Changes: The Houseboat Summit - Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg & More - Being in the Way

well I think that thus far the genius of this kind of underground that we're talking about is that it has no leadership the Western world has labored for many many centuries under a monarchical conception of the universe that nature is run by a boss and what we need to to realize is that there can be shall we say a movement a stirring among people which can be organically designed instead of politically designed it has no boss [Music] welcome to being in the way the Alan Watts podcast and I'm your host Mark watts and today we're going to hear a very unique recording it's from the summer of 1967. it was recorded on my father's houseboat the ferry boat Vallejo in Sausalito and it's a discussion that he had with Tim Leary Allan Ginsberg Alan Cohen of the Oracle and Gary Snyder and it's very interesting because they were talking about the Great Society ideas for how to live with a culture that wasn't anchored to the military-industrial complex of the time it has a lot of resonances for us today and some very interesting and practical advice and it also shows my father in a different role than we usually hear him here he's the host and Master of Ceremonies and at times moderating a humorous conversation between these fellows so it's Alan Watts Allen Ginsburg Tim Leary Alan Cohen and Gary Snyder in changes the houseboat Summit Summer of 67 ferryboat Vallejo Sausalito California enjoy the discussion foreign Watts speaking I'm this evening on my ferry boat The Host to a fascinating party sponsored by the San Francisco Oracle which is our new underground paper far outer than any far out that has yet been seen and we have here Alan Cohen representing the paper the oracle we have Alan Ginsburg poet and rabbinic sadhu we have Timothy Leary about him nothing needs to be said and Gary Snyder also poet Zen Monk and old friend of Many Years everybody is all bugged because I think won um the Dropout thing uh really doesn't mean anything is what you're going to cultivate is a lot of freak out uh hippies uh goofing around throwing bottles through Windows uh when they flip out on Ellis dick that's their stereotype Vision obviously second no no it's it's like it's uh it's it's no different from the newspaper Vision anymore I mean they've got the newspaper vision and secondly they're afraid that there'll be some sort of fascist push like his roommate lately everybody's gonna be arrested so that the lack of organization among the or the lack of community so lack of communicating Community among the hippies will lead to some a concentration camp situation or leads as it has been in Los Angeles recently to a dispersal of what what beginning of the community is there the old menopausal mines that there was a psychiatrist named Adler in San Francisco whose interpretation of the Butte being was that this is the uh basis for new fascism you know when a leader comes along and I said the activism the uh the cry for a leader the crime but they're just as intelligent as as so you are on this fact they know about what happened in in Russia that's the reason that they haven't got a big active organization is because they too are stumped by how do you have a community and a community movement uh in cooperation within the community to make life more uh uh pleasing for everybody including the end of the Vietnam War how do you have such a situation organized or disorganized as long as it's effective without a fascist leadership because they don't want to be that either so they are conscious of the fact that they don't want to be Messiahs political Messiahs who's the uh savios particularly he wants to go out yesterday he was weeping saying he wanted to go out and live in nature beautiful so I mean he's like um basically where we are so well I think that thus far the genius of this kind of underground that we're talking about is that it has no leadership uh the Western world has labored for many many centuries under a monarchical conception of the universe well God is the boss and political systems and all kinds of law have been based on this model of the universe that nature is run by a boss whereas the if you take the Chinese view of the world which is organic uh they would say for example that the human body is an organization in which there is no boss it is a situation of uh order resulting from Mutual interrelationship of all the parts okay and what we need to to realize is that there can be shall we say a movement a stirring among people which can be organically designed instead of politically designed it has no boss yeah well they had all the parts recognize each other in the same way as the cells of the body all cooperate together of course a new social structure yes it's a new social structure which follows certain kinds of uh historically non-tribal models exactly yeah uh when you my historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic maps have developed in history Rome turkey so forth and they always break down when enough people as well as the young the creative and the minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form I and I agree with what I've heard you say in the past Gary that the basic unit is tribal and what I Envision is thousands of small groups throughout the United States and Western Europe relation to the world and it's crapping out what happened when Rome fell whatever your job as a psychology teacher in Harvard now what you've dropped into is one a highly complicated series of arrangements for lecturing and for putting on the festival well I'm great about that no no but you're not dropped out of the very highly complicated legal constitutional appeals which you feel a Sentimental regard for as I do you have you haven't um dropped out of like a being the financial provider for Millbrook and you haven't dropped out of planning and conducting Community organization and participating in it and that Community organization is related to the National Community too either through the Supreme Court or through the very existence of the dollar that is exchanged for for you to pay your lawyers or to take money to pay your lawyers in the theater so you can't drop out like drop out because you haven't well uh let me explain so they think you mean like a drop out like go live on the Ashbury Street and do nothing at all even if you can do something like Bill caught furniture and sell it or give it away and barter with somebody else you have to drop out in a group you drop out a small tribal Group Well you drop it out one by one but you know like you can join the Southern Culture maybe it's a rough out of what Gary I think that you have something to say here because you to me are one of the most fantastically capable Dropout people out of the met I I think that at this point you should say a word or two about your own experience of how to live on nothing how to get by in life economically and this is this this is the nitty-gritty this is where it really comes down to in many people's minds where's the bread gonna come from if everybody drops off now you know expertly where it's going to come from living and life of integrity and uh not being involved in a commute uh neckties strangle News Scene well this isn't news to anybody but when uh 10 15 years ago when we dropped out there wasn't a community uh and there wasn't anybody who's going to take care of you at all you were really completely on your own what it meant was cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum and it also meant uh don't be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living uh that meant uh doing any kind of work on strawberry picking Carpenter laborer Longshore a Longshore is hard to get onto I figured very well I ended your shipping out that also pays very well but at least in my time it meant being willing to do any goddamn kind of