Alan Watts Classic Radio Talks: Volume One
Special - 'Classic Radio Talks Volume One' 7-disc set for Only $49.00
Daylight Savings and God
There's always this curious desire to found what one does and thinks on authority: to get some basis outside one's own judgment and one's own will to do what we want to do. And when what you do is challenged, you can say: 'I wasn't responsible: I acted on authority'—but without authority. And so we can see how, in this sense, we kid ourselves by inventing reasons for what we want to do, and are going to do anyhow, that somehow seem to pass the buck—to shelve responsibility on a higher shelf.
A talk on the nature of authority. In order to persuade everybody to get up an hour earlier in the Spring, they change the clock instead of just getting up an hour earlier, because the clock has a certain kind of mystique and a certain kind of authority. . .
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The Problems of Preaching
The permanent gains of human reason and kindness, of moral effort and social concern, are palliatives rather than solutions to the great basic problems of being sensitive and alive. They redecorate the interior, but don't repair the fundamental structure of the house.
What are the limits of successful preaching? Can preaching actually affect human suffering? A preacher tells people what they ought to do in order to improve themselves and the world. Within limits our circumstances can be improved, but the limits are small.
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A Tribute to C.G. Jung
Our rage, and our very proper rage against evil things which occur in this world, must not overstep itself. For if we require as a justification for our rage a fundamental and metaphysical division between good and evil, we have an insane and in a certain sense schizophrenic universe, of which no sense whatsoever can be made.
Watts recounts an intellectual gift he received from Carl Jung: a balancing factor which acknowledges the basic life contrasts of good and evil. Having been completely accepting of his own dark side, Jung was able to point out that, to the degree you find and condemn evil in others, you are to that degree uncounscious of the same thing in yourself, or at least to the potentiality of it.
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Play and Sincerity
For many people, the sensation of being in doubt as to whether there is any reality underneath begins to provoke an extraordinarily strong sensation of guilt. After all, there is supposed to be something that we really do stand for with all our heart—the possibility that there is something to which we can commit ourselves . . .
Is play to be considered as something trivial and superficial, distinct from grave seriousness and sincerity? You don't have to be serious to be sincere. When one discovers the potential hollowness of sincerity, they also discover the hollowness of the 'ability' to divide self from self. At this point one realizes they are sincere about everything; insincerity is not an option for a mind undivided against itself.
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The Symbolic and the Real
There's a certain kind of sadness in human nature—a melancholy deep down because we know, in the words of the song, 'but it all comes apart in the end'. And so it's a curious thing whether man is a logical construction. It's a great question—whether or not mankind is a self-defeating organism, a creature who knows too much for his own good.
The only radio talk recorded in front of a live audience, whose presence fuels Watts' flare for entertainment. A comparison of significant differences between symbols and reality, Watts outlines the dangers of language as a device for knowing the future. A nuanced study of the relationship between money and wealth, and between words and what they describe.
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Return to the Forest
More and more, each of us are thrown on our own resources, and this to me is a most excellent state of affairs. So that we become, in a symbolic sense, back in the forest—like the hunter of old who has nobody around to tell him how he ought to feel and how he ought to use his senses—and therefore must make his own exploraton and find out for himself.
Contrasting two phases in man's religious history, Watts discusses worldview developments devised by various cultures under religio-philosophical auspices. Shamanism, a belief system inherent in hunting cultures, is distinguished by an individualistic experience: solitary men of power who invariably have to find their own way in the world. The style of religiousness found in agrarian cultures, however, is an authoritative style where the individual derives his experience from a tradition usually embodied in a priesthood. He has to subordinate himself more and more to a socially implanted view of life, because only under these conditions is communication possible.
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Bang or Whimper
. . .everybody knows that, during the last 500 years—which really is the period of the birth of technology—the movement of social change, of technical change within human culture has suddenly taken an enormous spurt. And the rate of change seems to be faster and faster as the thing goes along, because as we learn how to change our environment, we learn how to change it faster.
A deep analysis of Darwin's dismal prognostication of population explosion. Is the impact of technological change advantageous to human beings? Or is the logic of technological culture a form of growth not necessarily beneficial to humankind? This may lead simply to a swift climax and disappearance of our species.
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