without express permission from the Alan Watts Institute. Now here is part one from a seminar entitled The Future of Politics with Alan Watts. This then is the last seminar in the series of seminars on the future devoted to the subject of the future of politics. All along I've been emphasizing a particular point, which is this, that the very idea of the future has some experience in it. That to live for the future is an indefinite postponement of life. And the great political systems of the Western world whether they be capitalists or communists, are based on the notion that what we live for is the future.

[01:14]

And this is a very funny thing, especially when you think about Marxism, because the Marxists have always said that religion is the opium of the people, because it's based on the idea of pie in the sky when you die. But in fact, the politics of Marxism don't have as much pie in the sky. It's always a piety of plan for something to turn up that will be better than what we have now later on. And in exactly the same way, our notions of the Great Society are based on a futurist approach to life wherein you go through in your education a whole series of steps. The word in Latin, grandus, means a step. So we have first grade, second grade, third grade, grandus, grandus, grandus, and you become a graduate.

[02:20]

You know, you've got a lot more steps. But you're still doing it. So when you become finally successful, as the president of your corporation, you have a funny feeling of being cheated. You've climbed the stairway and you've got to the top. And there's nowhere else to go. And since you've never been taught to live in the present, you don't know how to. So an insurance salesman comes around and says, listen, I've got the very thing for you. the retirement program because when you're 65 you will drop out of the system and then you will really have to retire yourself despite your prostate trouble, menopause, false teeth and everything else and so the art of living in the eternal now is not taught in our educational system

[03:32]

And it's not taught because it's thought of as being feckless, irresponsible. It isn't irresponsible at all. It is everybody's duty, I could put it that way, to enjoy themselves. Because if you don't do that, you become a nuisance. You become aggressive, you become a robber, you become a thief, you become somebody who's trying to organize the rest of the world, that is to say, a power media, simply because you haven't learned the very simple, inexpensive art of living in the present moment. It probably doesn't take an awful lot of energy to maintain a human life. If you really consider what you need to eat, what you need to wear, how much housing you have to have, It comes down to something quite simple.

[04:34]

And the simpler, the more you have the capacity to enjoy watching a raindrop crawl down a window. But if you watch a raindrop crawl down a window and you think, my, look at that, everybody says, you're crazy. You're watching a raindrop crawl down there. Can't you find something more important to do? That means can't you make more trouble than that? So, the mentality that doesn't recognize the importance of watching a raindrop fall down the window is the one that is creating the trouble in the world today. I had an astounding session yesterday or two ago with the chief of an Indian tribe. He was one of the western Shoshone Indians which are located roughly around central Nevada.

[05:43]

And he was explaining how the government of the United States He's really seriously trying to get rid of the Indian way of life completely, especially by virtue of a bill which allows the Indians to borrow money on their own land. You know what the end of that could do. So having only told his story, I said, well, now, what he wants to do about it. You said that's the wrong question. I knew this was coming. She said, we... You pale cases, you white people, you always think about doing something. That means in voting, in politicking. But that's what's the matter with you. So I said, yeah, that's what's the matter with me.

[06:49]

He said, we're going to do something about it, but they're not going to do it in your terms. We expect you to be sensible enough to correct your own actions. We're not going to fight you in the ordinary way, not on your terms. He said then further, we are in harmony with the physical earth and geometry of the sky and waters of this country. And you will all strangely find that there will be more and more tornadoes, more and more earthquakes, more and more dreadful disasters. Because You are, as people, you are violating nature.

[07:55]

You are destroying it. It will fight back against you. And we are nature. We are not some strange little thing. We are the same thing. We are the same process as the land. And we regard ourselves as the same as the continent. And it's not just us in North America. We're in touch with the Indians in Peru, Chile, Brazil. We have one great family, and we're just waiting for you invaders from west, from Europe. Just train yourselves and get rid of yourselves. But in other words, he was saying that he wouldn't play the political game. Not on any account.

[08:57]

And didn't really want us to play a political game on their behalf. Now, this is something so inconceivable to most white people. Because, for example, When you get a new type of renovation, and they don't do anything, they don't develop it, and they just sit around, and we say, well, they're no good. They're just lazy. They cannot make us understand the importance of a contented life. We say you are of no value, you're not even a human, unless you're changing things, unless you're interfering, unless you're progressing. Unless you are, we confuse growing with progressing.

