Program Notes
Guest speaker: Alan Watts
NOTE: This program is still available at the
Internet Archive.
Alan Watts’ son sent the following message requesting that his father’s talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon … bye bye Alan!
Mark Watts Said,
Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out.
February 25, 2011 @ 10:15 am · Edit
Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive.
If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege. … Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this?
… although, if you Google “alan watts mp3 torrent” you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material.
Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. … So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.]
“Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.”
“And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much as the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning.”
“Indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho-hydraulics’s.”
“If therefore, the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution.”
“As Jung once suggested, life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.”
“When somebody speaks as an authority it means they speak as the author. That’s all it means.”
“All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures. They contain no information for most of us on how we grow our brains, how we work our nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape our bones. That isn’t contained in the sensation, or the image, we call the ego. So, obviously then, the ego is not myself.”
“And they [fruit flies] in their world think they’re as important and as civilized as we do in our world. So that if I was to wake up as a fruit fly I wouldn’t feel any different as it were when I do when I wake up as a human being. I would be used to it.”
“In fact, it’s a thoroughly good arrangement in this world that we don’t remember what it was before [we incarnated as a human]. Why? Because variety is the spice of life, and if we remembered, remembered, remembered, having done this again and again and again and again, we should get bored.”
“There comes a point when really, if we consider what is to our true liking, we will want to forget everything that has gone before so that we can have the extraord…
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And although I had planned on getting this podcast online a couple of days ago,
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I have to admit that I was unable to tear myself away from watching the rescue of the Chilean miners who were trapped underground for 70 days.
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And, yes, I’m well aware of the controversy surrounding the 24 by 7 coverage of the event. I also have some other thoughts about it, but I’ll cover those after we hear today’s
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talks by Alan Watts.
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But first, I’d like to thank some of our fellow salonners who were kind enough to donate some
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of their hard-earned cash to the salon to help offset the expenses associated with these
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podcasts. And those fine souls are Joshua D., Colin F., Andrea D., Robert M., Anthony D., Jan B., Stephen B., Mark H., and Toby M.,
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who sent in another sizable donation just two weeks after a previous one.
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And I hope that wasn’t a double-click mistake somehow, Toby, that the machines made.
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And if it was, please let me know so I can send something back to you.
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But in any event, Toby, Mark, Stephen, Jan, Anthony, Robert, Andrea, Colin, and Joshua,
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oh, wow, I can’t thank you all enough for your support of the salon.
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Your notes of encouragement, along with your donations,
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and those of our other salonners over the years,
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makes me feel like I’m still doing something that has some value to a lot of people,
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and, of course, that sure makes me feel good.
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Now, one more person I want to thank today is Michael H.,
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who sent me the recordings I’m about to play for you.
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They are both by Alan Watts, Michael H. is actually two short bits that Watts recorded at some unknown time and unknown place. And if you are wondering about the title I chose for today’s podcast,
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which is On Being God and Death,
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well, that’s just my own dark humor coming out,
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because the first talk is about you being divine,
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and the second one is about death.
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So I combined the two ideas in a single title just to get your
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attention, not that you weren’t already paying attention, of course. So let’s get started
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with the first talk, and I’ll be back after that to introduce the second half of today’s
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program.
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Between Western psychology, psychiatry, and psych psychotherapy and the so-called religions of Asia, there is common ground because both are interested in changing states of human consciousness.
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Whereas institutional Western religion, Christianity, Judaism and even Islam are relatively less interested in this matter.
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Western religions are more concerned
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with behavior, doctrine and belief
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than with any transformation
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of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world.
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But this matter concerns psychiatry and psychology very much.
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Only those states of consciousness which are not normal are usually treated in Western
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psychology as being in some way sick.
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There are, of course, exceptions to this,
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and there have increasingly been exceptions.
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In the work of Jung, and to some extent even of Grodek,
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of Prinzhorn,
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of more modern people, Rogers, and Ronald Lang.
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Changing consciousness is often looked upon as a form of therapy.
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But in general, different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness.
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And therefore official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality.
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And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning.
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In this official doctrine, I might even say dogma, of what reality is.
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I might even say dogma, of what reality is.
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Because after all we know that our science, such as it is of psychology,
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is founded in the scientific naturalism of the 19th century.
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And the metaphysical and mythological assumptions of that science still underlie a great deal of psychological thinking
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in behaviorism eminently
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but also to a large extent in official psychoanalysis.
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Indeed one might say
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that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics
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and in fact could be called psychohhydraulics. Not that that analogy is
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altogether inappropriate because there are certainly respects in which our psychic life
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flows and exhibits the dynamics of water.
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But of course we want to know what kind of water and for the scientific naturalism of the 19th century
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the basic energies of nature
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were considered to be
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very much inferior
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to human consciousness in quality.
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Ernst Haeckel, a biologist of that time, would think of the energy of the universe as blind energy. And
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correspondingly, it seems to me that Freud thought of the libido as
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essentially blind, unconscious energy, embodying only a kind of formless unstructured and insatiable lust
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this is a generalization some modification in that thinking is of course possible
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but the tendency is to regard all that which lies below the surface of human consciousness as being less evolved,
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because you must remember that this was also the time of Darwin’s theories of evolution,
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of seeing the human mind as a fortuitous development from much more primitive forms of life
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coming forth by purely mechanical processes
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by natural selection
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and by the survival of the fittest
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and therefore
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man was in general seen
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as a fluke of nature
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an embodiment
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of reason
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emotion and values
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for which
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the more basic processes of nature
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had no sympathy
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and about which they did not care
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if therefore
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the human race is to flourish
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we must
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take charge of evolution.
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It can no longer be left to spontaneous process, but must be directed by human ingenuity, despite
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the fact that although our brains are capable of dealing with a colossal number of variables
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at once, our conscious attention is not.
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Most people cannot consider more than three variables
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at the same time without using a pencil.
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And this shows that in many ways
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the scanning process of man’s conscious attention
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is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables,
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the multidimensional processes of the natural universe.
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However, a serious attempt has been made and scientific naturalism issued in a fantastic fight with nature.
