In a moment, you'll be hearing another talk by the late Alan Watts. This won the fourth lecture from the series, The Seminar, Pursuit of Pleasure. First a reminder that you can get more information about the spoken word of Alan Watts by sending a self-addressed, stamped, legal-sized envelope to MEA Box 303, Sausalito 94965. We'll repeat the address later. Now here is Alan Watts. I suppose many of you are familiar with the work of Krishnamurti, and you will of course recognize that there is something in common between what he says and what I've been saying to you, but probably you will also notice that there's something different. Because Krishnamurti is more of a purist than I am, and he takes apparently a rather negative

[01:09]

attitude to things that are recognizably religious. That is to say, he sets no store by religious literature, by ceremonies, by meditation practices, religious ideas, and so forth, and does without them. He wouldn't dream of being involved in a ritual, at least not one that would be mistaken for a religious ritual. I, on the other hand, have a different attitude about those things, because I, first of all,

[02:12]

am not going to argue with anybody about their religion. Because everybody's religion is the same sort of thing as their life. You may be living a very weird life, but I could say, speaking sort of from a Hindu point of view, that that's your trip this round. If the generation of Maya, of the world illusion, is the play of the Godhead, then he will play the villains as well as the heroes, the fools as well as the sages, and the sinners as well as the saints. And that's why I'm not out to convert anybody or win souls, because it's as if I would go

[03:16]

and talk to a pig and say, my dear pig, you should be a cow, or to a giraffe and say, your neck is too long, or to an elephant and say, you are too heavy. I try to see what people are, not in the sense of trying to classify them or type them, but to see if it is possible to find what is called divine in every disguise. And beware old man Kabir was, when he came to maturity, he used to look around, he was a mystic who was part Hindu, part Buddhist, part Islamic, who lived in India in about the 15th century, and he used to look around and say, to whom shall I preach?

[04:19]

Because he saw the beloved, the Godhead, on all sides in every being, and therefore felt it would be presumptuous to make any recommendations. That's a strange state of mind, because it's so easily made over into a very shallow Pollyanna-ish optimism. But you know, in the mythology of the Hindus, they have some very nitty-gritty characters. Let's take Kali, Kali the female, one of Shiva's girlfriends, Shakti's. She really represents the dark side of yin, the feminine of feminine, the spider mother, the devouring feminine, the night which sucks in all days. But also, Kali is the mother of the universe, but it emphasizes the dark side of the mother,

[05:28]

and she's shown with fangs, black-skinned. In one hand she carries a scimitar, in another a severed head, and she is a bloody character. And, you know, there are Kalis all around us. And it's not like saying, oh Kali's not so bad after all, she has her good side. The thing is to see her bad side as an aspect of the divine, and then genuinely be able to refrain from saying, I wish you would improve. And it sounds sort of tough to do that. I mean, I feel the same way when I'm confronted with a representative of the militant, lunatic fringe of Protestantism, a Jehovah's Witness, or a Southern Baptist, or a Billy Graham type.

[06:35]

I have immense personal distaste for that kind of religion. So I wonder, and I look at it, and I think, where is the real kick in that? What are those people really doing? What do they get their basic pleasure from in this? How can God be playing that game? That's a very mysterious business. So I try to look at it that way, instead of blanketly saying, well, all your religious gimmicks are vanity, therefore cease and desist. And that's the attitude which I take to any practice which may be designated religious. That it's an art form, that it is a way of expressing exuberance, delight, and above

[07:54]

all, the sense of wonder, appreciation of the magic of being. And I've often quoted that saying of Vanderloo, that the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced, and that people who try to explain mysteries are people who try to destroy mysteries, and that is, in a way, to destroy life. It's often said by men that women are mysterious. Is that a complaint or a compliment? I take it as a compliment. May they remain mysterious, and may men remain mysterious to women. But you would see that there seems to be, after all I've said, and after all that Krishnamurti

[08:56]

says, there would seem to be something inconsistent in practicing meditation, or going to church, or participating in a ritual. If we didn't do those things, I think myself that life would be very much impoverished. All the churches would be turned into museums. The holy scriptures would be used for fuel. The rituals might live on in funny dances, but we should be scrubbed clean of superstition.

[09:57]

And I don't exactly look forward to that prospect from an aesthetic point of view. I like magical toys. I don't believe in them in the sense of thinking they will help me in the competitive games of life. But when I see a figure of the Buddha seated on his lotus throne with an aureole behind him, an incense burning in front of him, I feel something glowing, warm, civilizing, humanizing, and also mysterious.

