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 something spurious in it, that to live for the future is an indefinite postponement of life, and that the great political systems of the western world, whether they be capitalist or communist, are based on the notion that what we live for is the future. And this is a very funny thing, especially when you think about Marxism, because the

[01:19]

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 are just as much pie in the sky. It's always a five-year 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, gradus, means a step. So we have first grade, second grade, third grade, gradus, gradus, gradus, finally become

[02:20]

a graduate. You know, you've gone along the steps, but you're still doing it. So that when you become finally successful, as the president of your corporation, you have a funny feeling of being cheated. You climbed the stairway, and you 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. A retirement program. Because when you're 65, you'll drop out of the system, and then you'll really be able to enjoy 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, if you 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, they say, a power maniac, simply because you haven't learned the very simple, inexpensive art of living in the present moment. It really 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 a window. 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 crawl down a window is the one that is creating the trouble in the world today. I had an astounding session just a day or two ago with the chief of an Indian tribe. He was from the western Shoshone Indians, which are located roughly around central Nevada.

[05:43]

And he was explaining how the government of the United States is 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. And you know what the end of that bill is. So, having, when he had told his story, I said, well, now, what do you want us to do about it? He said, that's the wrong question. I knew this was coming. He said, we, you pale faces, 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 us.

[06:49]

He said, we're going to do something about it, but we'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, nor on your terms. He said then further, we are in harmony with the physical earth and geography and the sky and the waters of this country. And you will strangely find that there are going to be more and more tornadoes, more and more earthquakes, more and more natural disasters. Because you are, as people, you are violating nature.

[07:55]

You are destroying it. And it will fight back against you. And we are nature. We are not some strangers on this land. We are the same thing, actually, 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're one great family, and we're just waiting for you invaders from the West, from Europe. To strangle yourselves and get rid of yourselves. But in other words, he was saying that he wouldn't play the political game, not on any

[08:57]

account. 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 Indians on a reservation, and they don't do anything, and 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 contemplative life. We say you are of no value, you're not even 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, a 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 joint, and he gambles, or he smokes opium, or just generally wanders around and digs the scene. And we say, well, that's awful. That's irresponsible. You can't do that. That's not maintaining the world properly. What do you think? Maybe that is maintaining the world properly.

[11:02]

Maybe it's we who think that everything should be progressing who are destroying the world. Of course we are. By our Protestant ethic, by our notion of keeping everything in charge, it's true. We have a great initial success. We destroy diseases. We keep people alive. But 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 wretch and no bonnet.

[12:14]

You, uh, you promised yourselves the good thing is going to happen. You keep promising, promising, promising, promising. Even your money is a promise. It says on the dollar bill that the treasurer 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. Ha, ha, I want whatever it is with this dollar. And they just keep giving you credit. Because 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.

[13:21]

And we don't communicate with them. Because they don't want what we think is the desirable good society. Or some of them do, of course. 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're by and large frantic industrialists. And so, as a result, the cities of Nara, Osaka, Kobe are covered in smog. Tokyo is just a madhouse. They're getting it. So, the whole point is, the future is an illusion. See, the basic ideas in Hindu cosmology, that in the course of time, you go through the series of yugas, or the epochs,

[14:32]

you begin with a 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 rat race. And so, this underlies my idea of what I call the politics of diversion. Divert Western man from history, from the notion that he is in a historical process, which is leading to something always better and better and better, but which in fact only leads 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.

[15:35]

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. But this must not be looked at in a historical way. While it is looked at 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,

[16:41]

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. Once upon a time, all the banks in the world got tired of shipping gold from country to country, 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 when they had to exchange some gold was to trundle it across the street. And operations proceeded beautifully for about ten years. And then all the heads of the 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. At last the children said,

[17:43]

Daddy, I want to see the gold! And so the bank president said to the managers, Take our children down to the vaults so that they can see the gold. And so all those managers said, Well, it's sort of difficult and problematic and takes a lot of time. And the president said, Well, don't be stupid! What's the matter? Can't they see the gold? So they honked and horned and said, Well, we're sorry to report that seven years ago there was a disastrous subterranean earthquake and all the gold was swallowed up. But, of course, we all knew how much we had at that time and so we've kept the books according. So it's a joke. People don't realize, in other words, that money is bookkeeping. Nothing but bookkeeping.

[18:43]

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 and issue, instead of charging taxes, issue credit. But you have to keep the credit balanced 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 sheer insanity.

[19:45]

But it's all based on a psychological block above money. So, this kind of psychological block is what in Indian philosophy would be called a Maya. It is an illusion. And 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 if that's the way you operate, when you get there you're never going to be able to handle it because you still want the future ahead of you. You're a perpetual donkey with a carrot suspended from your collar on a rod like this and you're pursuing it. 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.