[10:02]

Unless something is happening and it's great operation, a new project is going on, and you're busy with it. We say, well, you're lazy. You're good for nothing. Because you are not working for the future. But they say, if you're working for the future, you're quite mad. So they don't work for the future. Just like a Chinese coolie works long enough to make some money. Then he knocks off work and he goes to the gambling zone. And he gambles. It's no joke to him. Or just generally wanders around and digs the scene. And we say, well, that's awful. That's irresponsible. You can't compare. That's not maintaining the world properly. What do you think? Maybe that is maintaining the world properly. Maybe it's we who think that everything should be progressing who are destroying the world.

[11:08]

Of course we are. I are a keeping everything in charge. It's true. We have a great initial success. We destroy diseases. We keep people alive. And on the end is the H-bomb to get rid of it all entirely. So these non-political people are saying to us, the trouble with you is you don't know what you want. You have a future which you're working for, but you're all wretched and no bonnet.

[12:14]

You promised yourselves that a good thing is going to happen to you. Keep promising, promising, promising, promising. Even your money is a promise. It says on the dollar bill that the Treasury of the United States will promise to pay a dollar. What are you going to get if you deliver this and say, come on now? I want whatever it is for this dollar. Hell, it's paper. It's all symbols. So all these myriads of so-called primitive people, like Amerindians, Mexican Indians, Africans, don't communicate with us and we don't communicate with them because they don't want what we think is the desirable or some of them do so in Japan for example the Japanese have been thoroughly conned into the idea that the western way of life is a great thing and so they are

[13:47]

by large, hectic industrialists. And so, as a result, the cities of Nara, Osaka, Kobe are covered in smoke. Tokyo is just a madhouse. They're getting it. So the whole point is, The future is an illusion. In the basic ideas in Hindu cosmology, that in the course of time, you go through the series of yugos, or the epochs, you begin with the great state of affairs, and it gradually deteriorates, is a way of saying to people, in the course of time, things only fall apart. Therefore, get out of time. Get off the wheel of samsara, the repress.

[14:55]

And so this underlies my idea of what I call the politics of diversion. Divert Western learning from history. from the notion that he is in a historical process which is leading to something always better and better and better and which in fact are leading to more and more destruction. Divert people from time by living a style of life which is timeless and which is therefore more attractive than life devoted to time. That doesn't exclude our technological power. Part of the whole point of technology that I'm going to take up in detail in a later session is that through technology we have the power to obliterate poverty completely.

[15:59]

But this must not be looked at in a historical way. or unless it's not bad in a historical way, it will not work. That is to say, the whole problem of money and the distribution of the wealth of the world as produced by technology is a psychological problem and not a material problem. People are hypnotized with money, which is the symbol of wealth, as if it was something that was valuable in its own right. That's the confusing money with gold. When Ramakrishna said that one of the evils of the world was gold, he was, I think, perhaps unconsciously quite correct. There's a story. banks and the world were on fire of shipping gold from country to country.

[17:04]

And so they decided to open an office in an island in the Pacific where all the banks had their headquarters and all the gold was put together there so that all they needed to do, and they had to exchange some gold, was to hand it across the street. And operations proceeded beautifully. Carabao, Cañada. And then all the heritage banks from the different countries came with their wives and their children to visit the island and have a great convention. And so they inspected the books and the transactions and everything was in perfect order. But at last the children said, they really want to see the gold. And so the bank president said to the managers, take our children down to the vaults so that they could see the gold. And so all those managers said, Well, it's sort of difficult and problematic, and it takes a lot of time. And the president said, well, don't be stupid. What's the matter? Can't they see the gold?

[18:06]

So they come to the board and said, well, we're sorry to report, but seven years ago, it was a disastrous subterranean earthquake, and all the gold was swallowed up. And of course, we all knew how much we had at that time, and so we kept the books accordingly. So it's a joke. People don't realize, in other words, that money is bookkeeping. Nothing but bookkeeping. And therefore the whole idea of taxation, for example, is a complete anachronism. The thing that is stopping the flow of the actual wealth of the world is this fixation on money. What you need to do is actually reverse taxation.

[19:13]

And instead of charging taxes, issue credit. But you have to keep the credit. balance to the gross national product in some form of figuring. And then everybody can circulate what they're making. Otherwise, you're in this ridiculous situation where people are starving in India, and we are hoarding food supplies and burning them and dumping them in the ocean, which is charity. But it's all based on a psychological block about money. So this kind of psychological block is what in Indian philosophy would be called a Maya. It is an illusion. It's the same kind of illusion as that of the future, of the idea that the future is when we are really going to live. And it's the way you operate.

