To understand Buddhism, in any case, you must realise that it is not something like a teaching as we ordinarily understand the system of teaching. It isn't simply a way, as we have in our universities, of a teacher imparting you certain authoritative information which when you've heard it you've got the message. It's a dialogue. It's a situation in which the teacher doesn't really have anything to tell you. He's simply reacting to your own bringing up of problems. And it's as if people came to the Buddha and said, Sir, we suffer terribly and what are we going to do about that? And he replies, is it not true that you suffer because you desire? They said, well, maybe that makes sense. All right, he said, see if you can do without desire. And all those students go away and see if they

[01:06]

can calm their desires. They come back and say, this is pretty difficult because we are animal beings and we have all these appetites to begin with. And then beyond that, we're in the unfortunate position of being aware of time, being aware of the future. And although it's advantageous to know about the future, in the long run it's depressing because we all know that we come to a bad end and that everything falls apart in time. That would be especially true if you lived under the influence of Indian cosmology, where the world is regarded as a process that begins beautifully, but as it goes on it gets worse and worse till it destroys itself. Then there's a long period of rest and it starts out again beginning beautifully but getting worse and worse all the time. Everything runs down in time according to that cosmology. And so there seems to be a fundamental futility. Desire, desire

[02:13]

for whatever it is that you want. But behind this, the intention of studying desire, seeing whether one can discipline desire, whether one can curb it, is a deeper question altogether which is, what do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? Let's suppose I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say, well, we're getting out of college and we haven't the faintest idea what we want to do. So I always ask the question, what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like

[03:16]

to be poets, we'd like to be writers, because everybody knows you can't earn any money that way. Or another person says, well, I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I say, do you want to teach in a riding school? Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that. And forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually

[04:19]

turn into, you could eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really good at it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much, that's, everybody's, somebody's interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you'll find others who are. But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on spending things you don't like and doing things you don't like. And to teach your children to follow the same track. See what we're doing is we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we're living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. So it's all wretched no bonnet. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question. What do I desire? Well, when we answer that question

[05:24]

in a naive way, we figure out that we want to desire, what we want is to control everything. To create girls that don't grow old. Apples that don't rot. Clothes that never wear out. Conveyances that get from one place to another instantly so we don't have to wait. Parlor available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly like that. To get this funny technological omnipotence. But if you take time out to think about that and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that's where you want to be, you will soon see that's not what you want. Because the moment you

[06:31]

have a situation where you are really in control of things, that is to say in which the future is almost completely predictable. You will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the past. You've had it. That's not what you wanted. You want a surprise. You don't know what that's going to be because obviously it wouldn't be a surprise if it did. You want a pleasant surprise. And like you say, what sort of a surprise would be pleasant? And you can't really answer that. Because you know if there are to be such things as pleasant surprises there must also be unpleasant surprises. There must be rude shots. So you're like somebody taking one of those wishing well boxes, you know, where you fish in and you bring out a package. And you don't know whether you've got a dead rat in it or a new camera. And that's the way, that seems to be the thing that really excites

[07:41]

people. But quite certainly there comes out of this inquiry a feeling of real disillusionment with the idea of power. To be in power, to be in control, is not something that any sensible person wants. Imagine the situation of Big Brother, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Heinrich Himmler. To be glued, day and night, to a highly defended office, with telephones, television screens, watching, peeking, spying on everyone and anything, getting all this information together. Why? You could never leave the office. I mean the character of Big Brother goes home in

[08:45]

the evening and when he's back home, you know, there are guards sitting outside the door, there's that hotline telephone going to something. He's always having to be in control. And he can't take any time off. He can't go for a walk in the park with a friend or go innocently to the movies or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the bar with the big fella. You know what a pauper this guy is. Completely deprived. Because he wants to be in control. Because he wants power. People are frustrated in love because you're jilted. There's a natural tendency in a human being to seek power as a substitute. And that's a very negative thing. It's like having a bad temper. To seek power after you're trying to get back on the love beam. Because nobody wants power. Now you may say that's