[20:49]

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. 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,

[21:55]

he had to fend for himself, to make his own clothes, to make his weapons, to know 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. And the interesting thing about a medicine man, as distinct from a priest, is that he is not ordained by anybody else. 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.

[22:56]

Now when a community settles, instead of being a roving hunting people living in the forests and they form instead a village, a great change occurs. Where do 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 pale. We say a person is beyond the pale. That means he is an outsider. Because the pale, from the paros, the free, is the posts used to make the stockade. So inside the stockade there are four divisions,

[24:04]

four blocks of town. And it is at the essence of an agricultural, as distinct from a 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. Second, the brawn, the military men, who defend the sea. So they are called in India, the Kshatriya. Who next? Why, the traders, the merchants,

[25:07]

the Vaishya. And then 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, Xiaomeng, meaning an immortal, who lives alone in the mountains. In other words, the people who still retain the values of the hunting culture. And say,

[26:09]

like this, when you settle down in the city, in the palace, and you divide labor, and you are Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Big Man, Thief, you assume roles. You put on a mask, and say, I am a soldier. I am a priest. But you get more maskier than that. You say, I am a person. The word person means mask. Persona. 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. I was taught by my mother that I was Alan Watts, and I have never been able to recover from it completely. And, and so everybody is assigned this role that you are supposed to play.

[27:16]

Well, you play that role, but in 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 are playing a role, seems a tremendous threat to what is going to become of you. But they explained that, um, that doesn't matter. You just 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,

[28:21]

you withdraw from your role. And you become what is called vanaprastha, which means forest dweller, instead of grihastha, which is householder. In other words, you go back to the forests, away from the palace, outside the pavilion. This, 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 you give up your name. You become, uh, nameless. Or you may assume a name, which is a divine name, one of the names of God. There are people trying to do this in the United States today, called hippies. I met one the other night,

[29:22]

and I asked him what his name was, and he said, my name is you. And he absolutely would not acknowledge any other name at all. Great. Okay. Who are you? So, uh, when you become a monoprosper, 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 just, 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 a sound, and find out what sound really is. Or you can look at light,

[30:24]

and find out what light really is. Or you can touch 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 civic arrangement, the role-playing, the game of social life, designed in a particular style. Now, I'm not saying,

[31:25]

I'm not trying to say in any way that the polis is something wrong. 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 buffoons, the roses, the eucalyptus trees, etc., everything is a form of biological game. It's a dancing thing, you know, different styles. And we wouldn't want to say any of those things. You shouldn't have them. Because they're all the great maya, the great illusion, the great play. And so, the polis, the human community,

[32:26]

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. All this is a particular kind of play. And each form of it is as legitimate as, say, different kinds of dancing. A waltz, a rumba, a foxtrot, a frog, all the other perfectly legitimate forms of dancing. So 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 pale, I, 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

[33:27]

this city against that city, this country against that country, so on, because you're too involved. So every sane society allows a certain number of people to deviate. Monks, priests, some sort of outsiders, and says, you don't have to join, you don't have to play the game. 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?

[34:29]

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 won't anyhow. Because a lot of people aren't interested in that, are not ready to quit. That doesn't mean that they're 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

[35:31]

dance. So, when a society allows a certain number of people to withdraw, it should have no anxiety that everybody will want to withdraw. Because some people are absolutely fascinated in competition, in being involved, in playing the game. They should be. It's fine for them. But we are witnessing in the United States today a great motivation for withdrawal. 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

[36:33]

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. And a society which cannot tolerate that is weak and in grave 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 differ. And so furthermore underlying

[37:33]

the nature of a democracy is the notion of mutual trust. OK. And this is difficult in a polis. You can't obviously have a an ongoing human arrangement in which proper behavior between each other is enforced by violence of some kind, by police. Because after all who stands behind the police? Who gives the police their authority? Why the people do? But if the authority of the police

[38:33]

becomes something separate from the authority of the people you get a a violent situation. You no longer have democracy you have a dictatorship. 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 simply establish which role is to move first. Not by authority but simply pointing out that when we get to a crossroads there has to be some sort of order here. We let so many cars go through this way then we stop them and we let so many cars go through that way. That's 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

[39:35]

scout starts dressing up like a stormtrooper and putting on all kinds of guns and whistles 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 a vested interest. And so we have to say to him go back to your boy scout's hat take off that helmet on those bandoliers full of bullets in those boots start looking like a human being again. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part one from a seminar entitled Future of Politics. 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 nine dollars to MEA

[40:36]

Box 303 Sausalito 94965

[40:41]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