Labor that came your way and not being fussy about it it meant and it meant cultivating the virtue of patients uh the patience of sticking with a shitty job uh long enough to win the bread that you needed to have some more Leisure which meant more freedom to do more things that you learned to do and and mastering techniques of all kinds of techniques of living really cheap like getting free rice off the docks because the loading trucks sometimes Fork the dock Fork the rice sacks and and still little piles of rice on the docks which are usually thrown away but I had it worked out with some of the guards done on the docks that they would gather 15 25 pounds of rice for me and also tea and uh I'd pick it up once a week off of dachshund I take it around and give it to friends and this was rice that was going to be thrown away otherwise you know those little techniques like that uh second day vegetables from the supermarket yeah we used to go around uh at one or two in the morning around the Safeways in the piggly wigglys in Berkeley with a shopping bag and hit the garbage cans out and back and we'd get Chinese cabbage cabbage broccoli lots of broccoli and I have a artichokes that were thrown out because they didn't look sellable anymore so I never bought them I never bought any vegetables for the three years I was a graduate student at Berkeley and when I made it mean it was usually horse meat from the pet store because it's uh they don't have a law that permits them to sell horse meat for healing consumption in California like they do in Oregon because he meant delicious wow I want to add to this Gary that during the time when you were living this way I visited you on occasion and you had a little hot way up on the hillside on Homestead Valley in Mill Valley and I want to say for the record this was one of the most beautiful pads I ever saw it was sweet and clean and uh it had a very very good smell to the whole thing and you were living uh what I consider to be a very Noble life now then the question that next arises if this is the way of being a successful Dropout which I think it is is true um can you have a wife and child under such circumstances yeah what about when the state forces you to send the child to school you send it to school come on I don't see this as a Dropout at all uh that no I want to say I want to finish what I was going to say that that's the way it was 10 years ago uh today there is a community yeah a huge Community which when you drop out when any kid drops out today he's got a subculture to go fall into he's got a place to go to they'll be friends and people that will put him up and people that will feed him at least for a while and keep feeding him indefinitely if he goes around from pad to pad uh but that's just uh stage one stage one the value of Glory's side or of the district in uh Seattle or the hate Ashbury is it provides a first uh launching Pad but that's that must be seen clearly as a way station I don't think they hate Ashbury district is a place any City for that matter is a place where uh the new tribal I agree with you is going to live so that uh what I mean drop out and they don't want to be misinterpreted I'm dropping out step by step Millbrook by the way is a tribal community we're getting closer and closer to the landing we're working out our way of Import and Export with the planet we consider ourselves a tribe of mutants just like all the little tribes of Indians were I wanted to have our little uh area there and we we have to uh come to terms of the white men around us so yes there's no way no look your Dropout line is fine uh for the for the for all those other people out there you know that's what you got to say them but I want to hear what you're building what are you making like it's a green we're dropping out and there are techniques to do it now what next where are we going now I'm making the prediction that thousands of groups will uh just look around the uh fake prop television set of American society and just open one of those doors and when you open the doors they don't leave no anyone can lead you out into the Garden of Eden which is this planet and then you find yourself a little tribe wandering around uh as soon as enough people do this and the young people do this it'll bring about an incredible change in the consciousness of the this country and of the western world it is happening actually yeah but the kind Garden of Edens rubber truck tires and tin cans right now you know parts that are each group that drops out has got to use it's two billion years of cellular equipment to answer those questions hey how are we going to eat oh there's no more paycheck there's no more Fellowship in University how are we going to eat how are we going to keep warm how are we going to defend ourselves what is very important here is that is that people learn the techniques a witch have been forgotten that they learn new structures and new techniques like you you just can't go out and grow vegetables man you've got to know how to do it you know like we've got to learn to do a lot of things we've forgotten to do I agree that is very true Gary our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence in other words exactly we don't learn how to cook how to make clothes how to build houses how to make love how to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life it's a whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions it trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat or some kind of um cerebral character within the next five years probably a a modest beginning will be made in subculture institutions of Higher Learning that will informally begin to exist around the company will provide this kind of education without being left to the establishment it's a big industry to government oh that's already happened it's already happening extension of that employing a lot of potentially beautiful teachers who are unemployed at the moment like there are gurus who are just waiting to be put to use and also drawing people who are working in universities with a bad conscience off to join that exactly there's a whole new order of technology that is required for this a whole new science actually a whole new physical science is going to emerge for this because the boundaries of the old physical science are within the boundaries of the judeo-christian and Western imperialist lost sense of the universe that Allen is talking about now in other words our scientific tradition is caught within the limits of that uh Father Figure Jehovah or Roman Emperor model which lumens our scientific objectivity and and actually holds us back from exploring areas of science exactly so that really you know like our new technology goes with this exactly it's like the guy in Los Angeles who had a bad trip on LSD and turned himself into the police and wrote please help me sign Jehovah but [Laughter] um here though is this thing you see uh we are talking about all this which is really a rather small movement of people involved in the midst of a fantastic multitude of people who can only continue to survive if automated industry feeds them closes clothes them houses them and transports them by means of the creation of immense quantities of Elsa's material fake bread fake homes fake clothes and fate or fake autos in other words this thing is going on you know this huge fantastic numbers of people increasing increasing increasing people think you know the population problem something's going to happen in five years from now I don't realize it's right Honest now people are coming out of the walls you got to Star it immediately putting the technology underground I can think of different ways that we can do this symbolically uh the solstice last April 21st a group of us went out in front of the house in millbra and uh we took a sledgehammer and we spent about an hour breaking through the road and we had this