So, this is the first of a series of four weekends devoted to the subject of the future.
And each session is pretty much, each weekend is pretty much self-contained.
There's a certain continuity, but it's moving towards a center point from various different points on a circumference.
And in the first weekend, this weekend, we are considering the subject of time and the whole concept of the future.
And the point of departure that I would like to suggest to you is that time is a social institution and not a physical reality.
There is, in other words, no such thing as time in the natural world, the world of stars and waters and mountains and clouds and living organisms.
There is such a thing as rhythm, rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes.
But time as such is a social institution, in the same way that language is, that number is, that concepts are, and or measurements, inches, meters, lines of latitude and longitude.
All those things are social institutions or conventions, the word convention from the Latin convenere, to come together, to agree about something, to hold a convention.
And thus, of course, in its deteriorated sense, when we say of something, it's purely conventional.
That is to say, you needn't take it seriously.
Now, of course, are we going to take time seriously?
That is the big question.
And it depends what you mean.
If you don't understand that time is a convention, of course, you take it seriously.
And you are driven by time.
Time is money.
Time is of the essence.
And we do, don't we, live in a culture, or a complex of cultures in the Western world, where we are literally driven by time.
If you read a book like Jules Henry's marvelous work, Culture Against Man, he documents in the most extraordinary way to what an extent this particular culture is driven.
So that even the psychologists have altered the word, the old-fashioned word, instincts, and now they call them drives.
Because there's this feeling, you've got to make that deadline.
There's something there you've got to get to.
And people feel driven even when, supposing, that something's going to happen, you've got an appointment coming up.
And some people find that, in a strange way, unsettling.
They are so either eager to make this thing or so anxious about it, that in between time they can't do anything else.
They're incapacitated until it happens, until the blessed event or whatever it is occurs.
But in the natural physical world, there is rhythm and there is motion.
And time, then, obviously, is a way of measuring motion.
By comparing motion with some sort of constant.
Now, the constant in the question of time is a circle, marked out in 360 or 60 degrees.
And that is time.
We cause a hand, a pointer, to revolve around that circle at a regular speed.
And that gives us a constant with which we compare all kinds of motions and rhythms.
And so the clock is just like a ruler and is as abstract as a ruler.
And must be taken just for that.
Which means, in a way, not seriously, you see.
That doesn't mean, of course, that you say, well, from now on we're going to melt down all clocks.
And use them for something else.
Because conventions, social institutions, are very valuable.
Corresponding to the watch, there is the compass.
And that also is a circle.
Divided four ways, north, south, east, and west.
The Buddhists speak of ten directions.
Because they have not only the eight points of the compass, but they add to that above and below.
And in their mythology, they have guardian kings, whose duty it is to guard the ten directions.
And you see them at the entrances to temples and places like that.
All a fearsome aspect.
The cosmic traffic cops are that fierce and are that firm about it all.
Because it is, after all, important that I can meet you at four o'clock in the afternoon at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue.
Because if we couldn't make that sort of agreement, that sort of convention, we couldn't convene.
And insofar as it is important to us to meet, we require these sorts of compasses and timers in the vast emptiness of the cosmos.
But we must recognize that these things are, as it were, written across vast emptiness.
The ground of being, as Tillich calls God, has nothing in it where you can stand.
You can't catch hold of it.
You can't describe it.
But you can imagine all sorts of things in it.
Indeed, perhaps the whole physical universe is such an imagination.
But don't take it for being ultimately real.
There are, of course, sort of gradations of reality.
One could say the clock, the lines of latitude and longitude, are, and words and things like that, abstractions, have a rather flimsy kind of reality.
Next in order will come, of course, what we call ordinarily the physical world.
We say, well, that's material.
That matters.
And so it has a little harder kind of reality.
And most people stop there and they think there's nothing at a deeper level than that.
And that's simply because of the limitations of man's consciousness, of his conscious attention.
Conscious attention is so worked out that it tends to ignore all constants.
In other words, when you move from the Middle West and come and live in California, at first when you get here, you think, oh, this is a fantastic place.
