California. Best to include a self-addressed, large, legal-sized envelope. We'll send you the catalog. Today's talk is entitled, Man's Place in Nature. It's part two of a two-lecture series called Philosophy of Nature. And here now is the late Alan Watts with Man's Place in Nature. Now, I was talking to you this morning about the basic philosophy of nature that underlies Far Eastern culture, and explaining why it's so important for us in the West to understand this so that we can encourage the Japanese people to re-understand it, because they are in danger of following some of our wildest excesses and doing things that will destroy

[01:03]

our environment. You see, a great deal of what we have done by way of technological development is based on the idea that man is at war with nature. And that, in turn, is based on the idea, which is really a 19th century myth, that intelligence, values, love, humane feelings, etc., exist only within the borders of the human skin. And that, outside those borders, the world is nothing but a howling waste of blind energy, rampant libido, and total stupidity. This you see is the extreme accentuation of the Platonic Christian feeling of man as not

[02:04]

belonging in this world, of being a spirit imprisoned in matter. And it's reflected in our popular phraseology, I came into this world, I face facts, I encounter reality, something that goes, boom, right against you like that. But all this is contrary to the facts. We didn't come into this world, we grew out of it in the same way that apples grow out of an apple tree. And if apples are symptomatic of an apple tree, and show that after all this tree apples, when you find a world upon which human beings are growing, then this world is humane, because it's humans. Only we seek to deny our mother and to renounce our origins, as if somehow we were lonely specimens in this world, who don't really belong here, and who are aliens in an environment consisting

[03:08]

mostly of rock and fire and mechanical electronic phenomena, which has no interest in us whatsoever, except maybe a little bit in us as a whole, as a species. You've heard all these phrases, nature cares nothing for the individual but only for the species. Nature read in tooth and claw, nature is dog-eat-dog, or as the Hindus call it, Matsyanyaya, the law of the sharks. And so, also the very popular idea in the 19th century, running over into the common sense of the 20th, that we belong as human beings on some very small, unimportant speck of dust, on the outer fringes of a very small galaxy, in the middle of millions and millions of much more important galaxies. And all this thinking is pure mythology. Let me go in a little bit to the history of it, because it's important for us as Westerners

[04:14]

to know something about the history of the evolution of our own ideas that brought this state of mind about. We grew up as a culture in a very different idea, where the universe was seen as something in which the earth was at the center, and everything was arranged around us in the way that we, of course, as living organisms, naturally see the world. We see it from a center, and everything surrounds us. And so this geocentric picture of the world was, however, one in which every human being was fantastically important. Because you were a child of God, and you were watched day in, day out, minute in, minute

[05:14]

out by your loving and judging Father in heaven. And you, because you have an eternal life, are infinitely important in the eyes of this God. I have a friend who is a convert to Roman Catholicism, and is a very sophisticated and witty woman. And in her bathroom, she had one of those old-fashioned toilets with a pool tank on the top, and a pipe down to the toilet seat. And fastened on this pipe, there was a little plaque, which had on it nothing but an I. And underneath was written in old English Gothic-style letters, Thou God seest me. So everywhere is that watching I that examines you, and at the same time as it knows you, it causes your existence by knowing you, God creates you, because you are an act of his creative imagination.

[06:15]

So you are desperately important. But Western people got this feeling, that this became too embarrassing. You know how it was as a child when you were working in school, and the teacher walked around behind your back, and looked over while you were working, and you always felt put off. While the teacher is watching you, you are nonplussed. You want to finish the work and then show it to the teacher. There is a proverb, never show anything unfinished to children or to fools. And children feel this very strongly about their teachers. They want to finish it before it's looked at. And so in exactly the same way, it's embarrassing to feel that your inmost thoughts and your every decision is constantly being watched by a critic, however beneficent and however loving that critic may be. That you are always under judgment. To put this to a person is to bug him totally.