[20:16]

When you get there, you're never going to be in a hamlet because you still want a future ahead of you. You're a perpetual donkey with a carrot. suspended from your collar on the rod that bears the Greek pursuing. Well, no. When we approach the subject of politics, you obviously recognize at once that the word is connected to the Greek polis, meaning a city. And the city, as I've indicated in a former lecture, is probably an ephemeral phenomenon in human life. As our technology of communication develops, cities are going to disappear. And for the same reason, as our technology develops, politics are going to disappear.

[21:17]

Let's go back to an early stage of our development when human beings changed from being hunters to being farmers. This is a very critical stage in the history of technology. When we were hunters, every male knew the whole culture. In other words, he had to fend for himself to make his own clothes, to make his weapons, to learn the arts of hunting, and also he was in charge of his own religion. There were peculiarly religious people in hunting cultures, and they are called shamans, or medicine men. An interesting thing about a medicine man, and this was picked from a priest, is that he is not ordained by anybody else.

[22:32]

He doesn't have to be approved by a guru, or by an organization, or a church. He goes away alone into the forest. and gets his own thing. He may contact what he calls the ancestors, but he has to do it by himself. Now when a community settles, and instead of being a roving, hunting people living in the forests, and they call instead a village, a great change occurs where new villages and towns occur where a road crosses a river or a road crosses a road and then around that which were originally hunting tracks trails a stockade is built and that is called the tail

[23:38]

We say a person is beyond the pale. That means he's an outsider. Because the pale from the house, the tree, is the host used to make the stockade. So inside the stockade there are four divisions, four blocks that come. And it is of the essence of agricultural, as distinct from the hunting culture, that you specialize, that you divide labor. And so when labor divides itself, it tends to divide into four major groups. Those, first of all, who are the braves, the Brahmins. the idea people, the thinkers.

[24:46]

Second, the brawn, the military men who defend the scene. So they are called in India, the Kshatriya. Who next? Why, the traders, the merchants, the Vaisya. And men next? Who? The craftsmen. the skilled workers, shudra. Of course, then outside there are the people who don't have any particular qualifications, and they are the lower outcasts, who are untouchable. But there are another group who are very curious. They are also outside the pale, but they are respected for being outside the pale. and they are called, in Sanskrit, shramana, which is the same as the word shaman, or in Chinese, shiangui, meaning an immortal who lives alone in the mountains.

[25:57]

In other words, the people who still retain the values of the hunting culture can say, like this, When you settle down in the city, in the palace, and you divide labor, and you pick a tale of soldiers, sailors, rich men, tall men, big men, king, you assume roles. You put on a mask. You say, I'm a soldier. I'm a prince. But you get more maskier than that. You say, I'm a person. The word person means mask. That's the mask. the mask worn by actors in the Greek or Roman drama. And you are taught, while you live in the palace, that you are your mask.

[27:02]

I was taught by my mother that I was Alan Watts, and I've never been able to recover from it. And so everybody was assigned this role that you were supposed to play. Well, you play that role, but the ancient Indian custom, it was recognized that you played it only for a while. That when you have raised your children and done your social duties, that you then have to prepare for death. Death, when you're playing a role, seems a tremendous threat to what's going to become of you. I may explain, but that doesn't matter.

[28:07]

You don't have to find out When you are ready to die, you can die properly and with dignity if you know who you really are. So in order to find out who you really are, you withdraw from your road. And you become what is called Barna Troxta, which means forest dweller, instead of Gryhasta, which is householder. In other words, you go back to the forests. away from the palace, outside the table. The doing of this may take many forms. It may be purely perfunctory, that you retire to a cottage in the backyard. You may actually go out into the jungle. You may actually tear off all your clothes and run naked and sit by the river. All sorts of ways of doing it. But if you have to name, you become or you may assume a name which is a divine name, one of the names of God.

[29:14]

There are people trying to do this in the United States today, called Hippids. I met one the other night and I asked him what his name was and he said, my name is you. And he absolutely would not have known any other name at all. Great. Okay, Peter, I'll come to you. So, When you become monocluster, you're outside the pale, and you concentrate your psychic energy to find out what's going on. What is this that we call existence? You can find this out quite easily, but you have to pay attention to it, you have to concentrate, you have to give your whole mind to, say, take hold of the sound and find out what sound really is.

