowers. Which came

the first, bee or flower? This is the same question as which came the first, egg or hen.

Because where there are no flowers, there can't be bees. And where there are no bees

or other fertilizing insects, there cannot be flowers. So the truth of the matter is

that bees and flowers, different as they are in appearance, and separated as they may be

in space, they constitute a single organism. This is the real lesson of the bees and the

flowers. And the same must be said truly of man and woman. There are no men without women.

There are no women without men, because it always takes a man and a woman to produce

a human being. So we are a man-woman arrangement, a woman-man arrangement, whichever way you

want to look at it. And so although, you see, therefore, we move and look as if we are individuals

and separate from each other, this is not the case at all. So now this, what I want

to point out is that this same sort of relationship exists between groups that would seem to be

hostile to each other. Now what are some of the bases of hostility? The real basis of

hostility is that the biological order is a mutual eating society. It's a very curious

game indeed, and if you are philosophically inclined, it is one which might bother your

conscience. When you realize that you as an organism are a compound of murders, you are

actually a bag of water, because the human organism consists mostly of water. And this

water is held together and prevented from slobbering all over the floor by a very complex

arabesque of tubes and cells and films, the material of which was invariably belonging

to some other being before you got it. You had to kill a chicken, a cow, or a cabbage,

or an apple, in order to get that tensile film of tube or whatever to hold the water

in you and as you. And so we are as human beings a predatory creature. In fact we are

more predatory than anything else in nature. The sharks are supposed to be predatory, but

they stay in the ocean. The piranha fish are supposed to be very predatory, but they stay

in the Amazon. The eagles are predatory, but they stay in the air and on the land. Only

man ranges the whole range of elements, earth, air, and water, and preys on things, and he

eats like a swarm of locusts. Not only does he prey on the living beings, he preys on

the minerals. And someone recently described our civilization as a lot of people sitting

in the middle of a sewage dump shooting rockets at the moon. Because if you read, get Playboy

magazine for September, and read about the use of water, or rather the misuse of water,

in our civilization, and it is absolutely horrifying. We've got to get that atomic power

bringing us water from the ocean in nothing flat, or we're going to be very thirsty. And

you can see how we use water in the most amazingly uneconomical ways. So we are a predatory monster

eating up the planet. And I have seen, say, a sorrel plant in the country covered with

green flies. One day it is full of little green succulent bodies having a ball. A day

or two later, stalk with grey dust all over it. See, they've eaten up, they multiply to

the point of eating up the plant, and so they turn into grey dust. Human beings could do

just exactly the same thing. And the reason why human beings are in danger of this is

that they have refused membership in a mutual eating society. They want to be top and only

eater, and do not want to be eaten. So that instead nowadays of returning what you ate

to the earth, we return our remains to the earth in an unassimilable form. Our remains

include not only mummified formaldehyded bodies, courtesy of the morticians, encased in concrete

so that no worms even can get in, but also the fact that many things that we return to

the earth are no longer in the organic cycle. For example, rust does not assimilate properly.

All sorts of chemicals, all sorts of gases that we give off do not return into the organic

cycle. And we are ruining, we are actually abolishing animals. Wild animals have less

and less of a prospect of living. Wild birds are being greatly reduced in numbers. Whales

have almost, are ceasing to exist because the whaling industry is getting rid of them.

And what is more, some of the animals we farm, like chickens, are no longer chickens. They

are strictly non-chickens which lay pseudo-eggs because they are raised in enormous wire cell

blocks and fed on chemicals under the superstition that anything fed to a chicken will turn into

chicken. And it won't. That is why you may have noticed that the chickens you buy don't

taste like chickens could taste, especially those that have been allowed to run around

in the sunlight and scratch. Those can become real chickens. Because you see, the necessary

thing about any species that you live on is that you must love it. I love you so much

I could eat you. Or, I eat you so much I could love you. But where you get things raised

without love, you cannot love a whole cell block of chickens. You cannot love wheat when

it is grown in vast wastelands or out of any trees and it is sheared off the earth and

then winnowed and reduced to pancake make-up and then chemicals are added to it and it

is converted into this styrofoam material called bread. Now you know, like one converts

milk into casein, so one converts wheat or rye into a plastic material which is a kind

of universal solvent which is nothing at all and tastes of nothing at all. In fact, you

know when you feed babies that kind of nasty white pabulum and you feed it and they always

spit it back into the spoon, well our white bread reduces itself to that instantly on

the contact with liquid and becomes a miserable paste. It's not bread at all. So, if you are

unwilling, you see, to join the mutual eating society and you want to conquer everything

and not be eaten by anything, the penalty you pay for this is the annihilation of your

species and you eventually annihilate through eating things that taste like chalk and string.

That's what it will come to because you don't love what you eat. You have no respect for

the raw materials. So, what we haven't understood then is that all groups need an enemy group,

but that the enemy group which preys upon it is actually a kind of friend because the

enemy group prunes your own group. It keeps your population at a reasonable level and

it keeps you on your toes because you have to defend yourself against it so you don't

become flabby. But you see, we have lost the meaning of chivalry in all war situations

and all conflict situations. Chivalry is indicated, for example, still in such customs as that

the partners to a fight salute each other before beginning to fight and salute each

other again at the end. You shake hands before boxing. You do these various things. You bow

before a judo contest and so on. And that means that you recognize the opponent as an

honorable opponent, as somebody with whom a fight is a really important matter. And

that is really one of the most essential laws of survival. To recognize that enemies, unless

they are predatory locusts who have no respect, who do not in other words farm the species

that they prey upon. That's the essence of the thing. You must cherish the species you

prey upon. You must see, like for example in lumbering, you must re-sow. You must plant

a tree for every tree you take. That is cherishing the species. And if you farm cows, you don't

treat your cows, you often treat them better than you would your servants. Because the

servants can go hang, but the cows are valuable. And so you nurture them because they're going

to sell as beef and they're going to provide milk or whatever it is. So the perception

of the fact that it is absolutely necessary to have an outgroup for your having an ingroup,

and that you cannot do without it, is the beginning of sociability. And so what you

get then in that case is a situation of contained conflict. A conflict gets out of hand when

an ingroup does not realize that it needs the outgroup. Then it says, "Let's get rid

of the outgroup. Get the dirty communists off the face of the earth." But do you realize

what a fix we'd be in without communists? The whole economy would fall apart, because

there would be no external threat. And the communists are in exactly the same situation.

Their kind of politics would fall apart unless there were some wretched capitalistic imperialists

with whom they could contrast themselves and against whom they could organize their energies.

Because it is a curious thing.