See, it is so beautiful and so lush and so on, and you stay here after a while, and in a few years you start taking the place for granted.
Because it's a constant stimulation of consciousness.
Also, for example, when you're listening to recorded music, there is always a kind of electronic hum.
But we screen that out and ignore it, and so it becomes unconscious.
Well, so in a similar way, there is what you might call a continuum, a something or other, in which all physical phenomena exist.
And you ignore it, unless in some way or other, you can make it hum.
And so various practices, like performing yoga exercises, or Zen meditations, or certain kinds of chemicals, can cause your entire sensorium to hum.
And this draws your attention to the ground, the background, of everything that you're perceiving, which you ordinarily ignore.
I think there is going around an entirely new religion called hum.
And hum has no organization, no hierarchy, no doctrines, only music and ritual.
And just hum.
If anybody asks what's it all about, they say, well, come and see.
Come and hear, come and hum.
That would be kind of nice to have something like that.
I don't know whether it exists or not, but it ought to.
But at any rate, the continuum in which everything occurs is, of course, basically what you are.
Only because we get absorbed in details, we forget all about it.
And that what we call consciousness and unconsciousness, coming and going, life and death, are changing modalities within this, whatever it is we are.
And your identities come and go, your forms, your bodies, your this, your that, it's all oscillating, like everything oscillates.
It wouldn't hum if it didn't.
And so, though we are, each one of us, all this cosmos and all this universe, its ground, we don't know it.
Because we can't make it an item of knowledge, a particular, and we think the only kind of knowledge there is, is knowledge of particulars.
A logical positivist will argue this to the death.
And say, well, because your thing that is common to all makes no difference.
It's true, in a mathematical equation, you cancel out, as irrelevant, terms that are equivalent on both sides of the equation.
You remove them as redundant.
But, you know, these things aren't redundant.
Well, it is perfectly true that a statement about the ground of being is, from the standpoint of formal logic, quite meaningless.
It makes an enormous difference to the way a person actually feels and behaves, whether he's aware of the ground of being or not.
The ground of being isn't a logical proposition.
It enters into human life as an extremely vivid experience.
And the difference between a person who sees that and a person who doesn't is quite startling.
They behave differently.
It may not be the way you want them to behave, but it's sure different.
And so, it's like being in love.
It's quite unreasonable to be in love.
But when you're in love, you're entirely changed and you behave differently, even though you may be crazy.
So, certain crazy things like being in love or like being aware of the ground of being are immense factors in human life.
Even though, from the standpoint of academic philosophy, and the kind of a scientist, scientific, I won't say scientific, I want to say scientismic, kind of phony science, they shouldn't be matters of scholarly attention.
Nevertheless, they're tremendously important.
So, within this enormous, so-called void, call it void, not because it's nothing in the literal sense, but because you can't pin it down.
But you can experience it.
And when you do experience it, you wonder why the devil you didn't see it all along, because it was so obvious.
Nothing is more obvious than this.
So, within that void, you see, we set up these two great circles, the time circle and the space circle.
And we notch them all the way around, and we use these concepts, which are really in our heads, as constants by which we regulate all sorts of events.
Now then, when you lose sight of the conventionality of these things, because you are absorbed in details and have become unconscious of the totality, you begin to invest emotions in them.
You may, for example, go to a game of some kind, football, basketball, or to chess, you know, and you watch the game.
And you know it's only a game.
At least that was what you understood when you went in.
But as it progresses and you become more absorbed in the back and forth of the game, your emotions begin to be affected.
And you start cheering for one side, or getting, want to take the part of the underdog, or something of this kind.
And that's what happened to us when we were born.
We got into a gaming room.
And we, it was only a game, but we begin to take it all terribly seriously.
And each one of us is given a part in the game.
And people tell us who we are.
Well, from babyhood up, they say, this is the way you are.
It's not like you to do a thing like that, you see, as your mother says to you.
Because she establishes an identity for you.
And this identity is something you have to make, because you've got to amount to something.
You've got to be someone.
I mean, as if, of course, in the beginning, I suppose, really, we are nobody.
But that simply means nobody.
Time and the future.