incredible piece of asphalt and uh Rock about four inches and then we said hey underneath this planet somewhere there's dirt yeah and it was really magical and once you get a little piece taken out about now I get one little piece then you just go underneath it and it begins to crumble uh so I think that we should start a movement to uh once one hour a day or one hour a week take a little hammer and put a little hole in some of this uh uh plastic and uh just see some Earth come up and put a seed there I can foresee and then put a little uh ring of uh mandalic ring of uh something around it I can see the highways and I can see the um uh Subways and I can see the patios and so forth uh suddenly the highway department come along there's a rose growing in the middle of Highway 101 and then then the robot Power Group will have to send a group of the highway department to kill the rose and put the asphalt down on the gentle naked skin of the soil now when they do that we're getting to them they'll be pictures in the paper and Consciousness is going to change because we've got to get to people's Consciousness we've got to let people realize what they're doing to the earth and the Ethereal poetry here we go and you're the politician I've told you that for 10 years foreign psychology and he doesn't know whether to drop out I'm not as Falls in two directions I think many people left it yes I think he should drop out and I want to be absolutely clear on that and the paper is uh nobody wants to listen to that simple uh two-syllable phrase it gets jargled and jumbled and uh uh and I mean it uh there's now everyone has to decide how he drops out and when and he has to uh time it gracefully but uh that's the goal now I can foresee that you might work for Susan Robux for six months to get enough money to go to India but that's part of your Dropout and what I'm doing today on it's part of my Dropout uh I do a responsibility contracts and I don't think that anyone should violate contracts uh with people that they love contract with the university huh fine quit tomorrow therefore I have to detach myself slowly when I was in India uh two years ago you know the University's personal relations also uh they can't reject those persons necessarily yeah among those persons you can as Tim says you can gracefully drop out which I take too much I was teaching at Burger you've got to do your yoga smarter than you're gonna have to go through and after you after you do that then he'll yeah you'll shut her and run for the door sooner the facts of the matter is that you can do this on the small scale as an individual where just a few people are doing this as they always have done there have always been a kind of elite minority who dropped out who were the sages in the mountains I was talking a drama you're not talking about you know anthropological realities the anthropological reality is to human beings in their nature want to be in touch with what's real in themselves and in the universe and that for example the longshoreman with their automation contract in San Francisco a certain number of them have been laid off for the rest of their lives with full pay and some of them have been laid off already for five years with full pay by their contract now my brother-in-law shoreman he's been telling me about what's happened to these guys most of them are pretty illiterate a large proportion of them are negros the first thing they all did was get notes and drive around San Francisco Bay because they have all this Leisure uh then a lot of them got tired of driving around boats that were just like cars and they started sailing then a few of them started making their own sailboats they move into and respond to the possibility of challenge Things become simpler and more complex and more challenging for them the same is true of hunting some guy says I'm going to go hunting and fishing all the time when I have my Leader by God and so he goes hunting all the time then he says I want to do this in a more interesting way so he takes a bow hunting yeah then the next step is and this has happened he says I'm going to try making my own arrowheads and he learns how to Flint flake his own arrowheads out but human beings want reality that's I think part of human nature and uh television and drinking beer watching television is what the Working Man laid off does for the first two weeks but then in the third week he begins to get bored and in the fourth week he wants to do something with his body with his mind with his senses I think that Automation in the affluent society uh plus psychedelics plus a for some Curious reason uh a whole catalytic uh spiritual change or bend of mind that seems to be taking place in the west today especially he's going to result uh can result ultimately in a vast Leisure society in which people uh uh will voluntarily reduce their number and because human beings want to do that which is real simplify their lives like the whole problem of consumption and and marketing is radically altered if a number of people the Larson people voluntarily choose to consume less and people will voluntarily choose to consume us if their interests are turned in another direction if what is exciting to them is no longer things but states of mind that's true now what is happening now as if people are becoming interested in states of mind and things are really substitute for states of mind so what I visualize is a very complex and sophisticated cybernetic technology uh surrounded by thick Hedges of trees somewhere say around Chicago and the rest of the nation of Buffalo a large number of people going around making their own arrowheads because it's fun but they know better you know they know they don't have to make it now this is interesting our utopian Visions are coming closer together I say that the industry should be underground you said should be in Chicago yeah that's the same idea yeah yeah but uh you know like those who want to be technological Engineers will be respected they're right to do that yeah and the other thing is like you can go out and live close to Nature or you can go back but you won't be allowed to drive a car outside this uh technological uh well you won't want to right you know it's not that you won't be allowed to that's where it's got to be at because it's the same thing when we get down to say some fundamental questions of food um more and more one realizes that the mass-produced food is not worth eating and therefore in order to Delight in things to eat you go back to the most primitive processes of uh raising and preparing food because that has taste in it and uh I see that there will be a sort of flip that as all the possibilities of technology and automation make it possible for everybody to be assured of having the basic necessities of life they will then say Oh yes we have all that now let's uh we we can always rely on that but now in the meantime while we don't have to work let's go back to making arrowheads and to um raising the most amazing plants yeah Chicago would rust away that's right right I forget they needed it either that's exactly what's going to happen the cyclads are going to be having so much fun I think it'll be so much obvious do you see any indication among people who are oppressed really turned on uh that they are cultivating this kind of material competence now I I haven't seen too much of it yet I went to uh some of those kids at Big Sur have got it yeah maybe you're right they learn they're learning like a few years ago they used to go down to Big certain they didn't know how to camp or how to dig the dreams uh but uh you know like what Martine has been telling me and what I've seen down there lately is that they they're getting very sharp about what together that's edible how to get sea salt uh what what are the edible plants yet we'll see it in the Revolutionary technological book for this state now it's got a l crovers