[11:06]

It's very hard to say what it is, or to put your finger on it, because I don't think it would be there if I could. Especially the Mahayana form of Buddhism has spread a kind of warm glow all over northern Asia. It's such a bane, such a sophisticated religion. It doesn't harass you with preachments. It doesn't pursue you. It doesn't make a busybody nuisance of itself. And yet it fosters the arts. It fosters compassion and concern, but not of the kind of concern for people that shoves what is good for them down their throats. And it's so roomy.

[12:16]

That's why it's called the Mahayana, the great vehicle, or the great course. It has so many different ways in it, so many different practices. And there's no kind of scrubbing people down to the basic essentials. It's not plagued with officiology. So personally, you see, I dig that. I also like that side of Christianity, where it's expressed in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. I don't like scrubbed Christianity, the Protestant kind, where they take away the candles and the vestments and the mystery and the incense and make it all rational. Because when you go for, you ask the question, what are the essentials of a religion?

[13:18]

To my mind, when people reduce any religion to what they call the essentials, they get rid of all the important things and leave in only the misleading ones. Because when we get it down to essentials, we say, we get back to this question, you see, that all religions offer a way of salvation or of liberation or whatever it may be, of union with God. And the Protestant would say to the Roman Catholic, well, all your rituals and obscure ways are getting in the way of man reaching God directly. We want to get all that crud out of the way and find a more efficient way of getting to God so that we can reduce the course from five years to ten weeks. Now, I have to take off all those holy days, too, which distract from business, because

[14:28]

it gives our apprentices holidays and we don't want to lose time. We're on the make. But you see, the moment you reduce the time it takes, you take out the religion. Because you make it into an enterprise to get something. And that's what I've been telling you all this weekend. You can't do. Because the moment you try to get God, you assume that you aren't there. When you don't try to get, there's a chance that you may discover that you are there already. We were thinking over lunch how funny it would be if we got a real, speeded up, easy course in meditation without tears. All the nonsense taken out of it, only the essentials, with a big headline, They Laughed When I Sat Down to Meditate. So here are all the merchants who are telling you the quick way.

[15:32]

But what is fascinating about the non-efficient religions is precisely their colorfulness, all the unessential things they do, all the exuberance of flowers and smells and ornaments and color. Do you notice in efficient religions the first thing they take away is color? Why do people take away color? Oh, they say color shows the dirt, you have to wash it all the time. So you wear black because you live in a grimy city and you don't want to show the dirt. That's efficiency.

[16:35]

But color is the first thing that goes. But let's suppose we look at religion in an entirely different way. We have begun, first of all, you see, with the understanding that religion is not an acquisition and therefore there's nothing you can do to acquire it. You begin from the point of recognition that you are what you are, you can't improve yourself because if you try to you'll only make yourself more tied up and messed up. So you have to recognize that because there's no alternative. And then you're in a position to be very simply and ingenuously aware of life without trying

[17:43]

to do anything to it. You let it happen and then it begins to show its color. And then you feel intensely the marvel and magical nature of the world so that whatever you do by way of a religious practice is an art form, like singing, to express the marvelous feeling that comes out of this. Not to secure yourself, not to acquire anything, any reward, but simply to live it up. It's difficult perhaps for many people to understand how you could be living it up by meditating. Meditation seems on the surface so dull. Why sit still for a long time?

[18:46]

That's awful, you know how when they tried to make you sit still as a child how you resented it? You'd be jumping around looking for this, that and the other all the time. Of course you can do that, you can take up dervish dancing as a form of yoga. If your temperament suggests it. But what about the more ordinary still sitting kind of meditation? Nobody seems to realize that it's supposed to be fun. You know when you have been sick and you just have to lie in bed, there's nothing else to do, while everybody else in the world goes about their business, and you're left with almost nothing to do except listen.

[19:51]

And you hear all the funny little noises that you don't normally notice, of not only people but also animals and birds and things going about their daily business. And it suddenly occurs to you that this is an unheeded symphony that's going on. You notice the sunlight leaving curious patterns on the painted walls, maybe of a hospital room where there are patches of damp and cracks in the ceiling. And because you are in a condition of complete receptivity and passivity, all this starts to come to life, because of course passivity is the root of life. Activity is the end of it, but passivity is the beginning. It's the womb from which creation starts.