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In this whole notion of the conquest and subordination of nature,
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which has as a matter of fact very ancient, non-scientific and biblical origins,
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with the idea of man as the head and chief and ruler of nature in the image of God. And the time has now
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dawned upon us all
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when our attempts to beat
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nature into submission are
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having alarming results.
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Because we see
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that it’s very dangerous
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to mess around with processes
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that we don’t understand.
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They have enormous numbers of variables, and we begin to wonder
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whether we hadn’t better let well enough alone.
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At the same time, although I said that Western psychology had more in common or more common interest with
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Oriental religion than it does with Western religion, there is a sense in which psychiatry
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and psychotherapy are becoming the religion of the West. psychoanalysis has much in common with the forms and procedures of institutional religion
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there is for example apostolic succession
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the passing down of mana of qualified power to practice therapy
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from the father founder sie Sigmund Freud,
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through his immediate apostles
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to an enormous company of archbishops and bishops,
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among whom there are, of course, as there were with Christianity,
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heresiarchs such as Jung and Groddick and Rank and Reich.
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such as Jung and Groddek and Rank and Reich.
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And the heresiarchs are duly excommunicated and anathematized.
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There are rituals, as there are also rituals with religion.
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There is the sacrament of the couch there is the
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spiritual discipline
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of free association
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there is the mystic knowledge
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of the interpretation of dreams
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and there are also the two
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great symbolic fetishes
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the long one and the round one.
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Now it’s extraordinarily easy to make fun of all this.
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And we must not forget that we owe a tremendous debt to Freud,
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if for nothing else than pointing out
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that that much of ourselves of which we are aware
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in terms of the conscious ego is not really ourselves.
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It is something superficial.
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However we define its nature, it is superficial.
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And the realities of human
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life are not under the gaze of its scanning process at least not in the
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ordinary way and that was a tremendous revelation there’s no question about
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that but one sees troublesome signs when the doctrines and processes of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and so forth become officialized.
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And I think Thomas Sass in his books, The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness, is pointing out something extremely important to us.
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pointing out something extremely important to us, which is that in effect the psychological official of today is the priest, and that he is beginning to exercise the same sort
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of controls over human life as were exercised by the church in the Middle Ages.
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So that a professor of psychiatry at Columbia or Harvard or Yale medical schools
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has today the same sort of intellectual respectability and authority
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as the professor of theology at the University of Toledo or Padua would have had in the year 1400.
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Now you must realize that the theologians of those days not simply believed in their cosmology and the theology.
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in their cosmology and the theology, they almost knew it was true in the same way that our scientists know certain things to be true. Despite the fact that they
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change their opinions very often, while they hold them they have in effect the
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force of dogma, as witness the anathematization of Velikovsky for his uncomfortable ideas.
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And therefore there are heresies existing today which are persecuted in the same way
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as heresies were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition.
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heresies were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition. And they are persecuted out of kindness in exactly the same way that the Holy Inquisition persecuted heresy out of kindness and deep
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concern for human beings. That is unimaginable to us but it was so for after all
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if you seriously believed
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that someone who did not hold the Catholic faith
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and who voluntarily rejected it
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would be tortured
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physically and spiritually
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forever and ever and ever in hell
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you would resort to almost any means
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to preserve a fellow human being from such a fate
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especially if the complaint or disease of heresy
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from which he suffered was infectious
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you would first of all reason with him
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and if he was not responsive to reason
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you would resort to abuse
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and to forceful argument
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and if he was not responsive to that
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you would give him shock treatment
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and bang him about
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if that didn’t work
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the thumbs crew and the rack and the iron maiden
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and if that didn’t work
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as a last desperate resort
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you would burn him at the stake
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in the pious hope that in the midst of those searing fires he would think better and make a last act of perfect contrition.
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And so be rescued from everlasting damnation.
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And you did all this in the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.
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in the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you in the spirit of a surgeon
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who is very very sorry indeed that he has to
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make you undergo this extremely painful operation
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but it is in your best interests
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and there really is at least a 50-50 chance
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that you may survive
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and so therefore in perfectly
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scientific medical spirit
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people may be very arbitrarily
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and without due process
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deprived of their civil rights
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incarcerated in prisons
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that are in many cases much worse
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than prisons for criminals
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and generally left to rot
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be neglected and ignored
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and when bumptious
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given shock treatment
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or put in solitary confinement
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for what?
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because they have unorthodox
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and heretical states of consciousness
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a lot of these people are not dangerous
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until provoked into being dangerous
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by being ignored
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by being treated as machines
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and in generally defined as non-human
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and if you are defined as non-human
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there’s precious little you can do about it
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because everything you say that sounds human
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will be taken as a kind of utterance
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of a mechanical man, as imitating
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humanness out of lunatic cunning.
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You will be suspicious.
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Everything you say will be listened to in a different way and with different ears.
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And you will have one hell of a time talking yourself out of it because there really are no rules as to what
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one must do when incarcerated for having unorthodox consciousness there is no clear road to repentance
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and this is found likewise in jails where people are incarcerated on one to ten year sentences as in places like vacaville
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california where when i visited such prisons young men have come to me in perfect desperation
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saying i don’t know what’s happened to me because i want to uh live like a decent citizen i know
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i’ve done things that are wrong but i simply don’t know what is expected of me here. If I try to do what’s
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expected they say I’m compliant and that seems to be some sort of a sickness. Thomas Sass
00:19:15 ►
drew attention to this when he quoted a discussion of the types of school children who may very
00:19:21 ►
well need therapy. There were overachieving children. There were underachieving children.
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There were children who exhibited erratic patterns. There were children who were sort of dullly mediocre.
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In fact, every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick.
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As Jung once suggested, life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis.
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It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.
00:19:57 ►
And I submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind,
00:20:01 ►
such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous.
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For I would suggest that today we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew
00:20:13 ►
about the galaxy in 1300.
00:20:17 ►
And that while there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy,
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individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy it is the surest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so we do not
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know how it is done just as we do not know really how musical artistic and
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literary genius is done you You cannot really teach it.
00:20:47 ►
You can put the tools for doing these things into people’s hands and you can show them
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how to use the tools. But whether they will use those tools with genius is quite unpredictable.
