Ep. 20 – Man is a Hoax

You are, if you can't live in the present, you are not able to enjoy the future for which you have planned. Because you will have in you a kind of syndrome, a whereby happiness consists in promises and not in direct and immediate realizations. So long as you feel that tomorrow it will come. See, on a dollar bill, it always says promise to pay. It's a promissory note. And nobody ever can come across. Because the promise is tomorrow and we say it in common speech, tomorrow never comes. Welcome to the Alan Watts podcast, being in the way. And today we're going to pull some delightful talks out of the archives. We're going to start with, "Man is a hoax." And this was a time when most of my father's recordings were being made in the radio booth. However, he had acquired a tape recorder, a UR tape recorder. And so he was experimenting, recording some sessions in New York, where he did a recording called "Joyous Cosmology," which we'll hear on not today, but in future weeks. And when he returned to California, he gave a talk in Sosolito at the first Christ church at Campbell Hall. And he recorded it, it's called "Man is a Hoax." And now here's Alan Watts. In our culture and in various other cultures, we have an absolutely extraordinary attitude to the new member of human society. Instead of saying, frankly, to children, how do you do? Welcome to the human race. We are playing a game, and we are playing by the following rules. We want to tell you what the rules are so that you'll know your way around. And when you've understood what rules we are playing by, when you get older, you may be able to invent better ones. But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation. He's not really a human being. He's a candidate for humanity. And therefore, to preserve the role of parent or to preserve the role of teacher, you have to do what they do in the Arthur Murray School of Dancing, which is that they string you out. They don't tell you all the story about dancing, because if they tell you, you'll learn in a few weeks and go away. And you'll know it, but instead they want to keep you on. And in just this way, we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life, which always is preparation and never actually gets there. In other words, we have a system of schooling, which starts with grades. And we get this little creature into the thing with the kind of, come on, kitty, kitty, kitty, and we get it always preparing for something that's going to happen. So you go into nursery school as preparation for kindergarten. You go to kindergarten as preparation for first grade. And then you see you go up the grades till you get to high school. And then comes the time when maybe if we can get you fascinated enough with the system, you go to college. And then when you're going to college, if you're smart, you get into graduate school and stay a perpetual student. And go back to be a professor and just go round and round in the system. But in the ordinary way, they don't encourage quite that. They want you after graduate school or after graduation commencement, as it's called, beginning to get out into the world with a capital W. And so you've been trained for this and now you've arrived. But when you get out into the world at your first sales meeting, they've got the same thing going again because they want you to make that quota. And if you do make it, they give you a higher quota. And come along about 45 years of age, maybe your vice president. And you suddenly don'ts on you that you've arrived. With a certain sense of having been cheated because life feels the same as it always felt. And you are conditioned to be in desperate need of a future. So the final goal that this culture prepares for us is called retirement. When you will be a senior citizen and you will have the wealth and the leisure to do what you've always wanted, but you will at the same time have impotence and false teeth and no energy. So the whole thing from beginning to end is a hoax and furthermore, some other aspects of the hoax just for kicks. You are involved by and large in a very strange business system, which divides your day into work and play. Work is something that everybody does and you get paid to do it because nobody could care less about doing it. In other words, it is so abominable and boring that you can get paid for doing it. And the object of doing this is to make money. And the object of making money is to go home and enjoy the money that you've made. When you've got it, you see you can buy pleasure. And this is a complete fallacy. Money never can buy pleasure. Because all pleasures depend upon not putting down a symbol of power, money, but upon disciplines. In other words, now in Sorsalito where I live, we have peer after peer full of fine boats, motor cruisers, sailing boats, all sorts of things, which nobody ever uses. Because they've been bought on the falling for the ad line that if you buy this thing, you will have pleasure. You will have status. You will have something or other. But then they suddenly discover that having a boat requires the art of seamanship, which is difficult but rewarding. Therefore, nobody has time for it. And all they do with the boats is have cocktail parties on them at the weekend. And in myriads of ways, you see you go home, you wear the wealthiest people in the world. And you would think that having earned your money, you would have a great banquet and an orgy. And so on. But nobody does. They eat a TV dinner, which is just a warmed over airline food. And then they spend the evening looking at an electronic reproduction of life, which is divided from you by a glass screen. You can't touch it, you can't smell it. And you have a strange feeling, you see, that the whole procession of grades that was leading to something in the future, to that goodie, that gorgeous, galopsious goodie that was lying at the end of the line, it never quite turns up. And this is because from the beginning we condition our children to a defective sense of identity. And this I think is the most important feature in the whole thing that a child grows into our culture. And this is not only western culture, it's equally true in Japan, an area which I can speak with some firsthand knowledge. We condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem, which is insoluble. And therefore attended by