His description of the seminar goes thusly.
In what sense is the future real?
And in what sense is time an abstract social convention like the equator?
Is there a way of measuring irreversible motion?
Or are our current notions of time obsolete?
And what a religious hope for the life of the world to come.
That's all four parts in a succinct paragraph.
And here comes Alan Watts with Time in the Future, Part 1.
So, this is the first of a series of four weekends devoted to the subject of the future.
And each session is pretty much, each weekend is pretty much self-contained.
There's a certain continuity, but it's moving towards a center point from various different points on a circumference.
And in the first weekend, this weekend, we are considering the subject of time and the whole concept of the future.
And the point of departure that I would like to suggest to you is that time is a social institution and not a physical reality.
There is, in other words, no such thing as time in the natural world, the world of stars and waters and mountains and clouds and living organisms.
There is such a thing as rhythm, rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes.
But time as such as a social institution, in the same way that language is, that number is, that concepts are, and or measurements, inches, meters, lines of latitude and longitude.
All those things are social institutions or conventions, the word convention, from the Latin convenire, to come together, to agree about something, to hold a convention.
And thus, of course, in its deteriorated sense, when we say of something, it's purely conventional.
That is to say, you needn't take it seriously.
Now, of course, are we going to take time seriously?
That is the big question.
And it depends what you mean.
If you don't understand that time is a convention, of course, you take it seriously.
And you are driven by time.
Time is money.
Time is of the essence.
And we do, don't we, live in a culture, or a complex of cultures in the Western world, where we are literally driven by time.
If you read a book like Jules Henry's marvelous work, Culture Against Man, he documents in the most extraordinary way to what an extent this particular culture is driven.
So that even the psychologists have altered the word, the old-fashioned word instincts, and now they call them drives.
Because there's this feeling, you've got to make that deadline.
There's something there you've got to get to.
And people feel driven even when, supposing, something's going to happen.
You've got an appointment coming up.
And some people find that, in a strange way unsettling, they are so either eager to make this thing, or so anxious about it, that in between time they can't do anything else.
They're incapacitated until it happens, until the blessed event, or whatever it is, occurs.
But in the natural physical world, there is rhythm and there is motion.
And time, then, obviously, is a way of measuring motion, by comparing motion with some sort of constant.
Now, the constant in the question of time is a circle, marked out in 360 or 60 degrees.
And that is time.
We cause a hand, a pointer, to revolve around that circle at a regular speed.
And that gives us a constant with which we compare all kinds of motions and rhythms.
And so, the clock is just like a ruler, and is as abstract as a ruler, and must be taken just for that.
Which means, in a way, not seriously, you see.
That doesn't mean, of course, that you say, well, from now on, we're going to melt down all clocks and use them for something else.
Because, conventions, social institutions, are very valuable.
Corresponding to the watch, there is the compass.
And that also is a circle.
Divided four ways, north, south, east, and west.
The Buddhists speak of ten directions, because they have not only the eight points of the compass, but they add to that above and below.
And in their mythology, they have guardian kings, whose duty it is to guard the ten directions.
And you see them at the entrances to temples and places like that.
All of fearsome aspect.
The cosmic traffic cops are that fierce and are that firm about it all.
Because it is, after all, important that I can meet you at four o'clock in the afternoon, at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue.
Because if we couldn't make that sort of agreement, that sort of convention, we couldn't convene.
And insofar as it is important to us to meet, we require these sorts of compasses and timers in the vast emptiness of the cosmos.
But we must recognize that these things are, as it were, written across vast emptiness.
The ground of being, as Tillich calls God, has nothing in it where you can stand.
You can't catch hold of it.
You can't describe it.
But you can imagine all sorts of things in it.
Indeed, perhaps the whole physical universe is such an imagination.
But don't take it for being ultimately real.
There are, of course, sort of gradations of reality.
One could say the clock, the lines of latitude and longitude, and words and things like that, abstractions, have a rather flimsy kind of reality.
Next in order will come, of course, what we call ordinarily the physical world.
We say, well, that's material.
That matters.
And so it has a little harder kind of reality.