00:21:01 ►
And this is above all true of the art of psychotherapy. We don’t know how it’s done. We’ve got some vague ideas. There probably are some people who by reason of their mental derangement are probably not qualified to perform it because they are maybe out just to make other people into messes.
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just to make other people into messes.
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But to say that there are certain standards and certain examinations that can be passed
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and certificates that could be issued
00:21:29 ►
which do indeed qualify people for this work
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is, I think, pernicious nonsense.
00:21:38 ►
And is used, of course, out of economic self-interest
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when those who consider themselves official therapists run into competition.
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The same was done by religion.
00:21:51 ►
I was talking, imagine it,
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to a Buddhist priest
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in Thailand some years ago.
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I was looking at some books
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in a bookshop
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in the precincts of a Buddhist temple.
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And I was wandering over and I noticed a book on a the precincts of a Buddhist temple. And I was wandering over
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and I noticed a book on a certain form of Buddhist meditation.
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And I murmured, hmm, Satipatthana,
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which is the name of a certain kind of Buddhist meditation.
00:22:17 ►
And a voice suddenly said to me,
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you practice Satipatthana?
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I looked up and there was a skinny Buddhist monk
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in a yellow robe with rather red eyes looking at me.
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I said, not exactly Satipatthana.
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I use a different method. It’s called Zen.
00:22:33 ►
Oh, Satipatthana, not Zen.
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I said, oh, well, it’s something like it, isn’t it?
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No.
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Well, it’s rather like yoga, I said, isn’t it?
00:22:40 ►
Not yoga. No. Satipatthana, different. Only right way.
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Well, look, I said to him, I have a lot of Roman Catholic friends who tell me that their way is the only right way.
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Who am I to believe?
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You know, I said, you’re like someone who’s got a ferry boat for crossing the river.
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I use the Buddhist simile.
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And another fellow down the stream has opened up ferry business and you go to the government and say he’s not authorized
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to operate a ferry boat because he’s competition to you let all operate ferry
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boats who will and if you haven’t got the sense to get off to stay off one
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that sinks it’s your fault after, I could say to him,
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you believe that everything that happens to you is your own karma.
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So why worry?
00:23:35 ►
But now, it’s so interesting that since
00:23:39 ►
official psychiatry, and I underline that word official
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because I hope those of you in this audience who are therapists
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will regard yourselves as unofficial.
00:23:51 ►
At least that will give you an out.
00:23:56 ►
But nevertheless, official psychiatry has curious things in common
00:23:59 ►
with Western religion, as well as with Eastern.
00:24:06 ►
With Eastern, I said, only in so far as it has an interest
00:24:07 ►
in states of consciousness
00:24:09 ►
and inclines to regard other
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states of consciousness than the ordinary
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as sick
00:24:14 ►
but it has one very important
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feature in common with western religion
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and that
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we have to go a little bit into Western religious history and ask
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ourselves what in Western religion and especially in Christianity and this goes also for Judaism,
00:24:36 ►
Islam, what is the great heresy? Curiously enough, the great heresy was first in the West committed by no lesser person
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than Jesus Christ, who believed himself to be God.
00:25:01 ►
This of course will be unquestionably true if you think that the gospel of St. John has historical value
00:25:06 ►
it’s a little vaguer in the synoptic gospels
00:25:10 ►
but if you read the gospel of St. John
00:25:12 ►
there is absolutely no doubt about it
00:25:14 ►
for he said I and the father are one
00:25:17 ►
he who has seen me has seen the father
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before Abraham was I am
00:25:23 ►
I am the way the truth and the life i am the resurrection
00:25:28 ►
and the life he said all that according to this gospel
00:25:35 ►
and that is something that in the western world you are not supposed to say
00:25:42 ►
and especially you are not supposed to believe it
00:25:41 ►
supposed to say.
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Especially you are not supposed to believe it.
00:25:50 ►
And naturally it was very difficult for Jesus because he was saying all this in the context
00:25:54 ►
of the Hebrew culture.
00:25:58 ►
And he tried to find language
00:26:00 ►
in the Hebrew scriptures
00:26:02 ►
with which to express his state of
00:26:06 ►
consciousness because he had an unusual state of consciousness as I read it he
00:26:14 ►
had cosmic consciousness otherwise known as mystical experience otherwise known
00:26:19 ►
as Moksha Nirvana Bodhi Sana, Alfana, or what you will.
00:26:28 ►
And that happens to people.
00:26:31 ►
It has happened as far back as we know.
00:26:34 ►
It happens all over the world and in all cultures.
00:26:39 ►
We don’t know very much about it.
00:26:42 ►
We don’t really know ways in which to make it happen because it
00:26:46 ►
seems to be of the nature of it that it is a spontaneous surprise but it
00:26:50 ►
unquestionably happens and most people keep their mouths shut about it when it
00:26:55 ►
does I had a friend who in the middle of having a stroke had this illumination
00:27:01 ►
and he said to me I fear to speak to my friends of this,
00:27:07 ►
but it was the most beautiful experience.
00:27:10 ►
I shall never be afraid of death.
00:27:12 ►
In fact, I recommend everyone to have a stroke.
00:27:20 ►
This was my friend Jean Varda,
00:27:23 ►
lately deceased Greek painter. But Jesus
00:27:29 ►
certainly had this transformation of consciousness and he was crucified for
00:27:35 ►
it. Why? Because he had committed an act of insubordination and treason against the cosmic government. Because if you believe that God is a monarch,
00:27:49 ►
an absolute, omniscient and omnipotent authority,
00:27:53 ►
shall we say a sort of cosmic ego,
00:27:57 ►
then to claim to be that is to introduce democracy into the kingdom of heaven,
00:28:02 ►
to usurp divine authority and to speak in its name
00:28:08 ►
without proper authorization and they asked jesus by what authority do you speak of heaven or of men
00:28:15 ►
and he was tricky about answering that one he said by what authority did john the baptist speak
00:28:23 ►
and they were nervous about answering that one he could have asked by what authority did John the Baptist speak and they were nervous about answering that one
00:28:27 ►
he could have asked by what authority did Isaiah speak etc
00:28:30 ►
or Moses
00:28:31 ►
but Moses became official authority
00:28:35 ►
and if you could wangle it that what you said
00:28:38 ►
was simply an extension of what Moses said
00:28:40 ►
because Rabbi so and so said it
00:28:42 ►
who got it from Rabbi so and so
00:28:44 ►
who got it from Rabbi so and so who got it from Rabbi so said it who got it from rabbi so-and-so who got it from rabbi so-and-so who got it from rabbi so-and-so who got it from
00:28:47 ►
Moses then it’s okay notice this that to be an authority today in the academic
00:28:55 ►
world depends on documentation it’s not enough to say for I say unto you you
00:29:04 ►
must put in your footnotes.