[07:17]

Indeed, it's one of the techniques used in Zen for putting people into a very strange state of mind. You are always under watch. So it was a great relief for the Western world when we could decide that there was no one watching us. Better a universe that is completely stupid than one that is too intelligent. And so it was necessary for our peace of mind and for our relief that during the 19th century particularly, we got rid of God. And found then that the universe surrounding us was supremely unintelligent and was indeed a universe in which we as intelligent beings were nothing more than an accident. But then having discovered this to be so, we had to take every conceivable step and

[08:18]

muster all possible energy to make this accident continue and to make it dominate the show. So the price which we paid for getting rid of God was rather terrible. It was the price of feeling ourselves to be natural flukes in the middle of a cosmos quite other than ourselves, cold, alien, and utterly stupid. Going along rather mechanically on rather rigid laws but heartless. Now so this attitude provoked in Western man a fury to beat nature into submission.

[09:20]

And so we talk about war against nature. When we climb a mountain like Everest, we have conquered Everest. When we get our enormous phallic rockets and boom them out into space, we are conquering space. And all the symbols we use for our conquest of nature are hostile. Rockets, bulldozers. This whole attitude, you see, of dominating it and mastering it. Whereas Chinese person might say, when you climb a high mountain, you conquer it. Well, why this unfriendly feeling? Aren't you glad the mountain could lift you up so high in the air so as to enjoy the view? So this technology that we have developed in the hands of people who feel hostile to

[10:34]

nature is very dangerous. But the same technology in the hands of people who felt that they belong in this universe could be enormously creative. I'm not talking some kind of primitivism as if we should really get rid of all technology and go back to being a kind of primitive people, but rather that in the hands of people who really know that they belong in this world and are not strangers in it, technology could be a wonderful thing. For one sees in the art forms that have been developed through this philosophy that we have a combination. My friend Saburo Hasegawa, a great Japanese artist of modern times, used to call it the controlled accident, that there is on the one hand the unexpected thing that happens

[11:39]

of itself that nobody could predict. That's the accident. And there is on the other hand prediction, control, the possibility of directing something along certain lines, just as when the sailor moves against the wind with the power of the wind, he is using skill to control the wind. So in the same way, our controlling things has a place, but it is with the accidental world of nature rather than against it. So then, this is why the philosophy of nature and the civilization of the Far East is immensely important to us to understand with our vast technical powers. And again, in turn, we, understanding that point of view, are immensely important to the people of the Far East, so as to help them not to be too intoxicated by our way

[12:51]

of doing things. Now, there's a long, long story about why technology developed in the West first rather than in the Far East, and I'm not going to go into that for the moment. But the important thing about this whole philosophy of nature and of man's place in nature is that this Taoist, and later Zen Buddhist, and Shinto feeling about man's place in the world is today corroborated by the most advanced thinking in the biological and physical sciences. Now, I can't stress that too much. Science is primarily description, accurate description of what's happening, with the

[13:57]

idea that if you describe what is happening accurately, your way of describing things will become a way of measuring things, and that this, in turn, will enable you to predict what is going to happen, and this will build you some measure of control over the world. Now the people who are most expert in describing and who are most expert in predicting are the first people to recognize the limitations of what they're doing. First of all, consider what one has to do in science. In a very simple experiment in which you want to study a fluid in a test tube and describe what is in that fluid so accurately that you must isolate that fluid from what are

[14:57]

called unmeasurable variables. I have a fluid in a test tube and I want to describe it accurately, but every time the temperature changes, my fluid changes, so I want to keep it free from changes of temperature. This already implies an air conditioning system. Also, I don't want my fluid to be jiggled because that may alter it, so I've got to protect it from trucks that go by the lab, and so I have to build a special bump-proof room where trucks won't jiggle it. Also, I have to be very careful that when I look at this fluid, I won't breathe on it and affect it in that way, and that the temperature of my body as I approach it won't alter it. And I suddenly discover that this fluid in a test tube is the most difficult thing to isolate in all the world, because everything I do about it affects it.