[20:57]

And so, in the same way, when you meditate, in some schools you will be given something to meditate on, although very often when an Oriental explains that he meditates and a questioner asks, as he will, what do you meditate on, the Oriental will look vaguely surprised. He says, I don't know what you mean, I don't meditate on, I meditate. Although as I say, you might be given the practice of concentrating on a visual image of a chakra, or a mandala, or a syllable, or humming a sound, or some focal point, but that isn't necessary. When you are at the point of which I'm speaking, where you are simply not doing anything, even

[22:03]

not trying to do nothing, because you can't, then you are sitting and you are as aware as can be of every tip of a hair, and you've got nowhere to go, you're not in a hurry, there's a period of forty minutes, an hour, or whatever it is, where it is only required of you that you be. Now, normally, at that moment, one is impatient, somehow bothered, by having to be restricted. If you take it easy, you will feel no restriction.

[23:11]

I'm trying to think how I can explain this. If you lift up a heavy weight, and hold it up on the tips of your fingers, say it's a big rock, normally we think of that as an effort, to maintain it there. But there's a certain way of looking at this, where you say, it isn't an effort, it's just going to stay there. And instead of fighting against any feeling of tension that the rock causes, you just turn that tension into, it's going to stay there. It's a curious thing, you can support a heavy weight for a very oddly long time, doing that. So in the same way, when you sit, even if your legs hurt, or you get uncomfortable, there's

[24:19]

a certain attitude wherein that just disappears, and you've got this extraordinary, the only thing it does is it keeps you awake, which is fine. Then you've got this extraordinary feeling of the amazing nature of looking at reality, at life, without doing anything to it, without any sense of hurry, without any wish to improve it, just let it happen. And you can understand then why Buddha images look blissful, because cats do this, cats

[25:27]

will sit for ages and watch. American Indians will do it, they'll sit for hours by a roadside. We think they're dumb, you know, sometimes I sits and thinks, but mostly I just sits. We think they have nothing better to do. Someone else was saying at lunch that if you're bothered on the phone and somebody asks you, could you come over this morning and do thus and so, it's perfectly legitimate to say, no, this is my morning for a hair appointment, this is my morning to go down shopping, etc., and I can't come. But if you say, this is my morning to be alone, people would think you were very strange, because you wouldn't be doing something for the world. But hermits, for example, and people who live solitary lives and meditate a great deal,

[26:28]

are doing an enormous amount for the world. Just the very suspicion that people exist like that is marvelous for everybody. Because it says to all of us, where do you think you're going? Why are you making, why are you raising so much dust? Because you think you're going somewhere and you're already there. And this dust is getting in everybody's nostrils and it is polluting everything, all because you are so busy to put up this big thing, whatever it is. It's getting top-heavy and it's getting a bore holding the thing up. So, to know that there are hermits deep in the forest is like knowing that there are

[27:35]

still streams and flowers which no one has ever seen. We are mostly of the mentality that if we heard of a hidden valley full of flowers which nobody has ever seen, we would say, that should be open to the public, should be bought for the nation, and they should put in a ranger station and toilet facilities and a picnic ground. It would be still worse if there were one person living in there and enjoying it all by himself and say, the selfish bastard, that he should live in that beautiful flowery valley all alone. Open it up, let's all have a look. And then when everybody's had a look, the place is a desert. Now I live opposite a forest.

[28:40]

It's in a state park, and I can see right across to that forest. It's a very big and very dense forest occupying the whole side of a valley. And I think sometimes it would be fun to explore it, and then on the other hand, I decide I'm not going to. I'm not going to disturb it. The only one who lives there is an old she-goat who comes out every so often and dances on top of a big rock. Oh, of course, there are birds, and probably deer, and skunks, rabbits, but nobody ever goes there. You never see anybody in that forest. And it's just wonderful to leave it alone. We saw one person, a Japanese man, very sad.