[09:51]

shirking responsibility. That if you were a really responsible person, you would go out for power and try to use power to the best possible advantage. For the benefit of all. Alright, what would be the benefit of all? Ask them. What do you want me to do with this power? I'm dictator. What would you like me to do? Well nobody knows. Because they haven't thought it through. They think of all sorts of short range things. And they are largely contrived and confused because they're not well thought out. But again when it finally comes down to it, nobody wants to be God. Now then, when oriental philosophy and religion was first introduced to the western world, it was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power. It was introduced with the latter part of the 19th century when

[10:57]

we heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights and we would eventually develop Superman according to Nietzsche or D.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells. Remember all that early fantasy of where evolution would lead through the development of technology. And so at this time people like H.G. Godatsky were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the east. And they phrased it, they commended it to us in a technological spirit. That there was psychic technology. That there was something that you could go way beyond anything that could be done through the physical sciences. You could cause your physical body to disintegrate to another level of vibration and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else. You could

[12:02]

live as long as you liked because you controlled the fundamental processes. You could determine if you decided to die where you would be reformed exactly. You would be a complete master of life. And so there are still innumerable books being sold which present oriental philosophy and religion in this light. That Charlatan Lobsang Rampa who writes about Tibetan mastery. People read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game. So therefore the wise men of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life. As for example people whose emotions didn't bother them. Who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings. Who could foretell the future.

[13:12]

Who could read your thoughts. And who were above all kinds of ordinary human frailty. Well, when I first met Buddhist priests, Zen masters, Swamis, all these wise men from the East. One of the first things that impressed itself upon me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings. They had bad tempers. They were fussy about certain things. They just acted as I would expect human beings to act. And so at first I was very disappointed. I thought they had seen this play. They didn't come up to these promises of psychotechnology. But after a while I got to realize why not. That they had already thought all that through. They had thought through what might be done if one had all these powers. And had decided

[14:15]

that wasn't what they wanted. The powers of this kind in Sanskrit are called Siddhi. S-I-D-D-H-I. But there is hardly one decent scripture or text on yoga that does not say again and again, if you get Siddhi, ignore them. Go on to something else. These are only the foothills. These are furthermore not only foothills, but they are seductive blind alleys. Won't take you anywhere at all. Now I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn. Because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way. And if we never thought it through. When you get control of it, what are you going to do with it? Supposing I have a... I'm an alchemist. And I have a whole secret closet full of love potions. A very

[15:23]

potent one. And if I see a desirable woman, all I have to do is offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions in it. Instantly, I'm a master. Now what will I think that through? What will I do with the situation? Because all I've got again is that plastic doll that when I push it, it does what I tell it to. And doesn't have any comeback. What you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there. Where there's a comeback. And you say, my God, this thing is alive. It has the will of its own. It is not in my control. And I would like to have a relationship with something like that. Because it would never be dull. And also, you would feel true affection. After

[16:23]

all, you can make love to yourself in a mirror. You can have one of those Dutch wives. You buy them in a place in Kobe where you get these rubber girls that you fill with hot water. And sailors take them on long voyages. But what an awful thing, you know, when you realize that this thing has no surprise in it. No thing that it does on its own, you see. And so when you think things through like that, you understand, you do not want power. You don't want to control it. And therefore, these Zen Buddhist masters that I met and others, were not super occultists. And very many Westerners who visited Japan, expecting to get a satori, as a result of which they would know everything and control everything, were grievously disappointed and said, there's not much in this after all.

[17:27]

So therefore, from the standpoint of Buddhism, the fact that the power game is not the game is expressed by saying, a Buddha is one who has gone beyond the gods. Because the gods have power. The Buddhism imagines all kinds of levels of heaven worlds inhabited by all kinds of gods. And the supreme of all the gods is called Ishvara. But it is said that all those gods in their paradisal world are in samsara. They're in the round of birth and death. And what goes up must come down. They're immensely successful. They're at the peak of power, spiritual power. But they're not delivered yet. Because they still don't know what they want. And therefore, in the exploration of what you want, you get to the