constant frustration. And as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future, so that one lives, one is educated to live in the future, and one is not ever educated to live today. Now I'm not saying that you know the philosophy of Carpe Diem, let us drink today for tomorrow we die and not make any plans. What I am saying is that making plans for the future is our views only to people who are capable of living completely in the present. Because when you make plans for the future and they mature, if you can't live in the present you are not able to enjoy the future for which you have planned. Because you will have in you a kind of syndrome whereby happiness consists in promises and not in direct and immediate realizations. So long as you feel that tomorrow it will come, see on a dollar bill, it always says promise to pay, it's a promissory note. Because the promise is tomorrow and if we say in common speech tomorrow never comes. But everything is based on the idea, you see, that you will get it tomorrow and you can enjoy yourself today so long as tomorrow looks bright. But Confucius once said, "A man who understands the Dau in the morning can die contentedly in the evening." That is to say, if you have ever lived one complete moment, you can be ready to die. You can say, "Well, that was it. That was the good. That I've had it." You see? But if you never lived that complete moment, death is always a guy who likes to come into a bar at two o'clock in the morning and says, "Time gentlemen please." And you say, "Oh please, one more drink, not yet." [BLANK_AUDIO] because you haven't really have the feeling that you ever had it, that you ever got there. Now then, the main factor in this kind of conditioning seems to me to be, as I said, the way in which we give children a sense of identity. And in this respect, we do something extraordinarily odd. We define a person. Consider this for a moment, this word person. Harry Emerson Phosdick once wrote a book called How to Be a Real Person. And this in translation means How to Be a Genuine Fake. Because the word person means a mask. The pair sonar, the mask worn by actors in Greek or Roman drama, which was a megaphone mouthed mask. So that through which pair sonar the sound goes. And so at the beginning of a play script, you will see the dramatic personae, the persons of the drama, that is to say the list of the masks that the actors are going to wear. But the word has so fallen from its original use that to be a person has come to mean your real identity, your true sincere on itself, the person. And we say of someone then, he's a real person, that means he's genuine. But we have confused, you see, the individual organism with the person, with that is to say its role. And we have defined the role of the person in such a way that it condemns everybody so defined to perpetual frustration. Now, how is this so? When you are a child, your parents, your peers, your teachers, your uncles and aunts are very anxious to define you. And what they are going to tell you is that you are a free agent. You are responsible. That is to say you are an independent first cause. You are an origin of actions and thoughts and feelings. And we can praise you or blame you for what you do. And above all, we require of you that you love us. You love your parents, you love your brothers and sisters. As Fred said, a child is not allowed to say to let that baby sister go back where it came from. Because that is not nice. All nice children love their brothers and sisters and their parents. Not of course because we tell you to do so, but because you would want to do it yourself. You see now here what's going on. You are required and commanded to do certain things which will be appreciated only if you do them voluntarily. Now you see when your identity is defined by society, you cannot resist it. You don't have the knowledge, you don't have the wisdom, you don't have the resources to understand that something is being put over on you. You cannot but help believe the definition of you as a free agent. But you believe yourself to be a free agent as a result of not being free. That is to say of being hopelessly unable to resist society's identification of you. So in the whole sense of our personality, there is a contradiction. And that is why the sense of ego of being oneself is simultaneously a sense of frustration. The feeling of iron is so far as most people are concerned. Is the feeling of tension between the eyes and behind them. Triggand Barrow, a remarkable man, did some studies about two kinds of awareness which he called "dietention and co-tension". And "dietentive" is the normal kind of awareness that we have of being a skin encapsulated ego, of being separate from the environment and of confronting an external objective world of which we are the independent observer. And this myth, he said, goes hand in hand with a physical state, which is a state of tension between the eyes. And he defined "co-tension" as another form of awareness, which you might call a certain kind of openness in which you realize that the external world is just as much you as anything inside your skin. And that you are not something that comes into this world on probation and doesn't really belong. This is, you see, the attitude that we foster in the child. That you are something not that comes into the world, but comes out of it. In the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree. That you are an expression, you as a human being are a symptom of nature. And that you really belong there and that, furthermore, your actual self. That is, finally and fundamentally you is not a separate and lonely part of the world. But the real you is the world itself, everything that there is. Expressing itself as this particular organism here and now, and of course as you look across the room, as all these other organisms in there here and now, we are all tits on the same cell, if I may put it so crudely, or if you want to put it more poetically, raise from the same sun. Now children very often ask their parents, you see as a result of having been given this funny sense of identity, mommy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else? This is a very common child's question, because the child gets the message from the parents using the English language, the French language, the German language or whatever. That