00:29:05 ►
And the more the footnotes, the more the authority, obviously.
00:29:12 ►
So, our dissertations tend to be books about books, about books, about books.
00:29:18 ►
And our libraries multiply by mitosis.
00:29:21 ►
multiply by mitosis.
00:29:33 ►
So, when somebody speaks as an authority,
00:29:34 ►
that means speaks as the author.
00:29:36 ►
That’s all it means.
00:29:43 ►
So, he says, when somebody speaks as an authority,
00:29:45 ►
it means they speak as the author.
00:29:46 ►
That’s all it means.
00:29:52 ►
Well, personally, I like that approach, because another way of saying it is that whenever somebody is spouting religious tracts of one sort or another to me,
00:29:56 ►
I know that they are in no way an authority, and so they can be safely ignored.
00:30:01 ►
Well, I hope that we haven’t offended any of what Watts calls
00:30:05 ►
official religious people or official psychotherapists
00:30:09 ►
among our fellow salonners.
00:30:11 ►
But at least you can’t say that you don’t know where he stands
00:30:14 ►
on the questions of religion and of the American practice
00:30:17 ►
of defining every little trait of our children
00:30:20 ►
as something that needs to be treated with a prescription drug.
00:30:23 ►
Personally, I think it’s a crime to drug our nation’s children
00:30:27 ►
with these horrible pharmaceuticals.
00:30:29 ►
But, hey, that’s just my opinion,
00:30:31 ►
and I’m aware that there are other sides to the story.
00:30:35 ►
Sides, of course, that are usually told by people
00:30:37 ►
who think that medical marijuana is a joke.
00:30:41 ►
And so their opinions hold little sway with me.
00:30:44 ►
But let’s get on to the next part of today’s
00:30:46 ►
program. Now that we’ve heard Alan Watts’s take on the concept of us recognizing the divine within
00:30:52 ►
us, let’s see what he thinks about what’s on the other side of the great beyond, the end result of
00:30:58 ►
a life well lived or a life not so well lived. Ultimately, no matter how much exercise you do,
00:31:05 ►
and how well you eat,
00:31:06 ►
and how good you are at avoiding the American Medical Association,
00:31:10 ►
well, the end result’s still the same.
00:31:13 ►
And while the topic of death isn’t often dealt with in polite company,
00:31:17 ►
it does seem like we should at least give it a little thought from time to time.
00:31:21 ►
After all, it’s the ultimate trip,
00:31:23 ►
or so I have been led to think I have a
00:31:32 ►
friend a girl who’s very intelligent and articulate and she was born blind and
00:31:38 ►
she hasn’t the faintest idea what darkness is the word means as little to her as the word
00:31:47 ►
light so if you went to sleep you’re not aware of darkness when you’re asleep and
00:31:58 ►
so if you went into sleep into unconsciousness for always and always and always
00:32:06 ►
it wouldn’t be at all like going
00:32:08 ►
into the dark, it wouldn’t be at all
00:32:10 ►
like being buried alive
00:32:11 ►
it would be as if
00:32:16 ►
as a matter of fact you had never
00:32:18 ►
existed at all
00:32:19 ►
not only you but everything else
00:32:24 ►
as well
00:32:24 ►
you would be in that state as if you had never been
00:32:30 ►
and there of course there would be no problems
00:32:35 ►
there would be no one to regret the loss of anything
00:32:40 ►
you couldn’t even call it a tragedy
00:32:43 ►
because there would be no one to
00:32:45 ►
experience it as a tragedy it would be simple nothing at all forever and for
00:32:56 ►
never because not only would you have no future you would also have no past and no present now you would think that that was a point
00:33:10 ►
where we’d say well let’s talk about something else
00:33:12 ►
but
00:33:15 ►
I’m not content with that
00:33:17 ►
I demur
00:33:18 ►
because this makes me think of two other things
00:33:22 ►
this state of nothingness makes me think of two other things. This state of nothingness makes me think, first of all,
00:33:31 ►
the only thing I get anywhere in my experience that’s close to nothingness
00:33:36 ►
is the way my head looks to my eyes.
00:33:42 ►
Because I seem to feel that there is a world out there, as it were, confronting my eyes.
00:33:50 ►
And then behind my eyes, there isn’t a black spot.
00:33:56 ►
There isn’t even a hazy spot.
00:34:00 ►
There’s nothing at all.
00:34:11 ►
There’s nothing at all. I’m not aware of my head, as it were, as a black hole in the middle of all this luminous visual experience. It doesn’t even have very clear edges because the field of vision is an oval.
00:34:18 ►
And if I run my fingers along my field of vision, it’s like this.
00:34:23 ►
And this is the point where my fingers just
00:34:25 ►
disappear from sight vague edged but then behind this oval of vision there is
00:34:32 ►
nothing at all just from the sense of sight of course if I use my fingers and
00:34:39 ►
touch I can feel something behind my eyes. But if I use the sense of sight alone, there’s just nothing there at all.
00:34:50 ►
Now, nevertheless, out of that blankness, I see.
00:35:01 ►
Well, that’s the first thing it makes me think of.
00:35:03 ►
Now, the next thing it makes me think of is this.
00:35:06 ►
If, when I’m dead, I am as if I never had been,
00:35:12 ►
then that’s the way I was before I was born.
00:35:16 ►
Because just as if I try to go back behind my eyes and find what is there, I come to a blank.