[18:47]

point where having all pleasures at your command, and they fall. And you think of new sources of pleasure. And eventually you'll get like the ancient Romans, who had all these mad crowds of barbarians, who had to go every Saturday to the Coliseum for a show that really had to surpass everything. Because they had public farms, they had prostitutes, they had every kind of luxury. But when they went to see one of the big shows that people like Nero put on, they would have, for example, floats circling the Coliseum, all full of slave girls from distant parts of the Mediterranean, garlanded with flowers and waving at the crowd and going innocently around. And the next minute they would release wild lions into

[19:49]

the arena to eat up all the slave girls. They got a big sadistic kick out of that. Because you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the Naraka world, that is to say, the hells. When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So naturally you descend from the Deva world at the top of the wheel to the Naraka world at the bottom. Whereas it shows all these beings in states of torture. Now of course the priests say when they're bringing up children, if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world. But this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world. You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want. As a result of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure,

[20:56]

which ends you eventually in the pursuit of pain. So when you're in the hell world, that's the way you want to be. So then the question is, to clarify once more, what do we want? If you understand first of all that you don't want absolute power, you don't want absolute control. You want, yes, some control. You see, we always love controlling something that's not really under our control. Remember I gave you the illustration right in the beginning of holding a gyroscopic top, and feeling sometimes you're with it but sometimes it's alive under your hand. And this sensation too, you often get say in driving a car or something like that, it's more or less under your control but on the other hand it isn't. And that's

[22:00]

the beautiful thing, because when something is partly under your control but isn't, then you have the same sort of relationship with it that you have when you have someone you love, some other person. They're partly under your control because they've agreed to live with you and go along with you and so on, but also they're not. And the measure to which they're not is the measure to which they seem really alive to you. So then we ask the question, if the motivation of power gaining disappears, you've seen through it and you know that's not what you want, what other motivation takes its place as the origin of actions? And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Essentially because when you want to relate to another living being, what you really are

[23:19]

asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights. You don't want a doll. You want another you, another self. Because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are. And so then at once, when you see that that is the case, and that the

[24:20]

most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others. And you can see at once yourself in the situation of all the other people. And then you think, no, I don't want to control these people. I would like them, yes, to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do. But obviously I can't force that, because if I forced it they wouldn't be happy. See, when you marry someone, when you have a family, you want your children, you want your relatives, you want your wife, to be happy to do the things for you that they do. And so we say to each other, would you like to bring the washing in? And very often the answer is no, but I will. Because you see,

[25:31]

we put it that way because we always hope that the things that we do for each other will be pleasurable to both sides. So a school teacher will get up in class and say, what nice boy will clean the blackboard for me? All these ways we use are trying to get voluntary cooperation, willingly given help. That's what we look for. But here is a, there is a, despite the lot of foolishness that goes on, this is a sound thing, I think, that there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do

[26:43]

for you what you want, because they like it. As you, on your side, would want to do something for them in that way, and so it gives pleasure to the other person. I think in sexuality, where you get a kind of a critical example of this, the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving orgasm to women. And if that doesn't happen, many men feel disappointed. Because they, the thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it. Now that's compassion, in the real sense of the word. Feeling with and through someone else. Where the whole trick is that you lose control for a while

[27:44]

of the situation and say, I throw the ball to you, now it's yours. Now I may seem, therefore, as a result of talking this way, to be talking like a Jewish or a Christian theologian. Because that's what they say about God. That God did something called kenosis in the beginning of all time. Kenosis is a Greek word meaning self-empty, self-sacrifice, giving up. And thereby conferred freedom of will and the power to love on angels and human beings. And therefore took a terrific risk by trusting the other. By trusting a principle called other that's not under your control. With God, of course, it is out of his control. But he sits back and smokes a cigar sometimes and lets it go to see what the children will

[28:45]

do. Like this all in the Greek past as we think for God. So, but you see it's really in a way the same idea as the Hindu idea. When the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says, no, God gets lost in that person and gives up power. And it's really the same thing. The idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So that the more you give the power away, what you're really doing is you're othering yourself. Now the more you other yourself by giving power away, the more of a self you