[15:58]

I cannot take that fluid in a test tube and take it out of the rest of the universe, and so it is separate and all by itself. A scientist is the first to notice this. Furthermore, he knows not only that it is his bodily approach that alters things, he finally discovers in studying quantum theory that looking at things changes them. So, when we study the behavior of electrons and all those subatomic particles, we find out that the means we use to observe them changes them. So that we, what we really want to know is, what are they doing when we're not looking at them? Does the light in the refrigerator really go out when you close the door? So what will it do when it's not being watched, because we found out that watching them affects

[17:07]

them. Why? Because, of course, in order to observe the behavior of sub-nuclear particles, we have to shine lights on them, as it were. We have to bombard them with other nuclear particles, and this changes them. And so we get to the point where we can know the velocity of a particle without knowing its position, or know its position without knowing its velocity. We can't know both at the same time. So, what all that is telling us is, you cannot stand aside as an independent observer of this world, because you, the observer, are what you're observing. We're in self-preservation. Let me put it in another way. We've been observing for a while a kind of behavior that, because it's our behavior,

[18:12]

we call it sense and order, into a system of behaviors that has been going on for goodness knows how long by our calculations, which fundamentally doesn't obey any rules at all. It is purely random. So all these discussions would then amount to nothing but wishful thinking. And religions have eternally been accused of being systems of wishful thinking, wherewith we console ourselves for being such unhappy accidents as sensitive beings in a world that is basically insensitive. So really, we have a third myth to discuss. We've discussed the Christian myth and the Hindu myth. We have now the myth of 19th century science, which is as follows, that the human organism

[19:17]

is a fluke that came about through a series of events, which can, however, be rationally explained. But it is basically a fluke, in the sense that through many, many chances, a world consisting of blind mechanism and directionless energy produced a sensitive being with a sense of direction, with reason, and with love. This being is very fragile and could very quickly cease to exist altogether. But if we want to continue to exist, and we seem to want to, we have therefore to fight our environment and use every ounce of intelligence and strength that we have to compel our environment,

[20:20]

which is witless and stupid, to submit to our will. So arises the great fight between man and nature that characterizes the technological civilization of the West, to beat this dumb world into submission, because love, reason, reason and goodness are found only inside human skins. Outside is a totally irrational jungle. So these are three competing mythologies. And I call the last one a mythology, because I don't see why it has any greater claim to

[21:21]

be true than either of the others. We've got to decide somehow which of these points of view constitutes the best set of rules for a game. I think that's the only way we can decide. Now let's consider for a moment comparative game rules. The simplest game practically is tossing coins. Will it be heads or tails? Will you bet? And this isn't terribly interesting, because we know that in about 1,000 tosses it'll come out 500 for one side and 500 for the other. In a hundred tosses it won't quite approximate 50 for one side and 50 for the other. Within a hundred tosses you may, one side may win definitely over the other.

[22:25]

But the longer the game goes on, the more you'll just tend to equalize and there won't be a game. Let's take a more complicated game, tic-tac-toe. How long can you go on with that? You can go on with tic-tac-toe until you learn the system, which is that anyone who starts can win. So it reduces itself to who's going to start. That reduces itself to tossing a coin. Now let's go to another extreme, the game of three-dimensional chess. This is chess played in a cube. You need eight. You need one, the ordinary set of chessmen, the black and white, but you need eight boards. And the boards represent levels in a cube. Now imagine a knight's move inside a cube. That's more than most people can think of. It's just too much.

[23:27]

And even very great players would feel ill at ease and feel it was just too much to think out the game of chess inside a cube. In other words, the game of tic-tac-toe stops after a while because it's too boring. The game of three-dimensional chess stops because it's too unthinkable. The games that seem to be viable are in the middle. Checkers, poker, bridge, chess, things of that kind, or if you're getting a little along with chess on the extreme, go, which is an immensely complicated tic-tac-toe. These things work because they combine randomness and skill in a nice mixture.