[29:43]

Yeah, he was a poet who went in there once, but that's about all. So, you see, here two things, two trains of my thought connect. The first train was, you see, the folly of trying to do good, and the second train is that you are doing good by doing nothing. That the very hands-off on this thing called life, the meditative attitude, which realizes to you how magical it all is, also benefits other people in the same way as the untouched

[30:46]

forest and wilderness land benefits people. It's essential to our sanity to have those areas of uninterfered with life. So we might say that is the passive side of exuberant religion, is the meditative. The one activity in which we are completely here and now, and not seeking any result. The other side of this exuberance is, of course, the musical, dancing, ritualistic side of religion. Many years ago, I decided to be a minister of religion, because I was young and wanted

[32:04]

to make out how I could fit into regular society. I was 24 and I was giving much less well-attended seminars and lectures as I do today, but I thought, I don't know, this is going to result in my being a kind of funny oddball. I think I ought to cooperate with the institutions of Western society and try to live from within them. So, I thought, well, the nearest thing that is regular to what I'm doing is being a minister. Because I'm not quite the college professor, that's a little too academic. I'm interested in the practical side. So a minister is the nearest equivalent in Western society to what I want to do. Then I was given the choice, well, what kind of a minister will I be? My publisher, who was Eugene X-man of Harper's in those days, was a Quaker.

[33:13]

And he said, oh, this ministry business. He was the religion editor for Harper's and he'd seen enough of ministers. And so he said, why don't you just join the Quakers? But I couldn't do that, because I'd seen quite a bit of the Quakers, and while I respected them enormously for their sincerity, they were just too good. They were just too serious, concerned, and I found that lugubrious. I couldn't become a Roman Catholic because I was married. So I considered the Methodists, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and found them unspeakably dreary. I mean, I'd only to look at the yellow stained glass in a Presbyterian church to realize

[34:14]

the full horror of the religion. You know that kind of yellow glass that's supposed to make dreary days look sunny, makes them look worse? Sometimes they have a sort of a round piece and it looks like the bottom of a beer bottle. And then sometimes they paint on it, you know, fake stained glass, they paint a crown with a sword through it in the form of a cross or something like that, and it looks simply awful. They have a big black Bible up there, enormous thing with thick covers, all black, and it's gold edges. And I always found that sort of thing extremely depressing. Well, I, of course, figured I was brought up in the Church of England, and I knew all their rituals by heart, but the advantage of the Episcopal Church was that you can

[35:16]

do almost anything in it and get away with it so long as you use the Book of Common Prayer. But you can use the Book of Common Prayer as if you were a Baptist minister, or you can use it as if you were a Roman Catholic priest. So, I discovered a church in New York where they were really living it up. It's called the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. It's practically invisible, it's near Times Square, but you can't see it because it's entirely flanked in by high buildings, but it's enormous. I went in there and found they were having one whale of a time in there. They had Gregorian chant, they had polyphonic music by Palestrina and Vittorio, they had incense, they had vestments, they had candles, they had everything in sight. I thought, wow, that place is beautiful. And so, naturally, I went into it from that aspect.

[36:17]

But I found out one thing about that kind of religion is never get to know the clergy. Keep it at a distance. Don't get involved. Don't get into the politics of it. Stay away. Because underneath, there's intrigue, there's all kinds of fussiness, like, I mean, the compulsive ritualist, when he celebrates mass, will keep his thumb and forefinger closed like this, ever after he touches the consecrated bread, so that no tiny particle of the body of Christ will be disposed of in an irreverent way. I mean, after all, when you've got your fingers like this, you can't pick your nose. So then, in the end, when the whole thing is finished, he's had his fingers together

[37:27]

all the time, he puts his fingers over the chalice, like this, and the acolyte pours water and he rubs it, and then he drinks it, you see? Because there's a tremendous anxiety as to whether the heart of the universe should be treated irreverently, as if it couldn't take care of itself, you know? Well then, you know, that is getting absurd, but on the other hand, when you see another kind of ritual, nobody is expecting to get anything out of this ritual, because it's not considered as magic, it's the Japanese tea ceremony. It is, apparently, a purely secular ritual, it is a way of drinking tea together, socially. Actually, it's a Zen Buddhist ritual, because in Zen, you get to a place where there isn't

[38:28]

any difference between religion and everyday life. But they don't, therefore, knock the ritual out of everyday life, they put the ritual into everyday life, have the tea ceremony. And there, the beauty of gesture, and of the primitive style vessels that are used, and the serenity of doing this ritual for no reason except the ritual, is a very lovely experience. But you see, in the life of America today, and you notice it here, in a rather special way, there is very little joyous ritual. I mean, there are Freemasons, and there are Shriners, and Knights of Columbus, but those

[39:31]

people laugh at their own rituals, really. They don't understand them, they have no real feeling for it, it's a kind of a clowning affair where you dress up, and you do this, and you give the money to charity, and so forth. And in the Roman Catholic Church here, they don't understand ritual, because a very strange disaster happened to the Catholic Church in this country. It all began in Ireland, well it began in France, to be exact. In the 18th century, there was invented in Paris by a fellow by the name of Jansen, a kind of Catholic Calvinism, a very austere, gloomy form of Catholicism. And they had a big seminary in Paris, and all the Irish seminarists used to go there