And most people stop there and they think there's nothing at a deeper level than that.
And that's simply because of the limitations of man's consciousness, of his conscious attention.
Conscious attention is so worked out that it tends to ignore all constants.
In other words, when you move from the Middle West and come and live in California, at first when you get here, you think, oh, this is a fantastic place.
See?
It is so beautiful and so lush and so on.
And you stay here after a while.
And in a few years, you start taking the place for granted.
Because it's a constant stimulation of consciousness.
Also, for example, when you're listening to recorded music, there is always a kind of electronic hum.
But we screen that out and ignore it and so it becomes unconscious.
Well, so in a similar way, there is what you might call a continuum, a something or other, in which all physical phenomena exist.
And you ignore it, unless in some way or other, you can make it hum.
And so various practices like performing yoga exercises or Zen meditations or certain kinds of chemicals can cause your entire sensorium to hum.
And this draws your attention to the ground, the background of everything that you're perceiving, which you ordinarily ignore.
Now, I think there is going around an entirely new religion called hum.
And hum has no organization, no hierarchy, no doctrines, only music and ritual.
And just hum.
If anybody asks what's it all about, they say, well, come and see.
Come and hear.
Come and hum.
That would be kind of nice to have something like that.
I don't know whether it exists or not, but it ought to.
But at any rate, the continuum in which everything occurs is, of course, basically what you are.
Only because we get absorbed in details, we forget all about it.
Deep down, far, far within yourself, you know very well indeed that you are that.
And that what we call consciousness and unconsciousness, coming and going, life and death, are changing modalities within this whatever it is we are.
And your identities come and go, your forms, your bodies, your this, your that, it's all oscillating, like everything oscillates.
It wouldn't hum if it didn't.
And so though we are, each one of us, all this cosmos and all this universe, its ground, we don't know it.
Because we can't make it an item of knowledge, a particular.
And we think the only kind of knowledge there is, is knowledge of particulars.
A logical positivist will argue this to the death.
And say, well, because your, your thing that is common to all makes no difference.
It's true.
In a mathematical equation, you cancel out as irrelevant terms that are equivalent on both sides of the equation.
You remove them as redundant.
But you know, these things aren't redundant.
Well, it is perfectly true that a statement about the ground of being is from the standpoint of formal logic quite meaningless.
It makes an enormous difference to the way a person actually feels and behaves, whether he's aware of the ground of being or not.
The ground of being isn't a logical proposition.
It enters into human life as an extremely vivid experience.
And the difference between a person who sees that and a person who doesn't is quite startling.
They behave differently.
It may not be the way you want them to behave, but it's sure different.
And so it's like being in love.
It's quite unreasonable to be in love.
But when you're in love, you're entirely changed and you behave differently, even though you may be crazy.
So, certain crazy things like being in love or like being aware of the ground of being are immense factors in human life.
Even though from the standpoint of academic philosophy and the kind of a scientist, scientific, I won't say scientific, I want to say scientismic, kind of phony science.
Because they shouldn't be matters of scholarly attention.
Nevertheless, they're tremendously important.