have look at the California Indians which tells you what's good to eat that's what I wanted but the thing is this look so many people I know it's also what to use for Tampax milkweed fluff beautiful diapers made of shredded cedar bark yeah the whole thing is all there California Indians but the thing that is this I found so many people who you know are the turned on type and they circumstances and surroundings under which they live are just plain cruddy you would think that people who had seen what you can see with the visions uh of psychedelics would reflect themselves in forms of life and art that would be like Persian villagers because obviously Persian Miniatures Moorish arabesques are all reflecting the State of Mind the people who have turned on and they are rich and glorious beyond belief Majestic Majestic young well now why doesn't it so occur it is slowly beginning to happen because I've noticed that since that recently all turned on people are becoming more colorful they're wearing beads and gorgeous clothes and so on and so forth and it's gradually coming out because you remember the old picnic days when everybody was in blue jeans and ponytails and no lipstick and the grab and crummy what now something is meaning it happened it wasn't quite that good but we were mostly concerned without being consumers then yes I know now I see it beginning to happen uh Timothy here instead of wearing his old uh whatever it was that he used to wear has now got a white uh tunic on with the gold colorful uh give me on it okay yes and uh it's very beautiful and he's wearing a necklace under all that kind of thing and the color is it last coming into the scene I think it's practical here uh I think we're all concerned about the um uh increasing number of people who are dropping out and uh wondering where to go from there now let's come up with some practical suggestions which uh we might hope could unfold in the next few months there's three categories Wilderness rural and urban there's going to be Bush People Farm people and City people Bush tribes Farm tribes and City tribes beautiful I that makes immediate sense to myself uh the word is evil and Technology somehow they come together and where there's an increase in technology and technological facility there's an increase in what we usually call human evil I wouldn't agree with that no no there's all kinds of non-evil Technologies for consultation about something like like Flint of a Neolithic obsidian flaking is technology technology yes for two but what you mean I think is this that when you go back to the great myths about the origin of evil actually the Hebrew words which say Good and Evil as the the knowledge of Good and Evil being the result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge these words mean contagious and disadvantageous and their words connected with technical skills and the whole idea is this which you find reflected in the the Taoist philosophy that the moment you start interfering in the course of nature with a mind that is centered and one pointed and analyzes everything and breaks it down into bits the moment you do that you lose contact with your original know-how by means of which you now color your eyes and breathe and beat your heart and for thousands of years mankind has lost touch with his original intelligence and he has been absolutely fascinated by this the kind of political Godlike controlling intelligence and analyze things all over the place and he has forgotten to trust his his own organism now the whole thing that uh that everything uh is is coming to be realized today not only through people who take psychedelics but also through many scientists they're realizing that this linear kind of intelligence cannot keep up with the course of nature it can only solve trivial problems when the big problems happen too fast to be thought about in that way and so those of us who are in some way or other through psychedelics through meditation through what have you are getting back to being able to trust our original intelligence are suggesting an entirely new cost for the development of civilization well it happened that Civilization develops with the emergence of specialization in labor yes and the emergence of a class structure a class structure a camps survive or can't put across its principle and expect people to accept it if they believe in themselves if they believe individually one by one that they are in some way Godlike or buddha-like or potentially Illuminati so that it's almost ingrained in the civilization of Freud said this you know civilization has a Neurosis that that the part of the nature of civilization is that it must put down the potential of every individual development uh and this is the difference between the that kind of society which we call civilized and that much more ancient kind of society which is still viable and still survives which we call primitive in which everybody is potentially a chief and which everybody like Amanda Comanche or the Sue everybody and the whole culture was expected to go out and have a vision at one time in his life to in other words to leave the society to have some transcendental experience to have a song and a totem come to him which he need tell no one ever and then come back and live with this double knowledge in society in other words through him having had his own isolation his own loneliness and his own Vision he knows that the game rules of society are fundamentally an illusion and in the society you know the society not only permits that the society is built on is built on that right danger which has been out of it that Society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality and no one who ever came in contact with the Plains Indians didn't think didn't think what they were never men yeah every record of American Indians uh uh from the Cavalry the Pioneers the missionaries the Spaniards says every one of these people was men you know in fact I was wearing something just the other day talking about the Iraq Indians an early settler up there no an early Explorer to come in on their fantastic self-confidence so every Indian has this had fantastic self-confidence and they laugh at me he said they laugh at me and they say aren't you sorry you're not in India poor wretched Indians this fellow said well that that is because every one of them has gone out and had this Vision experience has has been completely alone with himself from face to face with himself and has contacted Powers outside of what anything the society could give him and Society expects him to contact Powers outside of society in those cultures yes every healthy culture does every healthy culture provides for their being non-joiners sanyasi Hermits this is every healthy Society has to tolerate this a society like the Comanche or the zoo demands that everybody go out there and have this vision and and incorporate it and ritualizes then a society like India uh a step more civilized uh permits some individuals to have these Visions but doesn't demand it of everyone we have to wonder why some people are ready to drop out than others that may be explained by therapy Incarnation the people that don't want to drop out can't conceive of living on this planet outside of the prop television Studio are just unlucky enough to have been born into this uh sort of thing maybe the first the second time they're still entrance by the uh by all of the handmade man-made the man-made props but there's no question that uh we should I think we should uh consider how more and more people who are ready in being a Dropout that is to say being an outsider you can only appreciate and realize this value if there are in contrast with you insiders and squares the two are mutually supportive yeah if someone says to me I just can't conceive of dropping out it's like say well um uh you're having fun with this this go around in fine um yeah we've