1

The Alan Watts Story:

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher,
writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a
Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen
training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary,
where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest then left
the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American
Academy of Asian Studies.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer
programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and
articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the thenburgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on
Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be
thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human
consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology
(1962).
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin
on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and many of his
recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his
"writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

Table of contents:

Psychedelics and Religious Experience5

The New Alchemy.19
The Cross of Cards33
Taoism..41
From Time to Eternity47
A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? 57

Alan Watts Bibliography..68

Psychedelics and Religious Experience

The experiences resulting from the use of psychedelic drugs are often described in religious
terms. They are therefore of interest to those like myself who, in the tradition of William
James,1 are concerned with the psychology of religion. For more than thirty years I have been
studying the causes, the consequences, and the conditions of those peculiar states of
consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God,
with the Universe, with the Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use by cultural
conditioning or personal preference for the ultimate and eternal reality. We have no
satisfactory and definitive name for experiences of this kind. The terms "religious experience,"
"mystical experience," and "cosmic consciousness" are all too vague and comprehensive to
denote that specific mode of consciousness which, to those who have known it, is as real and
overwhelming as falling in love. This article describes such states of consciousness induced by
psychedelic drugs, although they are virtually indistinguishable from genuine mystical
experience. The article then discusses objections to the use of psychedelic drugs that arise
mainly from the opposition between mystical values and the traditional religious and secular
values of Western society.

The Psychedelic Experience

The idea of mystical experiences resulting from drug use is not readily accepted in Western
societies. Western culture has, historically, a particular fascination with the value and virtue of
man as an individual, self-determining, responsible ego, controlling himself and his world by the
power of conscious effort and will. Nothing, then, could be more repugnant to this cultural
tradition than the notion of spiritual or psychological growth through the use of drugs. A
"drugged" person is by definition dimmed in consciousness, fogged in judgment, and deprived
of will. But not all psychotropic (consciousness-changing) chemicals are narcotic and soporific,
as are alcohol, opiates, and barbiturates. The effects of what are now called psychedelic (mindmanifesting) chemicals differ from those of alcohol as laughter differs from rage, or delight
from depression. There is really no analogy between being "high" on LSD and "drunk" on
bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should one drive while
reading a book, playing a violin, or making love. Certain creative activities and states of mind
5

demand a concentration and devotion that are simply incompatible with piloting a deathdealing engine along a highway.

I myself have experimented with five of the principal psychedelics: LSD-25, mescaline,
psilocybin, dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT), and cannabis. I have done so, as William James tried
nitrous oxide, to see if they could help me in identifying what might be called the "essential" or
"active" ingredients of the mystical experience. For almost all the classical literature on
mysticism is vague, not only in describing the experience, but also in showing rational
connections between the experience itself and the various traditional methods recommended
to induce it: fasting, concentration, breathing exercises, prayers, incantations, and dances. A
traditional master of Zen or Yoga, when asked why such-and-such practices lead or predispose
one to the mystical experience, always responds, "This is the way my teacher gave it to me. This
is the way I found out. If you're seriously interested, try it for yourself." This answer hardly
satisfies an impertinent, scientifically minded, and intellectually curious Westerner. It reminds
him of archaic medical prescriptions compounding five salamanders, powdered gallows rope,
three boiled bats, a scruple of phosphorus, three pinches of henbane, and a dollop of dragon
dung dropped when the moon was in Pisces. Maybe it worked, but what was the essential
ingredient?

It struck me, therefore, that if any of the psychedelic chemicals would in fact predispose my
consciousness to the mystical experience, I could use them as instruments for studying and
describing that experience as one uses a microscope for bacteriology, even though the
microscope is an "artificial" and "unnatural" contrivance which might be said to "distort" the
vision of the naked eye. However, when I was first invited to test the mystical qualities of LSD25 by Dr. Keith Ditman of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at UCLA Medical School, I was unwilling to
believe that any mere chemical could induce a genuine mystical experience. At most, it might
bring about a state of spiritual insight analogous to swimming with water wings. Indeed, my
first experiment with LSD-25 was not mystical. It was an intensely interesting aesthetic and
intellectual experience that challenged my powers of analysis and careful description to the
utmost.