[29:47]

are. Because self and other are reciprocal. So you find that people who through a sadhana, a yoga discipline, have overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think theoretically they would all be non-entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego strength. But actually they're nothing of the kind. They are, every one of them unique, they're all quite different from each other, and they are very, very what I would call strong characters. Because the more they have given it up, the more they get it. So in this way of thinking, let's put it in another dimension for the

[30:56]

moment. Which of course is going to include as much of yourself as you can objectify. In other words, your stomach, your intestine, your everything, you see. Save it all. Now it's your turn. Let's see what you're going to do. Let it happen. You know, you do this completely out of control. And you find that you, I have to put it in a provisional way first. You get the sensation that everything else is living you. Isn't it due? That you've given away control, you see, to everything else. The lovely irresponsible state of being.

[32:01]

But then, you see, you do the flip. In giving away the control, you've got it. You've got the kind of control you wanted. That's to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world, but you didn't have to make up your mind what it should do. You let it decide. Now do you see that's how your bodies work? You don't have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do. You've delegated all that authority. If the President of the

[33:08]

going to do, he can't be President. He's got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way as you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do. And this is the secret of what we will call organic power as distinct from political power. Lao Tzu puts it in this way, the great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them. The more, therefore, you relinquish power, trust others, the more powerful you become, but in such a way that

[34:15]

instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else. And they carry it on for you. So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it, I want to wake up at 6 o'clock, and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. So the seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity, of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe, is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe. That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as another,

[35:19]

as you would another, and say, let's see what you're going to do. But in doing that, you see, in saying that to everything else that you have been taught to think is not you, you are also saying it to yourself. Because finally, as I pointed out, you do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. There was this guy who, a farmer, who ordered a help man summoned. And the farmer was an extraordinarily efficient worker. For the first day, he put him on sawing logs. And he sawed more logs than anybody

[36:21]

ever thought. It was fantastic. They were all done in one day. So the next day, he put him onto mending fences. And there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm. And in one day, he had the whole thing done. So he thought, what am I going to do with this guy? So he took him down into the basement and said, look, here are all the potatoes that are coming from this harvest. And I want you to sort them into three groups. Those that we sell, those that we use for seeding, and those that we throw away. So he left him at that. At the end of the day, the laborer came back and said, well, that's enough, mister. I quit. Well, he said, you can't quit. I've never had such an excellent worker. I'll raise your salary. And I'll do anything to keep you around here. Ah, I said no. So I'm mending fences and chopping wood. But this potato business is decision after decision after decision after decision. So when we decide, we're always worrying, did I think

[37:31]

this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite. So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. And then when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment. I mean, I'm speaking a little extremely, making some fun of it, and so on, because after all, we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds. But we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right. It's amazing how often it works. But worriers are people who think

[38:38]

of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen. So then when you make a decision, and it works out all right, I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control. But somehow or other, you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority. Why very great businessmen are those who can delegate authority. Trust others to work for them. Because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism. Delegation

[39:44]

of authority. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. You see, then what is happening is this. The more you let go of it and trust it, as if it were quite other than you, the more you realize the inseparable identity of self and other. To go back, if you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self,

[40:52]

no go. If on the other hand you find it through giving self, that is control, over to other and trusting that, you may make a mistake. You may make a bad gamble. But in the long run, you are acting on a principle, which has the backing of evolution. This is the way biological evolution goes on. Constant delegation of authority. Why, obviously, the democracy is superior to the monarchy. The talk show has said that democracy is always right, but for the wrong reasons. Because there is operating in a democracy the principle that Buckminster Fuller called synergy. And synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system, the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members. Because that goes

[42:05]

back again to this point. We are always entering a new environment. We don't ever know fully what the new environment is, because the only environments we know are the past ones. There has always been operating in the development of cellular life on any level, a new way of organization, higher than any existing form. And we are not aware of it until after it happens. If you ever saw, for example, the film Contiki, this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsa wood raft to sail from South America to the Pacific Island. But once he had set this in motion, he discovered that all sorts of unexpected factors cooperated with him. That when the wood got wet it expanded so that the ties bit into it and held it completely