[24:39]

In other words, when we shuffle the cards and deal for poker, we introduce randomness. And then the skill of the players has to introduce the order. The quality of randomness in chess, on the other hand, or go, is the situations which are too complicated for you to know immediately. The possibility that somebody else might think faster than you do. Or think, you see, when you get in chess, you come up against the kind of player who isn't very good, but who is unpredictable. And you have to think out not only the moves that they might make that would be intelligible, but the moves that they might make which would be absurd, or not necessarily bad moves from

[25:43]

their point of view. They might be bad moves, but they might also be very good moves from their point of view, but you wouldn't expect them to make them if they planned it. But they might make it by chance, you see? And you get a very funny kind of player in there. But a game which involves these sort of possibilities and eventualities is a good game. It's something to be fascinated with. So then we arrive, by such considerations, at ideas of optimal games. So, we go back then to our three mythologies, and consider which one of them is the optimal game. We will have to go a little bit beyond that if we decide on this, you see, whether the

[26:46]

one that is the optimal game has anything to do with what we call physical reality. But bear this in mind. We are, we who decide which of these games is optimal, are a physical organism. And our decision will have some relation to our organic structure. Our decision will relate to the kind of brain we have. And the kind of brain we have will be related to the kind of physical environment in which we live. Now then, here is our choice. First of all, we have a domain of reality, being, existence.

[27:52]

And in the first theory, we don't really belong here. We are sons of God by adoption. So, we come into being, we are evoked, we are called into existence by God from nowhere. So the pattern of that universe is this. You come in from outside. The universe is not really a universe. It is a collection of things, an assemblage of cosmic flotsam and jetsam that came from nowhere at all, from an outside that really didn't exist as an outside. There was no outside to God, but nevertheless, it is insisted in this mythology that God evoked being and creatures from nowhere at all.

[28:55]

So, you came into being at the divine summons, and you came from nowhere. This is the pattern. This is the aesthetic image you are asked to consider. The next image is this one. Here once again is the domain of being. The next image is this one. Here once again is the domain of being. And this domain of being manifested the multiple world like this. You see? Each point is a being, a thing, an event, which is the whole thing doing it, that is

[30:02]

to say focusing itself. Or you can do it this way. You can do it on the inside, like this, if you want to draw it that way. That's the same image as the one I've just drawn, but it's turned outside in, involuted. Now you notice at once, when you contrast these two images, that you have a schizophrenic image and an integrated image. These things here have no background. This is centered, and in that sense, it makes sense. And we've seen things in nature like that. We've seen crystals, we've seen galaxies, we've seen stars, we've seen all kinds of forms, elementary forms of life, radiolaria, diatoms, the fundamental cellular structures.

[31:11]

They're all this kind of organization. How are we going to draw the other figure? The other figure, well, we don't need to draw it. We may say it's, the world is a Rorschach plot. And just as every individual tells his own story about a Rorschach plot, and we know from the story he tells what kind of a person he is. So we could say that we are all living in the middle of a Rorschach plot. And the more persuasive individuals persuade others to agree as to their interpretation of the plot, and so societies are formed. But there is really nothing in this but projection. What is called the pathetic fallacy? The pathetic fallacy being the projection of human intentions upon nature, upon the

[32:18]

physical universe. But don't you see that the moment you measure the physical universe and you say, there is such a thing as a law of nature, there is Boyle's law, or there is the second law of thermodynamics, you are, according to this argument, projecting human patterns of thinking upon the external world. The moment you see you cover your camera or your field glasses or your microscope with a measured grid and hairlines, and you say, well, it is so many inches between this wiggle and that part of the wiggle, you are projecting, aren't you? But, but, but, that microscope and those hairlines are a part of the physical universe too. So you are not projecting altogether.

[33:20]

You are already here. So the idea, you see, that the laws of nature are merely human inventions, human whistles in the dark, by which we, isolated little men, introduce sense into the chaos of nature, neglects the fact that we are in nature already. So the difficulty about our third mythology, the mythology of 19th century science, of sensitive, loving, and intelligent man in a fundamentally mindless, stupid universe, man as an ego desperately floating on the sea of libido, this purely lustful animal

[34:26]

force, is based on this picture, ultimately. To be called into being out of nothing by the whim of the God Almighty is really the same thing as having come into being as a result of a fluke, as a result of pure chance. And just in this way, as you are a son by adoption only, that is to say, by the whim of the father, so in the other mythology you are a fluke. And both mythologies involve a fight between man and nature. In the one, you are a spirit put in charge of a wayward body, which has passions which

[35:28]

have to be governed and beaten down, which has a devil inside it who has to be outwitted and controlled. And in the other one, you have to fight with reason against the dark forces of the unconscious and the motions and effects of totally irrational genes. So you see, from both these points of view, the assumption is that man is a stranger in the world. Look at it this way. Here is a tree, and it has leaves on it. And when you look at that, you say, well, the leaves come from the tree. They grow out of it. The second image is, here's a completely leafless tree. It is barren. And suddenly, from nowhere at all, there arrive a flock of birds, and they sit on the tree.