I am somewhat in my body. You gave me my body. And who am I to whom this was given? You see, you can say to a girl in our culture, "Dying your absolutely gorgeous, you're so beautiful," and she says, "How like a man, all you think about is bodies. I may be beautiful, but that's my parents gave me my body, but I want to be admired for myself and not for my chassis." And this poor girl is a chauffeur. She's alienated from her body, and she doesn't take any credit, doesn't assume any responsibility for being what she is physically, and this is of course as much true men as of women. It is a common cultural attitude. We say, "I have a body." We don't say our "amber body." We feel a very sharp distinction in other words. Between our consciousness, which is a kind of focused attention, together with all those actions that we are able to perform voluntarily, on the one hand and on the other hand, everything both within us and outside us that seems merely to happen to us. Consider for a moment breathing. Do you breathe or are you breathed? You can feel it either way. If you become conscious of breathing, you get the sense that you are doing it in the same way as thinking or walking. But if you forget about it, it goes on. And you don't have to do it at all. That is why breathing exercises are fundamental in all meditation practices in the Orient. Because you can understand through breathing and through the experience of breathing, that there really is no differentiation between the involuntary experience and the voluntary experience. But when you set up game rules, whereby you identify all that you do voluntarily with you and all that happens involuntarily with the other, with what happens to you. And then you put a gulf between these things, not realizing, and this is the secret that is never given away. That self and other are inseparable, just in the same way that the front and the back of a coin are different but identical. There is all one coin. So in exactly the same way, the experience of self and the experience of other are mutually necessary. You wouldn't know what you meant by self unless you knew other, you wouldn't know other unless you knew what you meant by self. They are therefore polarities like north and south pole of a magnet, they are inseparable. But that secret doesn't get out because civilized language and thought ignores the fact that all classes, all logical classes and words are after all labels on classes are so constructed that they are intellectual boxes and every box which has an inside also must have an outside. And we think that inside exists. apart from outsides and outsides apart from insides. We don't realize that although they are opposed, they go together. And you see that is the secret of the whole thing. That is what the child is not let on to. And so instead the child is defined as a stranger in the earth and not as a symptom of the earth. And as a result of that we have the vast terrifying social problem of alienation, our feeling that the world outside human skins is unfeeling fully automatic stupidity which we have to fight and dominate. Otherwise it will swallow us up and condemn us to the imaginary terrors of everlasting nothingness. Now I feel in a way that when we say I wasn't responsible for being born, you know in the one of the great problems of psychotherapy today is passing the buck. By a kind of superficial Freudian attitude, you as a juvenile delinquent are not responsible for what you do because it was your parents who fouled you up. And so they write articles in the press that when instead of prosecuting the children we ought to prosecute the parents. So they hold the parents in with the parents say I know we're mixed up but that was the fault of our parents. And it all goes back to a guy called Adam and he blamed it on Eve and she blamed it on the serpent. And God said about the serpent. I'm not responsible for the serpent. He did it on his own because the serpent is the left hand of God. And what we call God, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, etc. That's the right hand. But Jesus Christ sits on the right hand of the Father. Nobody ever says who sits on the left because let not show left hand know what your right hand do it. See my temper got the better of me. I didn't really mean it. My lusts got the better of me. I'm really not responsible for them. They were given to me. You see now all this idea that you which is extremely limited so that we for example acknowledge thinking and walking and doing things with our hands and speaking but we don't acknowledge that we are growing our hair and beating our hearts. That is defined as happening to us. Birth is defined as something that happened to us. And we feel that must my father's responsibility. He had a dirty gleam in his eye and went after my mother and so on and he did it. I feel this is a hoax. Let's suppose now that we'll follow the theory of those astronomers who maintain that the universe is not a steady state thing but there was an enormous bang billions of years ago and from this bang all the galaxies were thrown out into space. Now then you look back at this as something which happened in the past and which is as it were the cause of the present but what I would say is that bang is still going on when you take a lovely bottle of black ink and throw it as hard as you can at a white wall and smash it. All it goes flush like this you know and in the center it's dense but on the out fringes it has all kinds of interesting curlicues and that's all you see one splash. Now in the same way we are at the moment sitting in this room and talking and thinking we are all the little curlicues out on the end of the original cosmic bang. We are it. We are not effects of it because to think that you are separate from the big bang is simply a matter of definition it's a way of talking. We separate events from each other in order to measure them that is to say the notion that there are distinct things and distinct events in the physical world is a calculus. It is like pretending that a curve is a series of points and so in the same way supposing you have a wiggle. Now you've got a wiggle line you see and the whole world is wiggle lines clouds mountains people rivers everything is wiggly lines. Now how much of a wiggly line is a wiggle you see what is one wiggle and you can see that this is a very