[43:12]

secure. He never expected that. And he found that as he sailed along, a flying fish would simply alight flat on the deck every morning for breakfast. There are all kinds of natural factors. He had touched a key where he was flowing with the course of nature, and everything cooperated with him. He had touched the key. He had made the act of sailing. And he was just picking up, in other words, a practice which had been hundreds and hundreds of years ago had been followed by others who had worked it out by their great ecological awareness. So we do come out of this way of thinking to something which has, I would say, the most

[44:13]

enormously creative and revolutionary social consequences. That it has become not virtuous, not self-sacrificing, not anything like that. It has become the hardened, practical politics to let go of control to others, to give up trying to dominate the future. Also, in a parallel way, it has become at this time in our history very much hard practical politics to learn how to enjoy ourselves. You can go to the Protestant people with their

[45:24]

Protestant ethics, who are against this kind of thing, and now say to them, with great glee, it is your song, this, to learn how to enjoy yourself. Why? Because in an age of People have really got to know how to enjoy themselves. Because if they don't, they'll smash the whole future of the human race. So a utopia has become not some sort of a dream, but an urgent necessity. We can't do without it. Because if we try to do without it, what's going to happen is that we are going to terminate our race in a mutual massacre of scapegoats. And so the present paranoia in the United States that is going on, where everybody is

[46:35]

making up a new scapegoat, and how great it will be to demolish them, or get them out of power, all this kind of bickering and right-and-left politics has become irrelevant. Because we now have the opportunity of trusting our own intelligence, our own technology, to take the risk of doing what we want, which will work, to the extent that we realize that what I want, basically, what I really

[47:35]

want is what you want. And I don't know what you want. Surprising. But that's my, that's the kinship between I and God. So when I ask, I go right down to the question, to be started with. What do I want? The answer is, I don't know. When Bodhidharma was asked, who are you, which is another form of the same question, he said, I don't know. Planting flowers, to which the butterflies come. Bodhidharma says, I know not. I don't know what I want. When you don't know what you want, you've reached the state of desirelessness. When

[48:36]

you really don't know, you see, there's a beginning stage of not knowing, and there's an ending stage of not knowing. In the beginning stage, you don't know what you want, because you haven't thought about it, or you've only thought superficially. Then when somebody forces you to think about it, and goes through and says, yeah, I think I like this, I think I like that, I think I like the other, there's a middle stage. Then you get beyond that. Say, is that what I really want? In the end you say, no, I don't think that's it. I might be satisfied with it for a while, and I wouldn't turn my nose up at it, but it's not really what I want. Why don't you really know what you want? Two reasons that you don't really know what you want. Number one, you have it. Number two, you don't know yourself, because you never can. The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge, just as a knife doesn't

[49:46]

cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself. I don't know. And this I don't know, utters in the infinite interior of the spirit. This I don't know is the same thing as I love, I let go, I don't try to force or control. It's the same thing as humility. And so the Upanishad says, if you think that you understand Brahman, you do not understand, and you have yet to be

[50:47]

instructed further. If you know that you do not understand, then you truly understand, for the Brahman is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not. And the principle is that any time you, as it were, voluntarily let up control, in other words cease to cling to yourself, you have an access of power. Because you're wasting energy all the time in self-dissent, trying to manage things, trying to force things to conform to your will. The moment you stop doing that, that wasted energy is available. Therefore you are, in that sense, having that energy available, you are one with the divine principle, you have the energy. When you're trying, however, to act as if you were God,

[51:50]

that is to say you don't trust anybody and you're the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line, you lose the divine energy. Because what you're doing is simply defending yourself. So then, the principle is, the more you give it away, the more it comes back. Now you see, I don't have the courage to give it away. I'm afraid. And you can only overcome that by realizing, and we're going back to a principle that I explored this morning, you bear it away because you know we're holding on to it. The meaning of the fact, you see, that everything is dissolving constantly, that we're all falling apart, we're all in the process of constant death, and that the world we hope men set their hearts upon turned to ashes, but it prospered and like snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting a little hour to a song, you know, all that homarchion jazz. You know, the cloud-capped towers, the