00:35:22 ►
If I try to remember back and back
00:35:25 ►
and back and back I’ve got my earliest memories and then behind them nothing
00:35:31 ►
total blank but just as I know there’s something behind my eyes by using my
00:35:38 ►
fingers on my head so I know through other sources of information that before
00:35:43 ►
I was born there was something going on there were my father and my mother and their fathers
00:35:49 ►
and mothers and the whole material environment of the earth and its life
00:35:54 ►
out of which they came and behind that the the galaxies and behind that another blank space
00:36:12 ►
so i reason that if i go back when i’m dead to the state where i was before i was born
00:36:23 ►
to the state where I was before I was born,
00:36:26 ►
couldn’t I happen again?
00:36:30 ►
You know, what has happened once can very well happen again.
00:36:32 ►
If it happened once, it’s extraordinary.
00:36:37 ►
And it’s not really very much more extraordinary if it happened all over again.
00:36:40 ►
So in other words,
00:36:42 ►
I do know for certain,
00:36:44 ►
because I’ve seen people die, and I’ve seen people born after them, that at any rate, after I die, not only somebody, but myriads of other beings will be born.
00:37:02 ►
That I know. We all know that. there’s no doubt about it but what worries us is that when we’re
00:37:14 ►
dead there could be nothing at all forever as if that was something to worry about.
00:37:28 ►
Before you were born, there was this same nothing at all forever,
00:37:29 ►
and yet you happened.
00:37:35 ►
And if you happen once, you can happen again.
00:37:38 ►
Now what does that mean?
00:37:44 ►
Well, we’ll get at it first in its very simplest way.
00:37:45 ►
And to explain myself, I must invent a new verb.
00:37:50 ►
This is the verb to I.
00:37:53 ►
And in the first place, we’ll spell that with the letter I.
00:37:58 ►
But instead of having it as a pronoun, we’ll call it a verb.
00:38:02 ►
The universe eyes. It has eyed in me and it eyes in you now
00:38:09 ►
let’s re-spell the word EYE when I talk about to eye something it means to look
00:38:16 ►
at something to be aware of something so we’ll change the spelling and we’ll say
00:38:21 ►
the universe eyes it becomes aware of itself in each one of us.
00:38:28 ►
And it keeps on eyeing.
00:38:30 ►
And every time it eyes, every one of us in whom it eyes feels that he is the center of the whole thing.
00:38:38 ►
And that I know that you feel that you are I in just the same way that I feel that I am I.
00:38:47 ►
And we all have the same background of nothing.
00:38:50 ►
We don’t remember having done it before.
00:38:53 ►
And yet it has been done before.
00:38:55 ►
Again and again and again, not only before in time,
00:38:58 ►
but all around us everywhere else in space is everybody is the universe I-ing.
00:39:07 ►
Now look, let me try and make this clearer in this way when I say it’s the universe eyeing who is eyeing what do
00:39:14 ►
you mean by I well there are two things you can mean by it on the one hand you
00:39:21 ►
can mean what’s called your ego, your personality.
00:39:26 ►
But that’s not your real eyeing, because your personality is your idea of yourself.
00:39:33 ►
It’s your image of yourself.
00:39:35 ►
And that’s made up of how you feel yourself, how you think about yourself,
00:39:40 ►
thrown in with what all your friends and relations have told you about yourself.
00:39:47 ►
So, your image of yourself, however, obviously isn’t you,
00:39:53 ►
any more than your photograph is you,
00:39:56 ►
or any more than the image of anything is it.
00:40:02 ►
All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures.
00:40:06 ►
They contain no information, for most of us, on how we grow our brains, how we work our
00:40:12 ►
nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape
00:40:17 ►
our bones.
00:40:18 ►
That isn’t contained in the sensation or the image we call the ego so obviously then the ego image is not
00:40:25 ►
myself so myself contains all these factors that we could say the body is
00:40:38 ►
doing the circulation of the blood the breathing the electrical activity of the nerves, all this is me
00:40:46 ►
but I don’t know anything about it, I don’t know how it came together, I don’t
00:40:50 ►
know how it’s constructed. And yet I do all that. If it is true also to say I
00:40:59 ►
breathe, I walk, I think, I am conscious. I don’t know how I manage to be
00:41:05 ►
but I do it in the same way as I grow my hair
00:41:10 ►
so
00:41:13 ►
I must therefore locate
00:41:17 ►
the center of me
00:41:20 ►
my eyeing
00:41:21 ►
at a deeper level
00:41:23 ►
than my ego which is my image or idea of myself but
00:41:29 ►
how deep do we go we can say the body is the eye but the body comes out of the
00:41:40 ►
rest of the universe comes out of all its energy so it’s the universe that’s eyeing the universe eyes in the same way that a tree apples or
00:41:49 ►
that a star shines and the center of the appling is the tree the center of the
00:41:57 ►
shining is the star and so the basic center or self of the eyeing which is called in this case Alan Watts
00:42:08 ►
which is only a name for this particular physical organism flowering from shining
00:42:16 ►
out of this particular environment makes the center of all this eyeing the eternal universe, or eternal.
00:42:27 ►
The thing has existed for 10,000 million years,
00:42:32 ►
and will probably go on for at least that much more.
00:42:36 ►
So we won’t worry about how long it goes on.
00:42:40 ►
But repeatedly it eyes.
00:42:43 ►
but repeatedly it eyes.
00:42:51 ►
So that it seems to me absolutely reasonable to assume that when I die
00:42:54 ►
and this physical body evaporates
00:42:57 ►
and the whole memory system with it,
00:43:01 ►
then it will be all over once again the awareness that I had before,
00:43:09 ►
not exactly the same way, but of a baby being born.