all done that many times in the past but the two groups the Insiders and The Outsiders work precisely and what we're doing what everybody's dealing with is people is not dealing with institutions or something but also dealing with people working within including the police you like you have to be able if you're going to talk this way you have to be able to say specifically say to someone in Wichita Kansas or who says I'm going to drop out yeah what do you advise uh how do you advise me to stay living around here let's be less historical now for a while let's be very practical about ways in which uh people who want to uh find the Tribal Way well this is telling to kids in Michigan in Kansas for example I told them first of all uh do you want to live here or do you want to go someplace else good all right they say I want to stay around where I am I say okay get in touch with the Indian culture here find out what was here before find out what the mythologies were find out what the local deities were and you can get all of this out of books go and look at your local archaeological sites beautiful hey a reverent visit to the local American Indian tombs and also the tombs of the early settlers find out what your original ecology was is it short grass prairies at Long Grass Prairie here uh if uh go out and live on the land for a while set up a tent and camp out and watch the clouds and watch the water and watch the land and get a sense of what the climate is here because since you've been living in a house all your life you probably don't know what the climate is beautiful uh then decide how you want to make your living here do you want to be a farmer or do you want to be a harmful gatherer you know like it's you start from the ground up and you can do it in any part of this country today cities and all right you use this company by Taking Back to the Indians yeah and I agree with you completely find out what the Indians were up to in your own area whether it's Utah or or Kansas cellular Revelation and genius uh Gary that's one of the wisest things I've heard anyone say in years that's exactly how it should be done I do see the need for transitions though and you say that there will be City people as well as country people non-people uh I would suggest that for the next year or two or three which are going to be nervous transitional mutational years where things are going to happen very fast by the way that uh the transition could be facilitated if every city set up a little meditation rooms and little Shrine rooms where uh the people in transition dropping out can meet uh meditate together and it's already happening at the Psychedelic shocks it's happening in New York I've seen a reason though why there shouldn't be 10 or 15 or 20 such places in San Francisco yeah I know but let's encourage that yeah I was just in Seattle and I was urging the people there hundreds of them crowd into coffee shops and this is beautiful energy they are liberated people uh these kids but they don't know where to go and they just need uh they don't need leadership but they need I think a a a variety of suggestions uh from people who have thought about this giving them the options to move well I'd like to see the difference just a minute yeah the different meditation rooms can have different styles when visan one can be macrobiotic one can be uh back to chanting one can be rock and roll psychedelic one can be lights uh if we learn anything from my sales we learned that God Delights in variety they've got to meet each other and form these tribal I would say reincarnation groups because the people who are ready to drop out and turn on will come to these centers and they'll wander around they'll form Natural Cellular groups and they'll leave the city I would suggest this practical step number two that the human being uh San Francisco be a model we've all tried different models of summer schools and institutes and research projects and uh individual dropouts and psychedelic celebrations and so forth and the Avalon and Fillmore and so forth I would say that the human being was was a tremendously important uh thing in the consciousness of San Francisco now that thing could happen in every large city in the country and again the beautiful thing about the being was it had no leadership it had no big financing it would just grow automatically but we're accused of being a leader we're cartoons you know what are we doing up on that that's the charge that doesn't bother me at all there were 50 people over that platform every one of them was a leader so are the people in the audience the reason was nobody came out and said we are the leaders no no but it said because I remember sitting up there every time every time they say you're a leader you pointing the Snyder well now look here yeah I know but but the Press has a leadership complex yeah they keep calling Gary one of the four philosophical questions is who started it and whenever the police saw the Press barge into a situation they want to know who started it right in other words because they're still thinking about God and the first cause and there was no courage who started who's in charge let's get back to a fundamental thing I think that what you are really all of you are having the courage to say is that the absolutely primary thing is that there'd be a change of Consciousness in the individual that uh he escaped from the hallucination that he is a separate ego in an alien universe and that we all come to realize primarily that each one of us is the whole works that we each one of us is what is real and has been real for always and always and always and will ever be and uh although the time language may not be appropriate here but nevertheless we are that and to the extent that it can be spread around that that's what you and I are and we lose our anxieties and we lose our Terror of death and our Terror of unimportance and all that kind of thing that this is the absolutely essential ingredient which if we get hold of that point all the rest will be added unto you you know in the sense of seek you first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added to you right isn't that what you're saying I mean isn't that absolutely basic that even if this is only realized in this particular statistical minority nevertheless it's immensely powerful it affects Consciousness it affects everybody I would add to practical step number two that more celebrations be set up over the or more of beans uh the the project was just occurred in the Practical details the model of it is something like the mahalila uh like you're asking how's it going to work well now is a is a group of about three different families uh who have sort of pulled their resources none of which are very great but they have decided to play together and to work together and to take care of each other and that means like like all of them are doing ways I have ways of getting a small amount of bread which they share and other people contribute a little money when it comes in and then they work together on Creative projects like they're working together on a light show right now for a poetry reading that we're going to get and they consider themselves a kind of extended family or Clan and like when they went to the B and they had a banner which said mahali like that is their Clan yeah and the model for the time is that is that breaking out of this of this of the smaller family organization we work in slightly larger structures like Clan structures in which people do work at various jobs and bring in whatever bread they can from various jobs but they're willing to pool it and share it and they learn how to work and play together and then they then they relate that to a larger sense of the job which is also loose but for the time being everybody has to be able from time to time to do some little job uh but but but the reference is uh the thing that makes it