[52:57]

gorgeous palaces, the great globe itself, I, all which it inherits, will dissolve, and like the distant substantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We're all falling apart. Everything. That's the great assistance to you. See, that fact that everything is in decay is your helper. That is allowing you that you don't have to let go, because there's none in the whole of London. It's achieved for you in other words, by the process of nature. So once you see that you just don't have a prayer, and it's all washed up, and that you will vanish and leave not a rack behind, and you really get with that, suddenly you find you have the power. This enormous access of energy. But it's not power that

[53:57]

came to you because you grabbed it. It came in entirely the opposite way. The power that comes to you in that opposite way is power with which you can become. You've been listening to Alan Watts with Part 3 from a seminar entitled, Do You Do It, or Does It Do You? If you'd like a cassette copy of this talk, send $9 to MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94966. Be sure to specify Part 3 from the seminar, Do You Do It. Address again, MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94966. This is S. P. R. Charter with a comment on Dilemma and the Debt of Thyroid.

[54:58]

I should like to draw a verbal cartoon. A man studying a heavy book, a tome if you will, is standing beside a cornucopia, a horn, which is expelling a constant stream of information even while the rising datapile already reaches his chest, and he needs to hold his book high above his head in order to study it. Perception should not be needed, but if one were wanted perhaps the single word dilemma would suffice, and of course it is quite a dilemma. What is to be done with this mounting datapile? No sooner do we begin to make certain connections from information we already possess in our attempts to study and evaluate the whole, so to speak, than another newer piece of information swamps us. How can we evaluate what we already know if we believe that somewhere hidden in the constant piling of data

[56:05]

is a particular piece of information which will modify all our past knowledge, which we have not yet evaluated? And once we hit this particular piece, should we keep on searching a pile for yet other pieces? To what aim? In the belief that knowledge is merely a collection of pieces of information, yet the datapile continues to increase nearly endlessly, it would seem. If there is any resolution to this dilemma to the man in the cartoon, it would be to know that it is there. Well, information is often surely useful, occasionally not, and more often than we are willing to admit, quite repetitive, equivalent to the research technician who again and again ten thousand times boils distilled water at atmospheric pressure and finds the boiling point to be a hundred degrees centigrade.

[57:07]

And then, at the ten thousandth and one experiment, if you will forgive the expression, those were surprised that the water begins to boil at ninety degrees centigrade. What does he then do? Does he check his instruments to establish their accuracy, or does he fire off a project proposal to the Ford Foundation? One resolution to this dilemma of the constant stream of data of the man in the cartoon is this, in my view. The datapile is not a prime source for knowledge, for the finding of intelligent connections. It is useful for extraction purposes, for the extraction from the pile of that data which one needs in one's quest for knowledge. The datapile is equivalent to a dump to which all sorts of things are constantly added,

[58:10]

and I don't mean this in any pejorative manner, because dumps serve many useful purposes, indeed essential ones. But in order to find the dump materials of some benefit, you need to approach it with some forethought already in mind, unless you happen to be a miscellaneous collector of all sorts of trivia, either for the sake of trivia or because you hope to find some uses some day for the bits and the pieces. The man in the cartoon obviously is seeking knowledge, and with some forethought. The steady stream of data which is nearly submerging him interferes quite actually with his search to make intelligent connections. He needs to extract himself from the pile, even while knowing of its existence and its potential value to him, whenever he finds that he needs to acquire some pieces of data

[59:12]

which may apply positively or negatively to his search for knowledge. He may find what he believes he needs within the datapile, and he may not. But the pile itself does not then immobilize him, precisely because he is not dependent upon it for his continuing attempts to make intelligent connections, knowing full well that regardless of the mass of the datapile, it is only he, as an individual, who is capable of making these connections. This is S.P.R. Charter. And this is KPFA and KPFB. Berkeley, KFC, Fresno, FM 91, Hologram. Please stay tuned for this next program.

[60:02]

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