00:43:17 ►
There will, of course, be myriads of babies born,
00:43:20 ►
not only baby human beings, but baby baby rabbits baby fruit flies baby viruses baby
00:43:28 ►
bacteria and which one of them am I going to be only one of them and yet every one of them because
00:43:39 ►
this experience comes always in the singular one at a time but certainly one of them
00:43:45 ►
actually doesn’t make much difference because if I were born again as a
00:43:49 ►
fruit fly I would think that being a fruit fly was the normal ordinary course
00:43:55 ►
of events and naturally I would think that I was an important person a highly
00:44:00 ►
cultured being because fruit flies obviously have a high culture we don’t
00:44:05 ►
even know how to look for it but probably they have all sorts of
00:44:09 ►
symphonies and music and artistic performances in the way light is
00:44:13 ►
reflected on their wings in different ways the way they dance in the air and
00:44:17 ►
they say oh look at her she has real style look how the sunlight comes off
00:44:21 ►
her wings and they in their world think
00:44:25 ►
there is important and as civilized as we do in our world so that if I were to
00:44:29 ►
wake up as a fruit fly I wouldn’t feel any different as it were than I do when
00:44:34 ►
I wake up as a human being I would be used to it well you say though it
00:44:39 ►
wouldn’t be me because if it would be me again I would have to remember how I was before
00:44:47 ►
all right but you don’t know remember how you were before and yet you’re
00:44:54 ►
content enough to be the me that you are in fact it’s a thoroughly good
00:45:00 ►
arrangement in this world that we don’t remember what it was before. Why?
00:45:09 ►
Because variety is the spice of life.
00:45:11 ►
And if we remembered, remembered, remembered,
00:45:15 ►
having done this again and again and again and again, we should get bored.
00:45:23 ►
And just as a memory is a beautiful thing to have, to remember,
00:45:27 ►
without memory we can’t be intelligent. But just as I have explained that in order to see the figure you have to have the background,
00:45:34 ►
in order that a memory be valuable you’ve also got to have a forgettery.
00:45:39 ►
That’s why we sleep every night to refresh ourselves.
00:45:42 ►
We go into the unconscious so that coming back to the conscious
00:45:46 ►
is again a great experience well when that’s gone on long enough when day after day we remember the
00:45:53 ►
days that have gone before even though there’s the interval of sleep there comes a point
00:45:58 ►
when really if we consider what is to our true liking, we will want to forget everything that went before,
00:46:07 ►
so that we can have the extraordinary experience
00:46:11 ►
of seeing the world once again through the eyes of a baby,
00:46:15 ►
whatever kind of baby,
00:46:17 ►
so that it’s completely new.
00:46:19 ►
We have all the startling wonder that a child has,
00:46:22 ►
all the vividness of perception,
00:46:23 ►
which we can’t have if
00:46:25 ►
we remember everything forever so do you see what happens the universe is a system which
00:46:33 ►
not only forgets itself and then again remembers anew so that there’s always this constant change and constant variety in the span of time
00:46:47 ►
but it also does it in the span of space
00:46:49 ►
by looking at itself through every different living organism
00:46:53 ►
to give as it were an all-round view
00:46:58 ►
you know that’s a way of getting rid of prejudice
00:47:01 ►
getting rid of a one-sided view so death in that sense
00:47:11 ►
is a tremendous release from monotony it puts an interval of total forgetting in
00:47:19 ►
a rhythmic process of on and off on and, so that you can begin all over again and never be bored.
00:47:29 ►
But the point is that if you fantasize the idea of being nothing for always and always and always,
00:47:38 ►
what you’re really saying is, after I’m dead, the universe stops.
00:47:52 ►
is after I’m dead the universe stops and what I’m saying is no it goes on just as it did when you were born you see you may say that you think it incredible
00:47:58 ►
that you have more than one life but I say first of all is it in isn’t it
00:48:03 ►
incredible that you have this one isn’t it incredible that you have this one?
00:48:06 ►
Isn’t it incredible that out of the nothing that is your past, here you are?
00:48:12 ►
Well, it’s astonishing.
00:48:15 ►
So, if that’s astonishing, it can always happen again and again and again. now what this is saying then is
00:48:29 ►
that just as you don’t know
00:48:33 ►
how you manage to be conscious
00:48:36 ►
how you manage
00:48:38 ►
to grow and shape this body of yours
00:48:41 ►
that doesn’t mean to say that you’re not doing it equally you
00:48:48 ►
don’t know how the universe shines the stars constellates the constellation and
00:48:57 ►
galactifies the galaxies you don’t know but that doesn’t mean to say that you aren’t doing it in just the
00:49:07 ►
same way as you’re breathing without knowing how you breathe if I say really
00:49:14 ►
and truly I am this whole universe or put it in another way this particular
00:49:20 ►
organism is an eyeing being done by the whole universe and somebody could say to me well who the hell do you think you are are you God do
00:49:29 ►
you warm up the galaxies canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or
00:49:36 ►
loosen the bonds of Orion and I reply to that who the hell do you think you are
00:49:41 ►
can you tell me how you grow your brain, how you shape your
00:49:46 ►
eyeballs and how you manage to see? But if you can’t tell me that, I can’t tell
00:49:51 ►
you how I warm up the galaxy. Only I’ve located the center of myself at a deeper
00:49:59 ►
and a more universal level than we are in our culture accustomed to do.
00:50:09 ►
So then, if that universal energy is the real me,
00:50:19 ►
the real self which I as all these different organisms spread out in different spaces or places,
00:50:27 ►
and happening again and again and again at different times,
00:50:31 ►
we’ve got a marvelous system going,
00:50:36 ►
in which you can be eternally surprised.
00:50:40 ►
The universe is really a system which keeps on surprising itself.
00:50:47 ►
The universe is really a system which keeps on surprising itself. The ambition that many of us have, especially in an age of technological competence,
00:50:53 ►
to have everything under our control, is a false ambition because you’ve only got to think for one moment
00:51:02 ►
what would it be like if you did really know and control everything supposing we had a super colossal
00:51:08 ►
technology which could go to our wildest dreams of technological competence so
00:51:13 ►
that everything that is going to happen would be foreknown predicted and
00:51:17 ►
everything would be under our control
00:51:21 ►
why you know it would be like making love to a plastic woman.
00:51:27 ►
There would be no surprise in it.
00:51:30 ►
No sudden answering touch.
00:51:33 ►
Because when we touch another human being it’s not like touching something made of plastic.
00:51:37 ►
There comes out a response.
00:51:39 ►
Something unexpected.
00:51:41 ►
And that’s what we really want.
00:51:43 ►
When we want to relate to the other you see you
00:51:47 ►
can’t experience the feeling you call self unless it’s in contrast with the
00:51:54 ►
feeling of other it’s like known and unknown light and dark positive and
00:51:59 ►
negative other is necessary in order for you to feel self.