[40:32]

to study. And they brought this very, very unjoyous, puritanical form of Catholicism to Ireland, and from Ireland it came to the United States. And so, the spirit of American Catholicism was infected by the same utilitarianism in religion that you find in Protestantism. And so therefore, when that kind of Catholic priest touches ritual, he doesn't know how to do it. He just churns it out. So that you get the impression, you see, that the Catholic Church was a wham-bam and thank

[41:36]

you ma'am kind of religion, where, you know, you put a quarter in the slot, and out comes a goody. You go to confession, and you don't even make the full confession, you know, you just say the sins that I remember are so-and-so and so-and-so, and the priest says blah-blah-blah-blah, and it's done, see? So therefore, we need to be delivered from utilitarian religion altogether. And come to the realization that the highest form of religion is perfectly useless. And this is the true nature of play, and of course it's the true nature of the universe. You see, what I'm doing is I'm playing a sort of little trick here because I'm showing you

[42:38]

the importance of the unimportant. See we got ourselves down to being absolutely incapable, that's what we did to begin with, and show you that that's where you really begin to live. So now again we're going to get down the very highest that there is, the Godhead, and religion, and the saints and angels, and the Dhyani Buddhas in their mandalas, sitting at the heart of the universe, and we're going to show that they are all quite useless. They serve no purpose whatever, they are not good for anyone or for anything. Why? They don't need to be. They're not going anywhere because they're there, and the expression, the maya of the universe which they show is not done because they have some purpose to work out. It's the way you spend your time when you don't have any purpose to work out.

[43:42]

Then you can afford to be devious. You don't have to go the direct way, if you've got a purpose, get there baby, see? Like that, get there. But if you don't have any purpose, you wander, and you go, and suddenly you say, well that's the outline of a leaf, and all those veins going through it, see? So you get the wiggly path instead of the straight path, it's going around in circles. So the planets go around the sun, they're not going anywhere, but the sun's going around another star, and all this thing is a great spiral nebula with its center somewhere beyond the constellation of Sagittarius, going around and around. So in the religious dance, we all join hands and we go around. In meditation, you make your breath go round, it isn't just in and out like a pump, it's

[44:51]

not like that, it goes like this, and there's no sort of hitch between the in and the out, it flows the whole way, see, in yoga, it's called, the Chinese call it the circulation of the light. It's going round. In Buddhism, and in Hinduism, they talk about the world as samsara, the round, the sari round, the sari go round, as distinct from the merry-go-round, samsara, the wheel of becoming, the bhava chakra, the wheel of birth and death, and Sir Edwin Arnold, in his poem The Light of Asia, makes the Buddha say, you suffer from yourselves, none else compels, none other holds you that you live and die, and were upon the wheel, and hug and kiss its spokes of agony, its tire of tears, its knave of nothingness. That's the rat race, thinking you're going to get somewhere.

[45:52]

Spin that wheel, baby, round and round, the wheel of fortune. Weigh what you gain on the roundabout, you lose on the swings. And on the other hand, there are certain people who have a different attitude to the wheel of fortune. Let's spin it for fun, let's gamble. Not to make money, but just because it's fun to gamble. Now you see, there's a gamesman, he's liberated, he's not hung up on the game. So in the same way, the mandala is a symbol of the transformed rat race. Now what's the nature of the rat race? The bhava chakra symbol of the six divisions of life, with the successful people at the top, they're the angels, the unsuccessful people at the bottom, the naraka, or the purgatorial

[46:58]

states of extreme suffering, and then in between are various graduated states, the humans, the frustrated spirits, the furious spirits, and the animals, see? At the top are the gods, at the bottom are the demons, and the tormented spirits. So everybody is moving to get up. So in a way, wherever you are, you're at the bottom, you're tormented. Those gods are trying to stay up, but there's nowhere higher than heaven, and the only way is down, down and out. So they've got that thing running, see? Now, importantly recognize on this wheel that being at the top is not being a Buddha. You may be a god, you may be an angel, a deva, from which we get our word divine as well

[48:03]

as devil, but you're not a Buddha, you're not liberated from the wheel. How do you get off? Why, knowing that wherever you are on the wheel is it, be there. Let's say we're all at the bottom, because on a squirrel cage wheel, the running squirrel or rat always stays at the bottom, see? All right, so you're as low as you can get, that's what I was pointing out this morning. Can't get any lower. You're in the naraka. The bottom of hell. But there you are, now what happens? You realize that every point on the wheel is there. And so you get a different picture of the wheel, not as the significance of it is no longer in the rotary movement around it, but suddenly in the movement from the center to the circumference, and from the circumference to the center, you get a flower.