different is that you don't bring it home to a very tight individual or or one monogamous family unit but you bring it home to a slightly larger unit where the sharing is greater I think that's where it's oh I think that's very important extended families the extended family I think is where it starts and my own particular hobby horse on this is that the extended family leads to matrilineal descent and when we get matrilineal descent then we'll have group marriage when we have group marriage we'll have the economy lit because with the group marriage capitalism is doomed and civilization goes out [Laughter] practical step number three is um foreign thank you I think we should encourage her extended families everywhere well it's very practical to encourage extended families because the present model of the family is a hopeless breakdown because first of all the family is an agrarian culture institution which is not suited to an urban culture because all the family consists in is Optometry where a wife and children are located and a husband who engages in a mysterious activity in an office or a factory in which neither the wife nor the children have any part no interest abstraction called money and whether a lot of pretty secretaries in the scene in which he actually works exactly yeah and so uh they they have no relations whatsoever to what he does and furthermore the awful thing about the the family as it exists at the moment is that the husband and the wife both feel guilty about not bringing up their children properly and therefore they live for their children instead of living out their own lives and doing their own interesting work in which the children would automatically become interested as participants and Watchers on the side as it is they're doing everything they say where we live we work we earn our money for you Darlings and these poor Darlings feel all this thing thrown at them they don't want to deal with it and then they are sent away to school shrilled after schools Dylan Thomas put it and to be educated for everything and nothing hi strangers by strangers who are dubious who teach them all sorts of purely spiritual intellectual and sexual character is life abstract uh formulations and things they'll learn and the the family has no reality and the the greatest institution today in the American family is the babysitter someone who just take the children out of our Consciousness while we enjoy ourselves and the deaths that are going to take the old people out of it and the death sitter exactly and even death has been taken from the people yes everything happens the the mod courtesy of the mortician yes a good death a good death is no longer possible practicing so I have a four stage thing American Indian Technologies practical now meditation centers group marriage and periodical Gatherings of the tribes I don't agree with Ruth marriage we are tribal we are a tribal of people uh you cannot have infidelity in a tribe infidelity sexual freedom is sexuality every word is finished every woman is all woman if you can't find all women and one woman it's your problem I do think it's possible for some of us to have found all women and one woman I want to get back to you I mean just let me get something with him uh infidelity means uh denying your commitments now if your commitments are within a group marriage then Fidelity is being true within your group marriage and infidelity is is being unsure dishonest outside of that now there's there are some cultures in South America in which all forms of marriage are permitted there are group marriages polyandrous marriages polygamous marriages and monogamous marriages by group marriages just a moment let's get a question of definition okay group marriages where a number of people as a group whatever the number is uh announce a marriage is a social announcement of commitment yeah I'll announce that we will be responsible for the children we produce and for each other no in other words all males and all females in this group can be in mutual intercourse with each other yeah yeah uh it happens in this South American culture that the majority of the marriages are monogamous but it also happens that there are some polyanders some polygamous and a few group ones and and I think that uh that what we can allow is people to combine in whatever combinations they wish oh I certainly would agree with that when people just as loud so said when the Great Dao lost there came talk of Duty demand and right conduct and so when the essential idea of Love Is Lost there comes talk of fidelity that actually the only possible basis for a two beings male and female to relate to each other is to Grant each other total freedom and say I don't put any Bonds on you you don't put any Bonds on me because I want you I love you the way you are and I want you to be that the minute you start making contracts and bonds and signing on the dotted line you are wrecking the whole relationship and you just have to trust the fact that human beings should be legally allowed to trust each other and to enter into a fellowship that does not involve a contractual arrangement I think we all agree with that you know because if you don't do that you'll kill it in primitive cultures marriage is not a contractual uh uh Arrangement but what it is is it's a public announcement amounts to it's it's a relationship which is made public what was your fourth Point Gary occasional Gatherings of the throne tribes that wasn't funny it was activity well I I it seems to me then so you say rather than group marriage extended families extended cooperation structures in other words American Indian Technologies meditation centers extended Cooperative Clan type or extended family type structures with much more permissiveness in the nature of the family structure than is permitted say in judea-christian Tradition and uh Gatherings of the larger tribes periodically practical suggestion number six I suggest that we have meetings and cities uh April 21st I suggest we have say National meetings uh there are one national meeting grabs uh June 21st and that we start moving through Europe to the east so that we would in September 21st the uh on the door between India and China with uh as many Indians or westerners or people that we picked up on the way uh I think that's the quickest way to end racial Prejudice and we're in Vietnam some cultures aren't going to understand this and I'm not going to get more than 20 000 people that was done anyway all the way all the way around there and that was done Anyway by Shankar Abdel and he got stopped at the border Burger but you know the Chinese would let him through when the Indians were upset there's a social historical problem there and one is that California's only places right San Francisco is the place yeah like you couldn't you couldn't do this in Japan it's already done that now let's move it out no but you can't do it yet a great a great percentage of the world is going to have to move through the drama of Western culture and technology in some accelerated way before they're ready for this like like America is the only culture that's uh in which a number of people have seen through it and are able to go beyond Japan isn't ready to for example it would it would be uh incredibly eccentric to them nobody's ready to try that I I question that I think that uh if you look at the spread of American ideology France is just now starting at Super drug stores fail to realize the authentic uh deep American Steward behind this and I think that if it's taken 15 years for France to accept the uh super drug store uh why not six months to accept the being in San Francisco well because because uh as in this way they spread drugs or Pepsi Cola or Coca-Cola was they uh when Coca-Cola first showed up in the Grand Canal in Venice or covers showed up in Pakistan it was considered eccentric but uh if pepsicola can do it the energy