So, within this enormous so-called volume,
and, but we are persuaded all along,
and,
all through life we begin to build up this precious identity which is our part in the game it's like
you're playing black i'm playing white or you you you're diamonds i'm clubs or whatever it is you
see and so we get a tremendous emotional investment in this identity and uh it's fortunes
on a kind of game you know like the old-fashioned snakes and ladders when you land on a certain
square and you have to go back and so on all this absorbs us and then finally we discover that the
props that we've all put together to constitute this identity wearing out and we're not able to keep
up this identity and gradually we get old and uh we begin to fail and then there's all this thought
that well it's too bad it's all over because we've got damn boozled into thinking that that what was
really going on so one of the greatest hoaxes in this whole thing is the future i don't know why
i should be giving a whole series of seminars on the future but it's important to understand thoroughly
the nature of hoaxes now when in talking in this sort of way don't take me too seriously
um i in all my writing and lecturing i exaggerate because if i don't exaggerate no one will listen
because all philosophers who take a moderate tone of voice and say on the one hand this and on the
other hand that and after all we should realize that all points of view should be taken into consideration
one reveres them for their calmness and their fair-mindedness but when you listen to it all how
they stimulated you have they given you a new idea no therefore to to teach in any way philosophy you
have to make outrageous statements but with the warning to your listeners that you're only doing
this for effect to get a point across to provoke thought because my position as a philosopher
is not a philosopher is experiential and not existential experiential that is to say the experience of the ground
and i will take any side weave all kinds of of patterns but the whole point of doing that
is by showing you how various opinions cancel each other out you can come to the no opinion to the ground
underneath and experience that which is as good if not better than falling in love
so but it's important then you see to understand that to some extent you see this is a hoax
that we believe that the future is what we are supposed what we're responsible for and what we're
supposed to live for and that we say of a thing which we don't think is any good it has no future
now when you contrast that which is absolute common sense to most people living in the western world
it's the future we've got to work for contrast that with the indian hindu buddhist idea of time
whereas wherein which they feel that in the course of time everything falls apart and that therefore
there is nothing to be hoped from hoped for from the future now they would say to us isn't that obvious
to you because after all don't you see that all organisms all entities whatsoever fall apart in the
end some go fast some go slow what do you mean the future uh individuals all fall apart eventually whole
species fall apart something else comes true but for each thing that you can consider as an entity as
an individual as a species its future is death
and then they say to us furthermore you think of time as a progress
a something like a stairway or an ascending ladder that goes on and on and up and up maybe it has
bumps in it where it occasionally goes down but it's like a graph you know of a successful business
corporation looks like this see that's how they want their graph to look the people who says this
you're absurd the very thing you use for telling time is round don't you see it just goes round
and so uh look at the stars isn't everything going round aren't the galaxies going round it is going
round and round it isn't going anywhere except round and we say to them oh you poor hindus
the trouble with you is that you don't have any technology you have a terrible economy most of you
are starving you think life is just terrible and therefore you have a pessimistic view of it well that
makes them laugh themselves silly they have a pessimistic view well the point is we're not
pessimistic because we know that the whole thing is a hoax we know who we really are and you poor
westerners you're bug-eyed you you rush around with long noses you have deep set eyes and you go poking
your noses into everything you send out missionaries because you are so uncertain of your own opinions that
you have to convert everyone else to agree with you and uh you're quite mad but you live for the future
and poor suckers all you do of course by living for the future is you create a great deal of trouble
because you think you're involved in a process called history now here comes another the very important
matter history i've had the most amusing discussions with orientals and they have really no sense of
history at all for them life goes around and uh one year is pretty much the same as the next year
there are rhythms of birth and death there are rhythms of rulers and revolutions and this and that but
they don't they don't regard it as as having some important progression in it they have chronicles
at least the chinese kept chronicles but keeping chronicles is like keeping a diary or a day book
it's a very different thing from writing history where you're trying to make out some sort of sense
in the course of events chroniclers just keep the records and the hindus didn't even bother to keep
chronicles properly so it's practically impossible to establish the date of a document from india
unless it was quite recent because every time they re-recited it or recopied it they'd update the names
because uh the king in it was an archetypal king and every king is an example of the archetypal king
about whom the story is told all these hindu scriptures are like our fairy tales once upon a time
who who knows when a million years ago 20 years ago it's all the same because the course of events
and the rhythm is cyclic so we on the other hand from saint augustine was the real troublemaker i don't
really i'm not absolutely sure that the hebrews had a linear theory of time it's questionable they