[49:06]

The path of the petal. And your wheel suddenly becomes a mandala. That is to say, a circle subdivided by petals or other symbolic petals to be a floral shape. And there you see the great Tibetan paintings of mandalas. We go back to the five great Buddhas, Dainichi Nyorai, as the Japanese say in Sanskrit, he's Mahavairokhana Buddha, who represents the basic energy of the universe, the Great Sun Buddha. He's in the middle. Then he has around him Amitabha, Akshobhya, Ratnasambhava, Ratnasambhava, and Amoghasi. And there are all these beautiful jeweled creatures in their places, and you see the balanced wheel, the joyous wheel. So this is the transformation of the rat race.

[50:08]

And this also is a kind of ritualization of everyday life. And this, you see, just as the rat race is transformed into the mandala, so for the person who is a master of pleasure, the little things of everyday life are likewise ritualized. Not because somebody's compulsive, you know, all the dishes must be without spot, give me my magnifying glass. Not that. But that doing any simple action with delight looks ritualistic. If you watch a very skilled craftsman at work, or a surgeon, or a good dentist, or a shoemaker, or a potter, who thoroughly loves the work, you notice their caressing hands, the delight,

[51:14]

the dance they do to do this thing. The doing of it is more important than the doneing of it. You see, they look ritualistic in their action. It's a ceremony, and you think he's worshipping some kind of a god. That's because he's turned the rat race into the mandala. So, you can do that with everything if you're not in a hurry. And you're not in a hurry if you know there's nowhere to go. I mean, so here's the end of the line, and there's a place called death and a tombstone on it. It says, well, he did it once. We write his name on the tombstone. That's the end. That's where you're going, if you look at it from that point of view. But if you're going here, and you've already arrived, what is proper behavior for a Buddha?

[52:28]

Supposing you are as rich as rich can be, and you are, the whole universe is yours, supposing you've got all the time you need, and you do have, now's enough, what to do, you see? Well, of course, live it up. Take delight in all the ordinary things that are to be done. Instead of trying to get them out of the way so that you could do something else, which is supposed to be better or more rewarding, you'll see the reward is everywhere because there's no hurry. In this way, now, the world is transformed. In this way, you might have a utopia. Because as Gary Snyder, my friend, has put it, there is no possibility of your doing

[53:37]

anything effective to save this world from a terrifying ecological disaster unless you know it doesn't need to be done. If you can see the dissolution of this world, the end of the human race, as the Kali Yuga that Hindus talk about, the cosmic cataclysm, which comes at the end of every 4,320,000 years, every Kalpa, and realize that this ecological disaster is simply the periodical death of a world system, and therefore there's nothing especially tragic about it, it's the way things go, just like the death of every individual. You would think that such a realization would make a person cold, indifferent, but no!

[54:41]

If you understand that and you're not fighting it, you are not afraid of it. And if you're not afraid of it, you can handle it. But you have to show that the preservation of the planet, and of life, is not a frantic duty, it's a pleasure. And you won't convince everybody it's a pleasure if you go and scream in the streets, start throwing rocks, then you're saying it's your duty. To whom? To whom do we owe this duty? Do you owe it to yourself? Well, that depends what you want to do. Do you want to go on chasing on the wheel? Do you want to think that by fierce political action we will have a better world to live

[55:46]

in, and we'll all be so happy? Five-year plans, and then another five-year plan, and then after that another five-year plan. It's like my music teacher when I was a child, he used to play a scale of some ridiculous ditty, and you know, he said, now once more, I played it again, he said, now just once more, just once more, you know, horrors! But you can find or realize the great life if you're not looking for it. You've been listening to the late Alan Watts with the fourth lecture in a series entitled Pursuit of Pleasure. That's number 9919 in the Alan Watts MEA tape catalog. Remember, if you want more information about the spoken word of Alan Watts, send a stamped, legal-sized, self-addressed envelope to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94965. The crucial part of that address again, MEA Box 303 and ZIP 94965.

[56:50]

Thank you.

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