[36:33]

Which is your feeling about man in nature? Are you on this planet as a bird from nowhere, or do you grow out of it? You see, the 19th century scientific myth is inconsistent, because on the one hand, it's evolutionary. It defines man as having grown out from the geological basis of nature, or the electric basis of nature. But yet, while it takes that point of view theoretically, it acts and thinks and feels as if man were a stranger. A stranger to whom the mechanical world of nature is quite alien. Now then, if you take evolution seriously, you see that human beings grow in a solar

[37:36]

system with a planet of this kind as a member of it. They grow here in just exactly the same way that apples grow on an apple tree. Now when you look at the tree and it hasn't any apples on it, you don't know that it's an apple tree unless you know a lot about trees. You go by the tree. It may have blossoms. It's a flowering tree. But there's nothing to eat on it. And so you pass it by, and you wait to find a tree that's got something to eat on it. Then you come by this tree a little later, which formerly you had neglected, and it's got apples on it. And you say, ha, an apple tree. Now imagine then our solar system jazzing around five million years ago, and a man in a flying saucer comes by from some other galaxy and takes a look at it. And he says, hmm, hmm, hmm, just a bunch of stuff, and goes away. And he reports to his headquarters that that particular section of planets in galaxy so

[38:42]

and so is dead. Later another man comes from the same galaxy in his flying saucer and looks at it and says, wow, look at that. Excuse me. It wasn't a dead tree. It's humans. It is, as we say of a ship, it is manned. But not it is manned in the passive sense, as we say of a ship, but in the active, it mans. Just as the apple tree apples. But you see what that way of looking at things presupposes? Presupposes not that man is an intelligent organism trying to cope with, and we all use this word coping so much in sociology and psychology, not an intelligent organism coping with an unintelligent environment. Man is an intelligent organism.

[39:43]

We have no idea what the word intelligent means except in terms of human behavior. Man is an intelligent organism who is the function of an intelligent environment. Just as an apple is the function of an apple tree. Think. The environment, in other words, has to evolve to the point where human beings arise in it. And the complexity of the environment, of all the insects and best salai and vegetations and heaven only knows what within it, has to evolve in complexity to a certain degree before the complexity called a human being will arise in it. But these things happen together. And just as you may say, in looking, say, there are certain cacti which flower once

[40:49]

only in 50 years, and you would never dream they were a flowering plant unless you passed them in that 50th year. So in the same way, all these rocks that constitute the solar system will seem to be dead unless you go by in that eon in which they flower as men. There are many, many considerations to this. I mean, you can then begin to see that planets are organisms. They are not just stones infested with human insects, you see, as if these insects were invaders from somewhere else, some kind of fungus that had arrived

[41:51]

from outside. But that the existence of human beings on the planet Earth is a function of the Earth just as hair is a function of our heads. Grass grows out of the Earth, and if grass gets going, it eventually becomes human. It's a long process of DNA and all kinds of nuclear molecular transformations, but there it is. So, if you realize, if you get your time organization right, you see that the consequences of the later state, that is to say, the existence of human beings in relation to the former state, where there are no human beings but there is just minerals, can't be explained

[42:52]

by saying human beings are the result of mere minerals. The later state and the former state go together in such a way that the minerals are not mere. They are minerals potentially capable of being human. Do you see that? That was the same thing I tried to show you in talking about sentences, that the later word in a sentence has to be uttered before we know what the earlier words mean. The bark of the tree and the bark of the dog. And that, likewise, when you study nature, the traditional approach in the past, in the early ages of science, has been to try and explain a living organism by an analytical

