Alan Watts- We were a mistake

it could be argued a very strong case could be made that the entire intellectual venture of civilization has been a ghastly mistake and that we are now on a collision course and that all the vaunted benefits of intelligence technology and all that is simply going to draw the human race to an extremely swift conclusion Of course, that might not be a bad thing.

I've sometimes speculated on the idea that all stars have been created out of planets and that these planets developed high civilizations which eventually understood the secrets of nuclear energy and naturally blew themselves up.

And in the process, these stars flung out lumps of rock as they blew up, which eventually spun around them and became planets all over again.

And that this is the actual method of genesis of the universe, which would accord, of course, with the Hindu cosmology, where time and the events in time are invariably looked upon as a process of progressive deterioration.

in which things get worse and worse as time goes on until it can't stand itself anymore and it blows up and after a period of rest and recuperation begins all over again why do we somehow have a distaste for a theory of time which runs in that direction I mean would you rather have a rhythm that goes or the one that goes see I mean which is it or do you want one that's going up always you see always getting better you can't even imagine such a state of affairs what I'm saying is don't take me too seriously I'm pitching a case for the fact that the civilization has been a mistake that it would be much better to leave everything alone that the wild animals are wiser than we in that they putting it in our crude and not very exact language they just follow their instincts and if a moth mistakes a flame for the signal on which it gets a mating call and flies into the flame so what that just keeps the moth population down and the moth doesn't worry you know it doesn't go buzzing around in a state of anxiety wondering whether this sex call is the real thing or just a flame It doesn't think consciously about the future.

At least we suppose this is so.

Maybe it does, but we suppose that it doesn't.

And therefore it isn't troubled.

But the species of moths goes on and on and on.

And so far as we know, it's been around for an incredibly long time.

And maybe even longer than we have.

bees ants creatures of this kind they have long since escaped from history so far as we can see in other words they live a settled existence which you might consider rather boring because it doesn't have constant change uh in the way that we do they live the same rhythm again and again and again and again but because they don't bother to remember it consciously it doesn't it never gets boring And because they don't bother to predict, they're never in a state of anxiety.

And yet they survive.

Now we, who look before and after, as Emerson says, and predict, and are always concerned whether this generation is going to be better or worse than the one that came before, we are tormented.

And we just don't realize, because of this tremendous preoccupation with time, we don't realize how beautiful we are.

In spite of ourselves.

Because you see, the conscious radar is a troubleshooter.

It's always on the watch out for variations in the environment which may bring about disaster.

And so, our consciousness is from one day's end to another entirely preoccupied with time and with planning and with what has been and with what will be and since troubleshooting is its function we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble and we ignore in this preoccupation with conscious attention how marvelously we get on how for most of the time our physical organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship.

How our body relates by all sorts of unconscious responses to the physical environment.

So that if you became aware of all the adjustment processes that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism you would find yourself in the middle of great music and of course this occasionally happens well the mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of your true physical relationship to the universe and you're amazed thunderstruck by the feeling that underneath everything that goes on in this world the fundamental thing is a state of unbelievable bliss well why not? why else would there be anything happening? because if the game isn't worth the candle if the universe is basically nothing but a tormented struggle why have one? Hasn't it ever struck you that it would be much simpler not to have any existence? It would require no effort.

There would be no problems.

So why is there anything going on? Let me say not why, but how is there anything going on? Because if it's all fundamentally a drag, I just don't see any reason for its being.

Everything would have committed suicide long ago.

and to be at rest Abu bin Adhem may his tribe decrease by cautious birth control and be at peace so we might work on this possibility then that civilization is a mistake and that we've taken completely the wrong track and should have left things to nature as it were and of course this is the same problem that is brought up in the book of Genesis actually the fall of man in Genesis is his venture into technology because in the Bible the Hebrew words for the knowledge of good and evil are connected with techniques.