arbitrary matter. So we see the more obvious wiggles in the world and we define them as people. Each of you is a wiggle and this wiggle is you and where did you begin when at parturation at conception or when you were evil gleaming your father's eye. Let's go back. You began on the first dawn of creation whenever that was that because you did it. See everybody is pretending they didn't and you can kind of play a game this is what gurus do you see zen masters and so on they give you a funny look and you say well I have a problem please teach you I'm this little me and I'm caught in this thing called life I got mixed up with all these tubes and nerves and it's uncomfortable and I don't know what to do about it because it's all going to fall apart and so the teacher says like whether it's Sri Ramana Maharshi or whether it's a Zen teacher who is mixed up in this thing who are you who asked this question show me find yourself you say well I just just me and he says oh come on you don't make me laugh see so eventually the person feels very bug because the the the teacher is calling his bluff and you are not the Lord God in the Jehovah sense of Christianity who is the cosmic technocrat who knows all the answers to everything but you are the Lord God in the Hindu sense who is different because the Hindu God it doesn't know how he does everything in the sense that he doesn't translate it into words he can't explain it because there's no point in explaining it you open and close your hand without knowing how you do it and yet you surely do it but you can't put it into words how it happens unless you're a physiologist and then even so it doesn't help you much to open and close your hand better than anybody else see so you do know how to do it but you can't explain it because the thing words are very clumsy way of talking about something which from the standpoint of words and the standpoint of logic is a very very complicated process so the if you ask Shiva how he dances the cosmos he would say I just do it like you say well I just open and close my hand so the Guru says to you listen Shiva don't kid me you know that you're not Shiva but you're just this thing called Mary Smith or John Doe etc. Ha ha and everybody says oh you can't admit that because you see if I did admit that I would have to be considered responsible and I would be considered crazy and I would feel that I really was one with this whole scheme of things and that's you see the secret that we don't let the children know in all well not in all but in many cultures initiation into manhood consists precisely in finding that out they finally get around to saying to you after all you know we've been pretending all this time that you were just a little boy a little girl but now we're going to let you in on the real story but not in this culture that's the problem in this culture we do have an initiation into adult life called psychoanalysis and everybody is ruined by education and then it's can't be helped because they have to know all the conventions and just like you to preserve beef you make it salt and when you're going to cook it you have to soak the salt out of it so in the same way to make a child tolerable companion you have to you have to be salted with education then when that mixes up all your natural instincts you have to be psychoanalyzed in order to be straightened out and recured of your education cured of your upbringing but the difficulty is you see that the assumptions of psychoanalysis and of a good deal of psychotherapy in various types and schools do not include the insight that you are basically the works they have in other words that that's simply because historically speaking psychotherapy originated in the 19th century. And therefore still carries on the 19th century assumptions about the nature of the universe. And all those 19th century assumptions about the universe were a put down. They included the myth, you see, that the universe is actually blind energy. It is essentially stupid. And man's intelligence and man's values and man's consciousness are a fluke in the world. And so this myth is that the world, the man in other words, is not a symptom of the world. Like an apple tree is a symptom. An apple is a symptom of an apple tree. But man is a fluke, kind of a joke, chance. And that to be realistic and hard-headed and factual, in other words, a strong man, you must realize that you are caught in this trap and face the facts. So then, for the West at any rate, this 19th century philosophy of man's place in the world and his identity has become the most plausible common sense. In other words, people say they are Christians, they say they are Jews, they say they are theosophists, they don't, it's Buddhists, etc., etc., but they are not. Because they know in their heart of hearts whatever they choose to believe that the world is as described in the 19th century myth because that's become our common sense. If people were Christians, they'd be screaming in the streets. They're not screaming in the streets. A few Jehovah's Witnesses are doing it, but they are, even they are fairly polite when they come to your front door. They show no urgency really. So they don't believe it because the plausible myth of our age is the myth of the fully automatic model of the universe in which man is a fluke and which he doesn't really belong. He's a chance, operation, and when you're dead you're dead and that's all that is to it. That's so plausible that really almost everyone believes in it without realizing that it is made out of whole cloth. It's nothing but a myth. So we're looking at things, we're striking an attitude. But this is the powerful, powerful idea that governs our children and that gives us our sense of basic identity, alienation, so that we live always in expectation of the future, which of course never happens. Today's podcast is a co-production with the Ram Das B here now podcast network. Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain courtesy of Moment Records and it's from his rhythm experience album. Today's talk and other talks in this part of the series are from the early radio talks and that 12-part series can be found in its entirety through the Alan Watts site. Go to AlanWats.org and look for audio recordings and you'll see it among the seminars. Classic Radio recordings and thank you once again for joining us. [Music]