might have had one because they did look forward to the coming of the messiah to the day of the
lord to they had this apocalyptic idea that they were in such a wretched situation that there was
going to come a day when the divine power would intervene in human events and set everything to
right and there would be a head knocking session called the last judgment and uh everybody would be
put in order well but what saint augustine did with that you see uh he rejected the cyclic theory of time
not quite so much on account of the day of the lord uh coming at the end of time but on account of the
incarnation he was somehow fixed on the idea that when jesus was crucified that was the one full perfect
sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world it happened once and if time is cyclic he argued this
would have to happen again and again and again and that couldn't be therefore there is only one time
one progression of time from the creation of the world through its redemption by the sacrifice of the
cross and on to the the final judgment then time would cease and we should be in eternity and from this
theologians increasingly began to think about the historicity of jesus and to emphasize that it was a
historical fact and that history as worked out in the bible stories from the creation through the fall
to the doings of noah and abraham and the captivity of the israelites in egypt and the giving of the law by
moses all this was worked out as being the mighty acts of god which revealed the divine pattern for the
course of human events and the funny thing is that although many many historians living today are not
christians and not jews and don't believe in anything of that they still think of history as
a significant momentum towards progress something that our children's children's children's children
are going to get we all suffered and lived for them but you're going to inherit this goodie down
the end of the line now we really don't know and can't talk about progress unless we know where we're
going and making progress towards that uh desired object but most people involved in what they call
progress haven't the faintest idea where they're going i have found increasingly that businessmen
and military men are astoundingly impractical they just don't know what they want they think they know
i had a long discussion with the air force strategic people and uh they asked me and some other philosophers
what is your basis for moral behavior so i pulled their legs and said the basis for my moral behavior
is pure selfishness a very practical selfishness said of course i am talking like this because you're
all hard-headed people i'm not going to give you any sentimentality and stupid stuff about love and so
on because you face reality you're a military man and you have to see that the united states of america
as a collective selfishness is uh properly looked after now i said of course in my own personal life
when i'm selfish i'm not too crude about it i don't run around hitting people over the head and telling
the gimme gimme gimme i pretend like i'm a public servant that i'm out for their best interests and
all that sort of thing but that's camouflage so then i said now the only trouble about this
is that to be effectively selfish you've got to answer two questions the first is what do you want
and the second is what do you mean by yourself well you know that just pulls the carpet out from under
everything because what do i want well if i answer as this kind of a sensible human being
what do i want in life the really important thing i have had from the beginning
which is that i'm a an incarnation of the ground of being like everybody else
that's the most important thing because you can't get rid of that
the next thing is of course i want food i want um friendship companions love and general singing
and dancing and so on and these are more or less attainable material realities but then i look at my
very wealthy friends who ought to be able to have all these things especially those who are extremely
active in business and i realize they don't have them they're the most miserable people here you're
a great executive of a very very important corporation to begin with you are drowned in paper
you do nothing but scan paper and make decisions about paper all day you may be the director of an oil
company you never get within sight of oil except when you drive your car mostly you're surrounded with
statistics about oil finances about oil and you are smothered in this and you have to spend almost all
day in a wretched office building in a place like new york you dress like a funeral director you uh
i've had lunch at the board of directors of a very important oil company that will shall be nameless
and it's like eating in a college cafeteria the food was just i mean it was good food it was extremely
ordinary but you would expect these great millionaires to be having caviar and uh glorious fish in aspic and
wines and beautiful waitresses serving them and uh to be lounging at tables like romans no sir
and then if you've read an article in look this week by marshall mcluhan and george leonard on uh sex
the future of sex fantastic brings up some information that what they call the narrow gauge specialized male
that is the sort of guy who gets out there and sells you know and he um he mustn't have any feelings
because that would be unmanly to have any feelings except he can have a kind of a gross
no and but so many of these men are like that and it says that that role playing of that kind of
male gives you ulcers and uh all kinds of complaints and is more deadly than facing the bullets in vietnam
and they all die before their wives
because they are engaged in the pursuit of a completely fatuous goal this fatuous goal is the future
and it is symbolized above all by money they make lots of it and uh have it much more than they can
even think about and they have no idea what to do with it except make more except invest it in bigger and
bigger units of something and uh while they are harassed about that and they're wondering about the
antitrust boys the internal revenue their competitors and all these ghouls who are involved in the game