Some months later, in 1959, I tried LSD-25 again with Drs. Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron,
who were then associated with the Langley-Porter Clinic, in San Francisco. In the course of two
experiments I was amazed and somewhat embarrassed to find myself going through states of
consciousness that corresponded precisely with every description of major mystical
6

experiences that I had ever read.2 Furthermore, they exceeded both in depth and in a peculiar
quality of unexpectedness the three "natural and spontaneous" experiences of this kind that
had happened to me in previous years.
Through subsequent experimentation with LSD-25 and the other chemicals named above (with
the exception of DMT, which I find amusing but relatively uninteresting), I found I could move
with ease into the state of "cosmic consciousness," and in due course became less and less
dependent on the chemicals themselves for "tuning in" to this particular wave length of
experience. Of the five psychedelics tried, I found that LSD-25 and cannabis suited my purposes
best. Of these two, the lattercannabiswhich I had to use abroad in countries where it is not
outlawed, proved to be the better. It does not induce bizarre alterations of sensory perception,
and medical studies indicate that it may not, save in great excess, have the dangerous side
effects of LSD.

For the purposes of this study, in describing my experiences with psychedelic drugs I avoid the
occasional and incidental bizarre alterations of sense perception that psychedelic chemicals
may induce. I am concerned, rather, with the fundamental alterations of the normal, socially
induced consciousness of one's own existence and relation to the external world. I am trying to
delineate the basic principles of psychedelic awareness. But I must add that I can speak only for
myself. The quality of these experiences depends considerably upon one's prior orientation and
attitude to life, although the now voluminous descriptive literature of these experiences
accords quite remarkably with my own.

Almost invariably, my experiments with psychedelics have had four dominant characteristics. I
shall try to explain them-in the expectation that the reader will say, at least of the second and
third, "Why, that's obvious! No one needs a drug to see that." Quite so, but every insight has
degrees of intensity. There can be obvious-1 and obvious-2, and the latter comes on with
shattering clarity, manifesting its implications in every sphere and dimension of our existence.

The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration in the present. One's
normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the
enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. Other people, going
about their business on the streets, seem to be slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole
point of life is to be fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost luxuriously,

into studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to the now highly articulate vibration
of every note played on an oboe or sung by a voice.

From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might
lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned
savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously
impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paper
work with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will all be too late. Only
those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making
plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results.
"Tomorrow never comes." I have never yet heard a preacher urging his congregation to practice
that section of the Sermon on the Mount which begins, "Be not anxious for the morrow...." The
truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, "not quite all there"
or here: by over-eagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the
price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its own advantages.

The second characteristic I will call awareness of polarity. This is the vivid realization that
states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and
front, or the poles of a magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly
different are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male and femaleand then, a little more surprisingly, solid and space, figure and background, pulse and interval,
saints and sinners, police and criminals, in-groups and out-groups. Each is definable only in
terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no
sale without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. As this awareness becomes
increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such
a way that you imply each other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pullas when you
move the steering wheel of a car. Are you pushing it or pulling it?

At first, this is a very odd sensation, not unlike hearing your own voice played back to you on an
electronic system immediately after you have spoken. You become confused, and wait for it to
go on! Similarly, you feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet that the
universe is equally something being done by you-which is true, at least in the neurological
sense that the peculiar structure of our brains translates the sun into light, and air vibrations
into sound. Our normal sensation of relationship to the outside world is that sometimes I push
it, and sometimes it pushes me. But if the two are actually one, where does action begin and
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responsibility rest? If the universe is doing me, how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, I will
still remember the English language? If I am doing it, how can I be sure that, two seconds
hence, my brain will know how to turn the sun into light? From such unfamiliar sensations as
these, the psychedelic experience can generate confusion, paranoia, and terror-even though
the individual is feeling his relationship to the world exactly as it would be described by a
biologist, ecologist, or physicist, for he is feeling himself as the unified field of organism and
environment.

The third characteristic, arising from the second, is awareness of relativity. I see that I am a
link in an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria
and insects to human beings, and, maybe, to angels and gods-a hierarchy in which every level is
in effect the same situation. For example, the poor man worries about money while the rich
man worries about his health: the worry is the same, but the difference is in its substance or
dimension. I realize that fruit flies must think of themselves as people, because, like ourselves,
they find themselves in the middle of their own world-with immeasurably greater things above
and smaller things below. To us, they all look alike and seem to have no personality-as do the
Chinese when we have not lived among them. Yet fruit flies must see just as many subtle
distinctions among themselves as we among ourselves.