[30:21]

Or you can look at light and find out what light really is, or you can tap something and find out what is going on here. And when you find out, you stop being anxious. But you see then, politics is the order of that transitory state, which is the city arrangement, the role-playing, the game of social life. designed in a particular style. Now, I'm not saying, I'm not trying to say in any way that the metallics is something wrong.

[31:30]

We shouldn't put it down and say it's bad. The only thing that could be bad is to take it too seriously. In other words, if you take the fundamental idea that the whole universe, all its forms, all the forms of biology, all the different species, the giraffes, the rhinoceroses, the perfumers, the roses, the eucalyptus trees, etc., everything is a form of biological game. It's a dancing thing. They are different styles. And we wouldn't want to say to any of those things, you shouldn't have them. Because they're all the great mind, the great illusion, the great play. And so the politics, the human community, organized with division of labor, with classes, with all the complications of economics and banking and transportation and so on and so on and so on.

[32:37]

All this is a particular kind of play. And each form of it is as legitimate as saying different kinds of dancing, a waltz, a rumba, a foxtrot, a frog, all are perfectly legitimate forms of dancing, that the universe does this. But the important thing to understand, what the sannyasin, the shramana, the man who goes outside the pale, is saying is, Please, people who are in the tail, my existence reminds you that you're only playing. Don't take it too seriously. Because if you take it too seriously, you're going to start destroying each other and fighting and saying, this city against that city, this country against that country, so on, because you're too involved. So every sane society...

[33:40]

allows a certain number of people to deviate monks some sort of outsiders it says you don't have to join you don't have to play the game in a society which is insane and unsure of itself cannot allow that to happen it says everybody must join everybody must work Everybody must belong. And then freedom disappears. Because as a matter of fact, the anxiety is if you say, well, you don't have to join. There are conditions under which you can go out. Then a lot of people get together and say, well, what would happen if everybody quit? I ask, what would happen if everybody decided to take American Airlines Flight 3 to New York tomorrow? Well, they just wouldn't get on. I mean, and they wouldn't anyhow.

[34:44]

Because a lot of people aren't interested in that, are not ready to quit. That doesn't mean that they are inferior. The acorn is not inferior to the oak tree. It's a potential oak. But as an acorn, it's just as beautiful and lovely a thing as a full-grown oak is. A baby is as lovely as an adult. Sometimes a great deal more lovely. So a person who is in a beginning state of evolution is just as marvelous as a person in a high state of evolution. Just as much a manifestation of the divine dance. So when a society allows a certain number of people to withdraw, it should have no anxiety that everybody will want to withdraw.

[35:47]

Some people are absolutely fascinated in competition, in being involved, in playing the game. They should be. It's time for them. But we are witnessing in the United States today the Greek motivation to withdraw it's simply because we haven't provided for it we haven't there's no opportunity for a Protestant to become a monk or a Jew the Catholics have half-heartedly provided for this sort of thing And there have to be people who stand outside the game and do not identify themselves with a class, with a name, with an ego, with a persona, with a role.

[36:55]

And a society which cannot tolerate that is weak and in great danger of dissolution. A society which can tolerate it is sure of itself inside. It doesn't have to insist on everybody agreeing with the way you see things. That's the nature of democracy, to say, you have a right to do it. And so furthermore underlying the nature of a democracy is the notion of mutual trust. And this is difficult in a palace. You can't obviously have an ongoing human arrangement in which

[38:07]

proper behavior between each other is enforced by violence of some kind, by police. But after all, who stands behind the police? Who gives the police their authority? Why, the people do. And if the authority of the police becomes something separate from the authority of the people, you get a violent situation. You no longer have democracy, you have a dictatorship. So, but if you really trust each other, you don't really need much in the way of police. Yes, you need some scouts to direct the traffic, who have essentially established which role is to rule first. not by authority, but simply pointing out that when we get to a crossroads, there has to be some sort of order here.

[39:16]

And we let so many cars go through this way, then we stop them and we let so many cars go through that way. And that's to the mutual benefit of everybody concerned. So there's a scout there to give a signal, which we've all agreed upon. But when that star starts dressing up like a storm trooper and putting on all kinds of guns and missiles and helmets and things like that, then he begins to act his role. He begins to behave like that kind of a person. And he becomes the best interest. And so we have to say to him, Go back to your Boy Scouts hat. Take out that helmet. All those band of ears full of bullets in those boots. Start looking like a human being again. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part one from the seminar entitled Future of Politics.

[40:24]

If you'd like to have a cassette copy of today's program to listen to again or to play for a friend, you send $9 to MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94965. Bye.

[40:57]

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