they lie awake nights uh they can't go home and throw the whole thing off uh they have to get completely
boozed uh that's one way out or tranquilized which is another way out or something or other in order to
take it and they call themselves realists you see they're utterly unrelated to the physical universe
this is partly of course because of the education they've received you see if you go to an ordinary
school such as we've had uh since the um no the early 19th century um you uh discover that your education
is purely cerebral you are prepared to be an executive a bureaucrat some kind of uh clerk you know the word
clerk is originally means clergyman because the clerics were the only people who were clever the word
clever clear clerk cleric is all the same word originally in english they were the literate people
and therefore they did all the bookkeeping and that kind of thing the records but they got away with it
you see and they convinced us that the records and the bookkeeping is more important than the actual goods
being transacted so that now people you see are much happier with money than with wealth or think they
are try to persuade themselves that they are they bought a lemon so this guy who thinks he works for
the future this great captain of industry condemns himself mostly to misery there are a few exceptions
naturally as i said i always exaggerate everything i know a few uh important businessmen who have some
conception of how to enjoy themselves but i was amused to meet a young one a little while ago
had created one big corporation which would have been brought up by another of the biggest
uh shows going today he was a member of the board of directors and he said now i'm 35 years old
i made an awful lot of money and i'm going to drop out so he took off for india
well uh then let's go and look and look we've had a little look at business let's go and look at the
the military people and they don't know what they want either first of all they invented a weapon
which was completely insane because it isn't a weapon it's a simply a contrivance for planetary suicide
and our weapon is a very specific thing now a sword is a weapon and notice it's pointed and sharp and directional
because then you learn first thing you have to know about using a sword is where to put it
where to point it and so it is selective but things like biological warfare poison gas and nuclear bombs
are not selective and you don't know when they're going to blow back on you or which way they're
going what the consequences of them are the only thing you can do with them is you can pile them up
and start playing lighting matches in the powder magazine this is a very dangerous game that people
might play with each other um well we're both sitting in a powder magazine and i dare you to drop that
thing you know we'll blow ourselves both up if you don't do what i want now this isn't strategy it's
madness beyond that they don't they they don't have any objective it would be understandable if we
were going to vietnam because of all those gorgeous little oriental girls we were going to capture the
whole lot and bring them back here but we're not we are out to destroy something called communism and
nobody really can figure out what it is because if russia is a communist country all it is is a one
great big corporate business um it's one corporation instead of a cluster of corporations and uh it's it works
rather miserably and uh i wouldn't think if you you need to fight it it'll just fall apart uh because
it's so boring uh history of the thing they were a lot worse when the uh brutal barons governed the
country and they are you know sort of better in a measly way like in china things are pretty terrible
ever since uh the british and their friends made a mess of china many years ago and china's been an
awful place and things again in china are kind of dowdy and uh uniform and dull but it's uh so far as
basic subsistence is concerned it's probably better than it was but my point is that we are fighting
abstractions for abstractions recently the congress of the united states passed an act against
burning the american flag stiff penalties for burning the flag and those same people who passed
that act with a great flurry of patriotic speeches were actively burning up the country for which the flag
stands they are allowing every kind of scoundrelly use of the water the air the natural resources and
exploitation of the people until the whole thing is being converted into a smog bowl
i flew not a few days ago from new york right across the country to los angeles and from new york to
denver there was smog over the whole country as far as i could see from 30 000 feet and this is america
the beautiful you know you burn up the flag is terrible burn up the country is quite okay because
these people are confused completely confused between the symbolic world and the real world and so
this historical thing you see which is a destiny in the future always being pursued is completely
destructive because technology clocks instruments measurements are fine for people who know how to use
them people who know what they want but for people who don't know what they want and who think that
the clock is the thing you know that's what you need i mean the russians are insane about this the moment
they move into a place uh with their army that is has some kind of technical civilization they capture
all the wristwatches in sight and they cover themselves with wristwatches like bracelets because
they are time crazy too but those things are very wonderful for people who as i say know how to use them
them because you can make significant plans for the future if and only if you are alive today and now
and know how to live now and know what to do with now but if you don't you see you never will because
the only the only time to start living is immediately do it i mean you know uh why wait around for something
to happen uh let's let's live it up now let's have a ball you see but we don't because we think that if
we have it now something we won't have it tomorrow but if you're always saving up to have it tomorrow
we never have it at all well let's take it into mission