[43:53]

and microscopic study of its component parts. We try to find out why a human being behaves like a human being by an analyzing his cells. That is fine, that gives us a great deal of important knowledge, but to find out how the whole thing works we've got to go in the other direction and understand that a cell is what it is and does what it does by virtue of being in a certain context. In other words, blood in a test tube does not behave in the same way as blood inside veins. By virtue of these components that we call blood being arranged in a pattern which includes being veins, and veins are arranged in a pattern which includes being connected with a heart and so on, this is absolutely determinative in the behavior of the blood cells. So you must just as much explain the behavior of any entity that you care to study by the

[45:01]

larger entity that includes it as by the smaller entities which compose it. So you explain human behavior by the situation of man in the total cosmos as much as you can explain it by things going on inside his skin at the neurological level and the chemical level. You've got to look both ways. So it seems on the whole that we are rather, from our world today, from the general situation of the scientific approach, we are rather committed or rather heavily in the direction of the plausibility of a unitary universe in which every part is seen as a function of the whole. And every part is known to be a part in relation to the whole.

[46:01]

So, that just as we can't have an inside domain which is being and an outside domain which is nothingness and say that this thing here inside is the real existence. It isn't. The real existence is the two together. For every inside has to have an outside. And the two together enable us to come back to the elementary principles from which we started light and darkness, yes and no, so opposite and yet so inseparable. You've been listening to a talk by the late Alan Watts. It was entitled, Experiencing the Illusion. He is in the advantageous position in the game because he has nothing to lose.

[47:10]

You've defined him as the teacher. So he sits back and relaxes. He can do anything and not lose face. It's like Suzuki who can take forever to answer a question or be fast asleep and be mistaken for being in deep Samadhi and because after all he doesn't have to prove anything. He's not concerned as to whether he is or isn't a good Zen student. He's just natural. But he's not natural in a forced way. That is to say, he's not going around trying to be natural, therefore being a phony. So then, in this whole evolution of what you might call competitive games as to which of you is the wisest, watch out.

[48:17]

What is the test going to be in the end? Which of you is the wisest? Who can be banged about enough without screaming? Is that the test? That's often the way it's put. How much suffering can you take? See? All right, we'll settle for that, you see, and then we can all sit on a pin and see how long we can do it or all sit like this and see how long we can take it without changing position. Then who's going to win? Crazy. Now then, somebody's going to come up and say, yeah, but that's all very well. But the point comes when you can suffer without screaming so much that nobody is quite sure whether you were dead or not already. After all, if you whip a dead horse, nothing happens. And you put pins into a dead man and he won't scream. So maybe your yogi self-control and your discipline has reached such a point that it has made

[49:21]

you effectively dead. You can't be moved. That was that thing about that lecture on Zazen we had. That when there was a reaction to something that went pop, some people's systems went all over the place when there was a little pop. But the adept in Zazen, they went like this, you know, the click test and nothing happened. Well, you say, was he very, very calm and collected and he didn't really mind it? Or was it that he's just got his feelings atrophied? Which is it? You see? Well, this is a game. And we can play in all sorts of ways. But if you compete too hard, you see, to be the great self-disciplined one, to be always in possession of yourself, to be always immovable, you will eventually reach the point where

[50:26]

you will lose the game because someone will outplay you by accusing you of being a dummy. And say, but after all, isn't it great to have emotions? And one would, look what you're missing, you're a calm Buddha in nirvana and you have no emotions. That's a wretched kind of a world to get mixed up in. I like to feel very strongly one way or the other, I'd be terribly happy and terribly miserable. One's the price of the other pretty much. And so you can say to that stone Buddha sitting, you've got no guts. You won't let yourself get caught, you won't let yourself fall in love, because you're afraid. And so you've said to it all sour grapes, you shouldn't fall in love, you shouldn't become attached to the world, you're afraid of it. So it goes. You've been listening to another talk by the late Alan Watts.

[51:34]

Today's talk entitled, Games of Complexity and Simplicity. A reminder that if you would like a cassette tape where Alan Watts describes the highlights from his more popular lectures, you send $5 to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94965, California. Be sure to include tax if you live in California. Thank you.

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