and the cellular collectivity which started here can move much more quickly because it's talking to deeper things in uh human beings in Pensacola I think these things are so many of these people in Africa and Asia are caught up in the drama of progress they want nothing more than to come to America and get a lot of a large apartment and a large car and a big town we can tell them uh I feel the same way about the problem with the the American Negro uh does he have to become a middle class white before he can then go on and leave that uh I don't think we have to uh go through these uh uh historical periods I think it's possible to move it forward I hope it's possible to accelerate it but you can't take it around the world this year or next year yeah like the drawing is changing like what people are interested in is not things at states of mind you know like that's the cultural shift let's say you know this is a very important state of this really yes uh We've we've turned a corner it's a bigger Corner than the Reformation probably yes on the order of the change between Paleolithic and Neolithic uh and it's a it's like one of the three or four major turns in the history of man not just culture but man right now an enormous number of people go into the heart of New York every day for no other reason than to shop uh there are to a large extent frustrated women living in these wretched dormitories their husbands are working and the women go in in order to get some kind of sense of existence of being by buying things now supposing it happens that instead of that they change their state of mind right instead of going out you know and buying something they change their state of mind sitting where they are in the first place then bond with teller uh everything in the middle of town simply collapses Lord and Taylor and so on there's no more reason for existence it's like Market Street in San Francisco where everything is slowly falling apart because it's so ridiculous to Parkway and you can't get at the place anyhow so where are people going to buy their you or take machines and their numbers suppose they don't want them pardon me suppose they don't want them what we all have them they'll buy them from people transitional figures mostly three centralized no like we don't need them like I would be happy to hear Larry Bird sing his his convance and his Buffalo dance and I don't want to take it I'll hear it and that's in my mind for the rest of my life there's a withering away of the state [Music] individual tribe can operate and create whatever it needs other than that there's the technology as we know it now and well I think that the technology like a large electronic Network I think that the technology where there's a way as people learn to do it themselves like it's more interesting to do it yourself at home with your friends like sit around and blow the buffalo horn and blow the contrary and then and not turn on the television but that was like conditions that were possible before when the continent held 50 million Indians yeah but now the continent holds a great many more but they are still what's most interesting but to do what you can do yourself the whole problem is reproduction it's not only of the reproduction of the species in a second sector but reproduction as we are now reproducing what we are saying on tape because if supposing this conversation were very turned on and far out I don't know whether it is or not people would say Oh What A pity that didn't get recorded because it didn't really happen unless it was recorded and increasingly we are developing all kinds of systems for verifying Reality by echoing it will trained Minds remember and the words of the Buddha were all remembered yeah and the words of the Buddha came down for 200 years before anybody put it in writing because people were paying attention to what he said and only then did they start embellishing it yeah Gary but Krishna moti would argue that remembering it was already a fallacy well he's very pure [Laughter] he wanted to be a bridge builder now that stoled car if uh we've all got to be Bridge builders in one sense I think perhaps um he was told in hate Ashby amongst the acid heads and no one gave him a push uh if we're telling the kids they're doing something holy they have to a certain extent we have to be a little bit holy we and Holiness is good and we have to we have to learn to give um the um the diggers uh have said that since they've been on January 14th thousands and thousands of kids who don't really know where they're at but they're attractive because they want to know where they're at and come to the city but they come to the city and they don't quite know whether to be defined they don't know they don't know what to be and unless they can become bridges for themselves each person a bridge for themselves so they can show that what they have got is something giving um if domestic doesn't get across the car should be pushed exactly it's not enough to tell them that what they're doing is what they're doing by dropping out is right you know if that's the point I'm trying to get at yes well that's very important is the point we've got to become Saints is not even a silly thing to say right it's not exactly it's exactly it they've got to be told that they're pursuing the holiest uh role you have to understand what that means well there should be again if we have these meditation centers in all cities there would be centers where the Gita would be read where the ancient sutures would be read where uh they will be reminded that this is not this is not teaching we need this personal example all over them right but but I I would suggest that in these meditation centers there be uh some program of readings not in the sense of educating or teaching facts but just reminding uh young people and any person who drops out and turns on that they are part of an ancient profession the only holy profession the professionals kept the flame going and it certainly should uh Express itself in pushing the Mercedes this is fine do you think it's practical to try to get some sort of meditation in the public schools no drop out of the public schools the public schools are cannot be compromised with yeah [Music] we're not compromising with IBM or with General Electric we're simply saying as Gary has said that uh part of man's karmic Heritage is the ability to uh do incredible things with his hands and his uh uh analytic mind but they should be holy things yeah this is a question of right occupation and right conduct it's it's not like that technology is better that schools are well now look here what are we saying when we say now something is Holy that means you should take a different attitude to what you're doing than if you were for example doing it for kicks now there's a curious thing here I have noticed with it Alan Ginsburg that when he chants Hindu sutras he doesn't do it in an umpire's way right there's a joyousness and there's a feeling of delight to do to doing this chant that has been a zip to it that anything we knew in the past was being holy now when he was doing something holy in the past if you had to put on a solemn expression of saying we are doing this but it hurts but it's good for us he's not doing that when he chants that he's not saying it hurts and therefore it's good for me he's saying it's good for me because I enjoy it it's gorgeous I'm going right in there and I'm going to say all these um Etc you see he's turning himself on and I told his love and love is just right and I I told some nuns a little while ago where the Mother Superior came and they were all talking about the reform of the Liturgy and how the Catholic church has gotten itself in a Mess by translating the Latin liturgy into terrible English and all the magic has gone out of it and I said you could have happened this down against Bug chunk the Citrus because then you'd know how