From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life and being are simply
variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many
different ways as possible. As the French proverb goes, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme
chose (the more it varies, the more it is one). I see, further, that feeling threatened by the
inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are
feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much "I" as myself. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at
all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other"-to something beyond its control and
experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. But the intellectual jump that mystical and
psychedelic experiences make here is in enabling you to see that all these myriad I-centers are
yourselfnot, indeed, your personal and superficially conscious ego, but what Hindus call the
paramatman, the Self of all selves.3 As the retina enables us to see countless pulses of energy as
a single light, so the mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self.

The fourth characteristic is awareness of eternal energy, often in the form of intense white
light, which seems to be both the current in your nerves and that mysterious e which equals
mc2. This may sound like megalomania or delusion of grandeur-but one sees quite clearly that
9

all existence is a single energy, and that this energy is one's own being. Of course there is death
as well as life, because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves must have both crests and
troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off. Basically, therefore, there is simply
nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing
hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is.
Quoting Isaiah just a little out of context: "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light
and create the darkness: I make peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things."4 This is
the sense of the fundamental tenet of Hinduism, Tat tram asi"THAT (i.e., "that subtle Being of
which this whole universe is composed") art thou."5 A classical case of this experience, from the
West, is in Tennyson's Memoirs:

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all
alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to
myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality,
the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a
confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the
weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of
personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.6

Obviously, these characteristics of the psychedelic experience, as I have known it, are aspects of
a single state of consciousnessfor I have been describing the same thing from different
angles. The descriptions attempt to convey the reality of the experience, but in doing so they
also suggest some of the inconsistencies between such experience and the current values of
society.

Opposition to Psychedelic Drugs

Resistance to allowing use of psychedelic drugs originates in both religious and secular values.
The difficulty in describing psychedelic experiences in traditional religious terms suggests one
ground of opposition. The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or moksha from the
Hindus, or satori or kensho from the Japanese, to describe the experience of oneness with the
universe. We have no appropriate word because our own Jewish and Christian theologies will
not accept the idea that man's inmost self can be identical with the Godhead, even though
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Christians may insist that this was true in the unique instance of Jesus Christ. Jews and
Christians think of God in political and monarchical terms, as the supreme governor of the
universe, the ultimate boss. Obviously, it is both socially unacceptable and logically
preposterous for a particular individual to claim that he, in person, is the omnipotent and
omniscient ruler of the world-to be accorded suitable recognition and honor.

Such an imperial and kingly concept of the ultimate reality, however, is neither necessary nor
universal. The Hindus and the Chinese have no difficulty in conceiving of an identity of the self
and the Godhead. For most Asians, other than Muslims, the Godhead moves and manifests the
world in much the same way that a centipede manipulates a hundred legs-spontaneously,
without deliberation or calculation. In other words, they conceive the universe by analogy with
an organism as distinct from a mechanism. They do not see it as an artifact or construct under
the conscious direction of some supreme technician, engineer, or architect.

If, however, in the context of Christian or Jewish tradition, an individual declares himself to be
one with God, he must be dubbed blasphemous (subversive) or insane. Such a mystical
experience is a clear threat to traditional religious concepts. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has
a monarchical image of God, and monarchs, who rule by force, fear nothing more than
insubordination. The Church has therefore always been highly suspicious of mystics, because
they seem to be insubordinate and to claim equality or, worse, identity with God. For this
reason, John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart were condemned as heretics. This was also
why the Quakers faced opposition for their doctrine of the Inward Light, and for their refusal to
remove hats in church and in court. A few occasional mystics may be all right so long as they
watch their language, like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, who maintained, shall we
say, a metaphysical distance of respect between themselves and their heavenly King. Nothing,
however, could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy than a popular outbreak of
mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven-and
such alarm would be shared equally by Catholics, Jews, and fundamentalist Protestants.