00:52:10 ►
So then, isn’t that the arrangement you want?
00:52:15 ►
And so in the same way, couldn’t you say the arrangement you want is not to remember?
00:52:20 ►
Memory is always remember a form of control.
00:52:23 ►
I’ve got it in mind, I remember it know your number you’re under control now if you go on remembering and
00:52:29 ►
remembering and remembering it’s like writing on a piece of paper and going on
00:52:33 ►
writing and writing and writing until there’s no white space left on the paper
00:52:37 ►
your memory is filled up and so you need to wipe it all clean so that you have a white paper all over again and can begin to write on it once more.
00:52:52 ►
So that’s what death does for us.
00:52:57 ►
It wipes the slate clean and also, looking at it from the point of view of population and the human organism on the planet,
00:53:08 ►
it keeps cleaning us out.
00:53:13 ►
And the idea of a technology which would enable each one of us to be immortal
00:53:19 ►
would be something that would progressively crowd the planet
00:53:24 ►
with people with hopelessly crowded memories.
00:53:29 ►
They would as it were be like people living in a house where they’d accumulated so much
00:53:33 ►
property, so many books, so many vases, so many sets of knives and forks, so many tables
00:53:39 ►
and chairs, so many newspapers, that there wouldn’t be any room to move around. To live,
00:53:46 ►
we need space. And space is a kind of nothingness, and death is a kind of nothingness. It’s all
00:53:53 ►
the same principle. And by putting blocks, as it were, or spaces of nothingness, spaces
00:53:59 ►
of space, in between spaces of something, we get life properly spaced out,
00:54:05 ►
to use the German word Lebensraum, room for living.
00:54:10 ►
That’s what space gives us.
00:54:11 ►
And that’s what death gives us.
00:54:14 ►
Now look, notice that in everything I’ve said about death,
00:54:19 ►
I haven’t brought in anything that I could call spookery.
00:54:23 ►
I haven’t brought in any information about anything that you don’t already know.
00:54:30 ►
I haven’t invoked any mysterious knowledge about souls, memory of former lives, anything like that.
00:54:39 ►
I’ve just talked about it in terms that we already know so that if you say well all this idea that people have of life beyond the grave is just wishful thinking I say okay I’ll grant
00:54:51 ►
that let’s assume that that is wishful thinking and that when we are dead there
00:54:56 ►
just won’t be anything see let’s face that fact that’ll be the end.
00:55:07 ►
Now, notice first of all,
00:55:08 ►
that’s the worst thing you’ve got to fear.
00:55:13 ►
Does it frighten you?
00:55:16 ►
Who’s going to be afraid?
00:55:19 ►
Supposing it ends, no more problems.
00:55:24 ►
But then, you will see that this nothingness, if you followed my argument, is something as it were you bounce off from again just as you bounced in the first place when you were born.
00:55:34 ►
You bounced out of nothingness. Nothingness is a kind of bounce.
00:55:39 ►
Because it implies that nothing implies something. So you bounce back.
00:55:48 ►
All new, all different. nothing to compare it with before a refreshing experience
00:55:54 ►
and if therefore
00:55:58 ►
you get this sense just like you’ve got the sense of nothing behind your eyes
00:56:02 ►
the sense of nothing behind your eyes.
00:56:06 ►
Get the sense of nothingness,
00:56:08 ►
very powerful, frisky nothingness,
00:56:10 ►
underlying your whole being.
00:56:14 ►
And there’s nothing in that nothing to be afraid of.
00:56:18 ►
Then, with that sense, you can come on like a person for whom the rest of life is gravy because you’re already dead.
00:56:24 ►
You know you’re going to die.
00:56:25 ►
We say there’s one thing certain, which is death and taxes.
00:56:30 ►
And the death of each one of us now is as certain
00:56:33 ►
as it would be if we were going to die five minutes from now.
00:56:40 ►
So where’s your anxiety? Where’s your hang-up?
00:56:43 ►
Regard yourself as dead already. So that you have nothing to lose.
00:56:50 ►
Turkish proverb says, he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed.
00:56:55 ►
So in the same way, the person who regards himself as already dead,
00:57:00 ►
who, therefore you are virtually nothing,
00:57:03 ►
a hundred years from now you’ll be a handful of dust.
00:57:06 ►
That’ll be for real.
00:57:08 ►
All right, act on that reality.
00:57:17 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:19 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:26 ►
Oh, did I hear that right?
00:57:29 ►
A hundred years from now, you’ll be a handful of dust.
00:57:32 ►
That’ll be for real.
00:57:34 ►
All right, act on that reality.
00:57:38 ►
Well, that’s what he said, and then the recording ended.
00:57:41 ►
So, how do I act on that reality?
00:57:44 ►
I guess the answer to that question would be different for each and every one of us.
00:57:49 ►
For me, I guess it’s doing these podcasts is how I’m acting on the reality
00:57:53 ►
that a hundred years from now, this biological avatar I call Lorenzo
00:57:57 ►
will be walking around no more.
00:57:59 ►
So, I guess I’m trying to leave a little bit of me here.
00:58:02 ►
In fact, sometimes little children seem to figure out the fact before we do that we’re going to die.
00:58:08 ►
About a year or so ago, I was carrying one of my grandchildren down a flight of stairs,
00:58:12 ►
and she was on my back with her arms wrapped around my neck when I said,
00:58:16 ►
You know, when I’m a hundred years old, I won’t be able to carry you down the stairs like this.
00:58:21 ►
And without missing a beat, she said,
00:58:23 ►
Yeah, because you’ll be dead by then.
00:58:27 ►
And I still have to laugh when I think about that moment. Maybe it’s only the very young
00:58:32 ►
and the very old who take death as lightly as we probably all should. And of course,
00:58:37 ►
I’m not alone when I say that, at least for me, learning how to manage a deep psychedelic
00:58:42 ►
trip has been exactly the kind of training I think I need
00:58:45 ►
to successfully navigate that big trip that all of us will one day experience.
00:58:51 ►
Now, I probably shouldn’t even mention this, but I have to take exception with what Alan Watts just said
00:58:56 ►
about what he thought worries all of us about death.
