It took me 33+ years to realize what Alan Watts will tell you in 10 minutes...

[00:00:00]our fundamental notions about [clears throat] what life is about.

[00:00:03]And there are historical origins for this, which influence us more strongly than most people realize.

[00:00:13]Ideas of the world, which are built into the very nature of the language we use, and of our ideas of logic and of what makes sense altogether.

[00:00:24]And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense.

[00:00:37]A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

[00:00:46]But if you're an astronomer and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved space, >> [music] >> you say, "Well, it's as if you had a black balloon and there are white dots on the black balloon and those dots represent galaxies."

[00:00:59]And as you blow the balloon up uniformly, [music] all of them grow and grow farther apart.

[00:01:05]But you're using an analogy. The The actual universe is not a balloon with white dots on it.

[00:01:12]So, in the same way, we use these sort of images to try and make sense of the world, and we [snorts] at present are living under the influence of two >> [music] >> very powerful images, which are in the present state of scientific knowledge inadequate. [music] And one of our major problems today is to find an adequate, satisfying image of the world. The two images which we have been working under for 2,000 years and maybe more, are what I would call two models of the universe, and the first is called the ceramic model and the The the fully automatic model.

[00:02:00]The ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of Genesis from which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity derive their basic [music] picture of the world.

[00:02:14]And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact.

[00:02:22]It is made.

[00:02:24]As a [music] potter takes clay and forms pots out of it.

[00:02:29]Or as a carpenter takes wood [music] and makes tables and chairs out of it. But when you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life, uh [music] it has limitations.

[00:02:47]For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit.

[00:02:56]This idea doesn't work anymore.

[00:03:01]Long, long ago physicists stopped asking the question, "What is matter?"

[00:03:08]They began that way.

[00:03:10]They wanted to [music] know what is the fundamental substance of the world.

[00:03:16]And the more they asked that question, the more they realized they couldn't answer it.

[00:03:21]Because if you're going to say what matter is, you've got to describe it in terms of behavior.

[00:03:30]And that is to say, in terms of form, in terms [music] of pattern.

[00:03:35]You tell what it does.

[00:03:38]You describe its small the smallest shapes of it that you can see.

[00:03:45]Do you Do you see what happens? You look, say, at a piece of stone, and you want to say, "Well, what is this piece of stone made of?

[00:03:53]Well, you take your microscope and you look at it and instead of just this uh block of stuff, you see ever so many tinier shapes, little crystals.

[00:04:06]So, you say fine, so far so good. Now, what are these crystals made of?

[00:04:11]And you take a more powerful instrument and you find that they are made of molecules.

[00:04:19]And then you take still more powerful instruments to find out what the molecules are made of and you begin to describe atoms electrons protons, mesons all sorts of sub nuclear particles.

[00:04:38]But you never never arrive at the basic stuff.

[00:04:44]Cuz there isn't any.

[00:04:48]What happens is this. Stuff is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus.

[00:04:56]Fuzzy.

[00:04:58]And so all that we can talk about is patterns.

[00:05:05]We never never can talk about the stuff of which these patterns is supposed to be made because you don't really have to suppose that there is any.

[00:05:17]It's enough to talk about the world in terms of pattern.

[00:05:21]It describes anything that can be described.

[00:05:24]And you don't really then have to suppose that there is some stuff which constitutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the essence of pots.

[00:05:38]And and so for this reason, you don't really have to suppose that the world is some kind [music] of helpless, passive, unintelligent junk, which an outside agency has to inform and make it into intelligent shapes.

[00:05:57]So, the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff, potted clay, but pattern.

[00:06:09]A self-moving >> [music] >> self-designing pattern.

[00:06:14]A dance.

[00:06:16]Our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with this.

[00:06:21]In the course of [music] time, in the evolution of Western [clears throat] thought, the ceramic image of the world ran into trouble and changed into what I call the fully automatic model or image of the world.

[00:06:37]In other words, Western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature.

[00:06:47]In other words, the potter, the maker of the world in the beginning of things laid down the laws, so we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws, as if in other words, the laws of the world were like the rails on which a street car or a tram or a train runs, and these things exist in a certain way, and all events respond to these laws.

[00:07:12]Here's this idea that there's a kind of a plan, and everything responds and obeys that plan.

[00:07:20]Well, in the 18th century, Western intellectuals began to suspect this idea.

[00:07:28]What they suspected is whether there is a law maker, whether there is an architect of the universe.

[00:07:35]And they found out, or they reasoned, that you don't have to suppose that there is.

[00:07:41]Why?

[00:07:43]Because the hypothesis of God does not help us to make any predictions. If the business of science is to make predictions about what's going to happen, science is essentially prophecy.

[00:07:59]What's going to happen? By studying the behavior of the past and describing it carefully, we can make predictions about what's going to happen in the future.

[00:08:06]That's really the whole of science.

[00:08:09]And to do this and to make successful predictions, you do not need God as a hypothesis.

[00:08:16]Because it makes no difference to anything. If you say everything is controlled by God, everything is governed by God, that doesn't make any difference to your prediction of what's going to happen.

[00:08:31]And so what they did was simply drop that hypothesis.

[00:08:35]But they kept the hypothesis of law.

[00:08:39]Because if you can predict, if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved, and you've got some regularities in the behavior of the universe, you call that law. And so they what they did was they got rid of the law maker and kept the law.

[00:08:55]And so they conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism.

[00:09:01]Something in other words that is functioning according to regular, clock-like, mechanical principles. And so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature. We talk about the conquest of space, the conquest of Everest.

[00:09:19]And the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer.

[00:09:25]You don't need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature?

[00:09:28]Because after all, you are a symptom of nature.

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[00:09:44][music] >> Let's go!