to celebrate math properly so when we're talking about something being holy we've got to be very careful we're saying now Gary you were saying all right people got to be Saints and you said well that's not just a not just a joke to say this but it's got to be Saints in an entirely new sense not this masochistic kind of sainthood whereby uh I am Holy because I hurt and the amount of personal hurt that I've piled up is the uh measure of my Holiness well that's the Judea Christianity which says that the cross is at the center of the universe what about India where we do have a like a giant psychedelic community and many tribal groups and tribal Gatherings which serve as the model for our own what kind of material system is that uh would that be acceptable to Mario sure it's acceptable so what do you think of swarming back to even doctors plea for the acceptance of Krishna in every direction well it's a lovely positive thing to say Krishna yeah you know like Christian is it's a beautiful mythology and it's a beautiful practice it should be encouraged yeah you think about it he feels it's the more uniting thing um well I tell you I think why he feels this is that it is the the mantrams the images of Krishna have no have in this culture no foul associations the word God is contaminated so tilik would say the ground of being instead of God anything except saying God the word uh get down on your knees and be humble before your heavenly father that gives everybody the the groups it just is just awful to say something like that you see because all these Christian images have horrible associations attached to them whereas when somebody comes in from the Orient with a new religion which hasn't got any of these associations in our minds all the words in you all the rights are new and yet somehow it has feeling in it and we can get with that you see and we can dig that and it can do something for us that it can't do in Japan for example in Japan when young people hear the Buddhist Sutra chanted they think oh yeah don't let's hear that thing because that they associate all that with fogism here in the Buddhist churches in the nisses they they can't stand it when the priests chant the Sutra is in sino-japanese language for the ulsters they want to hear Buddha loves me this I know father Sutra tells me so I always want to look as much as they can like Protestants because that's exotic to them you see we're writing our new myth and uh yes but we do we do it in our own way everybody on his own discovers the immemorial truth which has been handed down and that's the only way you can get it because you can't follow the truth as other people have taught it you can't imitate it you can only Discover it out of your own thing and by doing your own stuff you keep repeating the Eternal pattern okay and uh this probably is the sort of situation we have well you think because an egg was thrown at me at Santa Monica just talking about egg I'm talking about The Throne issue in Laredo that worries me not at all no well that's as it should be in game activity when I wander into the television studio and try to do things uh if I can bet 50 500 it's incredible uh how things have done it wrong mistakes I'm sorry I didn't well we are moratorium on Partner let's do you hear it was ridiculous I shouldn't have done that no I know well we all make fools of ourselves occasions oh good God I make a uh blunder at least one out two times I come to bed one of these celebrations uh were a mistake uh they said the first four were great they were spontaneous religious outbursts but then it became a success and people said yes you got to keep them going you got to take it around the country and so forth that was a mistake it was a mistake to make it commercial mistake to have it in the theater mistake to uh charge admission a state to keep a static form going and we've dropped out of it beautiful though phase four uh celebrations were uh the only way of finding a ritual for celebration which or are you making use of the of these of the established rituals or the historical knowledge that's been coming out lately on ritual to make a celebration which is or which is you know like really uh communal and beautiful since that being I said I said we're dropping out of the of the theater celebrations goodbye Show Business the real yeah Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said quite recently that obviously the world is going to help and the only way that it could be stopped was not to try to prevent it from happening yeah in other words when there is a game when there is a game going on that's on a collision course and that this game obviously is going to lead to total Destruction the only way of getting people out of a bad game yeah to indicate that the game is no longer interesting right see uh we we've left this game and um it deposes and uh we we've got something going on over here which is where it's at you know that's the point and this is this is where it's at and everybody who's playing this game you know they're in that plane going yeah on the mark you know suddenly they realize that that's not where it's at so many people are doing over on the other side I'm like what's going on now and see what's happening over there because maybe something's happening in instead of learning to him instead of the emphasis on the dropping out I I think in a sense it's it's one of the point to say there's something else going on right yeah it doesn't sound illiteratively correct though oh it's an intern on this video he's got a unless unless it's with language is interpreted in a way which is understandable and acceptable uh he keeps saying and then finally we just bring the transistors back in all the time are offended by the word dropped out because the defense and because it's negative rather than positive and it's over time it's a lust of three the last appreciative well now look here at him at that thing in Santa Monica you made two points one was hey you can't stay high all the time because when you finally come down from the high you realize that the ordinary State of Consciousness is one with the highest date this to me has been the most fantastic thing in all my LSD experiences that the moment I come down yeah is the critical moment of the whole experience I suddenly realize that this everyday world around me is exactly the same thing as the world of the specific Vision right now then how do you integrate that realization with the dropout all right uh we'll change the uh slogan uh yeah I I I'm completely with Mark McMillan everything I say is just a probe I'm trying to get people to uh yes I get that I do the same thing I uh Seattle you know uh we were banned from Seattle and I went out there and talked about menopause and mentality and drop out and uh and all the cocktail parties and uh Cuisine drop out menopausal menopausalito drop out I would agree to change the slogan to drop out turn on drop-ins you've been listening to Alan Watts Gary Snyder Alan Ginsberg Tim Leary and Alan Cohen in a discussion called changes the houseboat Summit recorded in 1967 on the ferry boat Vallejo my father's home in Sausalito California this podcast was produced in conjunction with the ramdas be here Now podcast Network our theme music is by Zakir Hussein from the Rhythm experience and for further information on the recordings of Alan Watts please visit Alan watts.org again that's Alan watts.org and thank you for listening today [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 11,443

Keywords: alan watts, alan watts podcast, be here now network, mark watts, being in the way podcast, karma podcast, alan watts talk, alan watts lecture, be here now, daoism, daoist way, being in the way, ram dass podcast network, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Synder, Allen Cohen

Id: ioYljpGWbzc

Length: 71min 54sec (4314 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022