The monarchical image of God, with its implicit distaste for religious insubordination, has a
more pervasive impact than many Christians might admit. The thrones of kings have walls
immediately behind them, and all who present themselves at court must prostrate themselves
or kneel, because this is an awkward position from which to make a sudden attack. It has
perhaps never occurred to Christians that when they design a church on the model of a royal
11

court (basilica) and prescribe church ritual, they are implying that God, like a human monarch,
is afraid. This is also implied by flattery in prayers:

O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of
princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech
thee with thy favor to behold....7

The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe thus clashes
with his society's concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be
congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some
such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences
directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. For the ecologist, the
biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom feel) that every organism constitutes a single field
of behavior, or process, with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given
organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of
organisms in environments but of organism-environments. Thus the words "I" and "self" should
properly mean what the whole universe is doing at this particular "here-and-now" called John
Doe.

The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God, or self and universe, inconceivable in
Western religious terms. The difference between Eastern and Western concepts of man and his
universe, however, extends beyond strictly religious concepts. The Western scientist may
rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be
true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as
an ego-as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an
external and alien world. We say, "I came into this world." But we did nothing of the kind. We
came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees. Our galaxy, our cosmos,
"peoples" in the same way that an apple tree "apples."

Such a vision of the universe clashes with the idea of a monarchical God, with the concept of
the separate ego, and even with the secular, atheist/agnostic mentality, which derives its
common sense from the mythology of nineteenth-century scientist. According to this view, the
universe is a mindless mechanism and man a sort of accidental microorganism infesting a
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minute globular rock that revolves about an unimportant star on the outer fringe of one of the
minor galaxies. This "put-down" theory of man is extremely common among such quasi
scientists as sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, most of whom are still thinking of the
world in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and have never really caught up with the ideas of
Einstein and Bohr, Oppenheimer and Schrodinger. Thus to the ordinary institutional-type
psychiatrist, any patient who gives the least hint of mystical or religious experience is
automatically diagnosed as deranged. From the standpoint of the mechanistic religion, he is a
heretic and is given electroshock therapy as an up-to-date form of thumbscrew and rack. And,
incidentally, it is just this kind of quasi scientist who, as consultant to government and lawenforcement agencies, dictates official policies on the use of psychedelic chemicals.

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of
awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous
hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of
alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spiritto the
"conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. The result is that we are
eroding and destroying our environment, spreading Los Angelization instead of civilization. This
is the major threat overhanging Western, technological culture, and no amount of reasoning or
doom-preaching seems to help. We simply do not respond to the prophetic and moralizing
techniques of conversion upon which Jews and Christians have always relied. But people have
an obscure sense of what is good for them-call it "unconscious self-healing," "survival instinct,"
"positive growth potential," or what you will. Among the educated young there is therefore a
startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over
the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen
Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that
the whole "hip" subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest
and responsible effort of young people to correct the self-destroying course of industrial
civilization.

The content of the mystical experience is thus inconsistent with both the religious and secular
concepts of traditional Western thought. Moreover, mystical experiences often result in
attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular
society. Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone
mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises. Moreover, their sense of the
relativity of good and evil arouses the suspicion that they lack both conscience and respect for
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law. Use of psychedelics in the United States by a literate bourgeoisie means that an important
segment of the population is indifferent to society's traditional rewards and sanctions.

In theory, the existence within our secular society of a group that does not accept conventional
values is consistent with our political vision. But one of the great problems of the United States,
legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The
Republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and
prosper only on a basis of mutual trust. Metaphysically, the American Revolution was a
rejection of the dogma of Original Sin, which is the notion that because you cannot trust
yourself or other people, there must be some Superior Authority to keep us all in order. The
dogma was rejected because, if it is true that we cannot trust ourselves and others, it follows
that we cannot trust the Superior Authority which we ourselves conceive and obey, and that
the very idea of our own untrustworthiness is unreliable!

Citizens of the United States believe, or are supposed to believe, that a republic is the best form
of government. Yet vast confusion arises from trying to be republican in politics and monarchist
in religion. How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven, and hell
are a monarchy?8 Thus, despite the theory of government by consent, based upon mutual trust,
the peoples of the United States retain, from the authoritarian backgrounds of their religions or
national origins, an utterly naive faith in law as some sort of supernatural and paternalistic
power. "There ought to be a law against it!" Our law-enforcement officers are therefore
confused, hindered, and bewilderednot to mention corruptedby being asked to enforce
sumptuary laws, often of ecclesiastical origin, that vast numbers of people have no intention of
obeying and that, in any case, are immensely difficult or simply impossible to enforcefor
example, the barring of anything so undetectable as LSD-25 from international and interstate
commerce.