00:59:00 ►
Namely, that when we’re dead, there may be nothing at all forever.
00:59:04 ►
My worry is just the opposite, that there actually is existence of some kind after we die.
00:59:10 ►
The possibility that after death there is simply non-awareness or non-existence
00:59:14 ►
doesn’t seem to be something worth worrying about to me.
00:59:18 ►
In fact, I can think of a wide range of reasons why this should actually be a state to be hoped for rather than feared.
00:59:24 ►
wide range of reasons why this should actually be a state to be hoped for rather than feared.
00:59:30 ►
And that’s why I included the warrior’s lament in the mountaintop farewell scene in the Genesis generation. For some strange reason, it brings a great deal of peace to my mind, possibly because
00:59:36 ►
it’s so contrary to the brainwashing about heaven that my young mind was exposed to in Catholic
00:59:41 ►
school. If you’ve heard my book, I’m sure you remember how it goes.
00:59:47 ►
I can hear my comrades calling.
00:59:50 ►
I can hear them calling me from the other side,
00:59:52 ►
to the place where all great warriors go.
00:59:55 ►
Do not mourn for me,
00:59:57 ►
for it is the end all great warriors face.
01:00:00 ►
Do not mourn for me,
01:00:02 ►
for I will never know.
01:00:09 ►
As I said, I can’t say why that refrain touches me so deeply,
01:00:12 ►
but it certainly does bring a strange peace to my mind when I think of my comrades who are no longer walking this planet with me.
01:00:17 ►
In some strange way, it motivates me to continue on,
01:00:20 ►
but without having to carry the baggage of my thoughts about
01:00:23 ►
what I could have or should have done or said before they left.
01:00:28 ►
Perhaps it’s just another way of saying, let the dead bury the dead.
01:00:32 ►
Life is for living, and we still have some dancing to do, which is where living is at its best,
01:00:38 ►
especially when it’s under the stars with a few thousand of our closest friends all kicking up the dirt on the dance floor with us.
01:00:42 ►
with a few thousand of our closest friends all kicking up the dirt on the dance floor with us.
01:00:45 ►
Now, I’d like to close today with just a brief comment
01:00:49 ►
about the rescue of the miners in Chile.
01:00:51 ►
If you were following that story,
01:00:53 ►
my guess is that you felt a great deal of empathy
01:00:56 ►
for the trapped miners and for their families and friends.
01:00:59 ►
And no matter what your opinion is about the extensive television coverage,
01:01:03 ►
you have to admit that, if nothing else, this event has helped us put faces on those brave people who go down
01:01:10 ►
into the earth each day and dig out minerals and gems that we so often take for granted.
01:01:15 ►
When you give somebody a piece of jewelry with a precious stone in it, or when you use
01:01:20 ►
your computer or MP3 player, do you give any thought to the women and men
01:01:25 ►
who labored under deplorable conditions underground
01:01:28 ►
to bring out the minerals that make those computers hum
01:01:31 ►
and the jewelry sparkle?
01:01:33 ►
Until now, I have to admit that they were invisible to me as well.
01:01:37 ►
But now I have the faces of the men and their families
01:01:40 ►
imprinted indelibly on my mind.
01:01:43 ►
And so, the next time I think I need to get the latest MP3 player or a new computer,
01:01:48 ►
I’m going to think long and hard about upgrading,
01:01:50 ►
because now I can see the faces of the people who are risking their lives every day
01:01:55 ►
just to bring us more stuff.
01:01:57 ►
According to an article from BBC that I read,
01:02:01 ►
there are over 10,000 miners who are killed in accidents each and every year.
01:02:06 ►
That means that during the 70 days that we watched and waited for the rescue of the
01:02:11 ►
33 Chilean miners, there were about 2,000 other miners who died in other accidents.
01:02:17 ►
And some estimates push the total number of mining fatalities each year as closer to 20,000.
01:02:24 ►
At this very moment, there are hundreds
01:02:26 ►
of thousands of our fellow humans who are deep under the earth, sweating, straining, and digging
01:02:32 ►
for us so that we can continue to enjoy the wonders of high tech and high fashion. I realize
01:02:38 ►
that this problem is another one of those things that are so large that we more or less just throw
01:02:44 ►
our hands up and surrender
01:02:45 ►
and simply look the other way when an issue like this surfaces.
01:02:49 ►
And I don’t have any solutions myself other than to promise myself that I’m never going to again replace anything electronic
01:02:56 ►
unless it no longer works, and not just because I want a little more speed for my graphics programs.
01:03:02 ►
want a little more speed for my graphics programs.
01:03:04 ►
So, I celebrate the wonderful rescue and the
01:03:06 ►
brave hearts of everyone involved in the
01:03:08 ►
miraculous rescue that we all just
01:03:10 ►
witnessed, and at the same time
01:03:12 ►
I send my love and support to the families
01:03:14 ►
of the 25 or so
01:03:15 ►
women and men who will die in other
01:03:17 ►
mining accidents today,
01:03:19 ►
and every day from here on out until
01:03:21 ►
enough people raise their voices against the oligarchs
01:03:24 ►
who are squeezing the life out of the world’s miners by forcing them to work in unfit and unsafe
01:03:29 ►
environments. Until we’re able to recognize the divinity in not just ourselves, but in everyone
01:03:35 ►
else on this planet, I’m afraid these tragedies are going to persist. I’m currently reading a
01:03:41 ►
novel by John Foles in which one of his characters says,
01:03:48 ►
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum.
01:03:51 ►
At that time you must accept yourself.
01:03:53 ►
It is not anymore what you will become.
01:03:57 ►
It is what you are and always will be.
01:04:00 ►
So, what are we?
01:04:01 ►
What do we stand for?
01:04:03 ►
And what are we going to do about it? Well, that’s going to do it for now.
01:04:08 ►
And so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you once again that this and most of the podcasts
01:04:13 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under
01:04:18 ►
the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. And if you have any
01:04:23 ►
questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link
01:04:25 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:04:28 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:04:31 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:04:34 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel,
01:04:36 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:04:38 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:04:40 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:04:44 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:04:48 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.