Finally, there are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs. First, use of these drugs
may be dangerous. However, every worth-while exploration is dangerousclimbing
mountains, testing aircraft, rocketing into outer space, skin diving, or collecting botanical
specimens in jungles. But if you value knowledge and the actual delight of exploration more
than mere duration of uneventful life, you are willing to take the risks. It is not really healthy for
monks to practice fasting, and it was hardly hygienic for Jesus to get himself crucified, but these
are risks taken in the course of spiritual adventures. Today the adventurous young are taking
risks in exploring the psyche, testing their mettle at the task just as, in times past, they have
14

tested itmore violentlyin hunting, dueling, hot-rod racing, and playing football. What they
need is not prohibitions and policemen, but the most intelligent encouragement and advice
that can be found.

Second, drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes
unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by
no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you
have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in
which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very
lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But
beyond these occasional lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a
system of total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of logic and
language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that "energy which is eternal
delight" can consist with the misery and suffering of everyday life.9

The undoubted mystical and religious intent of most users of the psychedelics, even if some of
these substances should be proved injurious to physical health, requires that their free and
responsible use be exempt from legal restraint in any republic that maintains a constitutional
separation of church and state.10 To the extent that mystical experience conforms with the
tradition of genuine religious involvement, and to the extent that psychedelics induce that
experience, users are entitled to some constitutional protection. Also, to the extent that
research in the psychology of religion can utilize such drugs, students of the human mind must
be free to use them. Under present laws, I, as an experienced student of the psychology of
religion, can no longer pursue research in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual
and intellectual freedom, suggesting that the legal system of the United States is, after all, in
tacit alliance with the monarchical theory of the universe, and will, therefore, prohibit and
persecute religious ideas and practices based on an organic and unitary vision of the universe.11

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Footnotes

1.

See W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

2.

An excellent anthology of such experiences is R. Johnson Watcher on the Hills (1959).

3.

Thus Hinduism regards the universe not as an artifact, but as an immense drama in which the One Actor
(the paramatman or brakman) plays all the parts, which are his (or "its") masks or personae. The sensation of
being only this one particular self, John Doe, is due to the Actor's total absorption in playing this and every other
part. For fuller exposition, see S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life(1927); H. Zimmer, Philosophies of
India (1951), pp. 355-463. A popular version is in A. Watts, The BookOn the Taboo Against Knowing Who You
Are (1966).

4.

Isaiah 45: 6, 7.

5.

Chandogya Upanishad 6.15.3.

6.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His Son (1898), 320.

7.

A Prayer for the King's Majesty, Order for Morning Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (Church of England, 1904).

8.

Thus, until quite recently, belief in a Supreme Being was a legal test of valid conscientious objection to military
service. The implication was that the individual objector found himself bound to obey a higher echelon of
command than the President and Congress. The analogy is military and monarchical, and therefore objectors
who, as Buddhists or naturalists, held an organic theory of the universe often had difficulty in obtaining
recognition.

9.

This is discussed at length in A. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of
Consciousness (1962).

10. "Responsible" in the sense that such substances be taken by or administered to consenting adults only. The user
of cannabis, in particular, is apt to have peculiar difficulties in establishing his "undoubted mystical and religious
intent" in court. Having committed so loathsome and serious a felony, his chances of clemency are better if he
assumes a repentant demeanor, which is quite inconsistent with the sincere belief that his use of cannabis was
religious. On the other hand, if he insists unrepentantly that he looks upon such use as a religious sacrament,
many judges will declare that they "dislike his attitude," finding it truculent and lacking in appreciation of the
gravity of the crime, and the sentence will be that much harsher. The accused is therefore put in a "double-bind"
situation, in which he is "damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't." Furthermore, religious integrityas in
conscientious objectionis generally tested and established by membership in some church or religious
organization with a substantial following. But the felonious status of cannabis is such that grave suspicion would
be cast upon all individuals forming such an organization, and the test cannot therefore be fulfilled. It is
generally forgotten that our guarantees of religious freedom were designed to protect precisely those who were
not members of established denominations, but rather such (then) screwball and subversive individuals as
Quakers, Shakers, Levellers, and Anabaptists. There is little question that those who use cannabis or other
psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted religion which appears to the rest of society
as a grave menace to "mental health," as distinct from the old-fashioned "immortal soul." But it's the same old
story.
11. Amerindians belonging to the Native American Church who employ the psychedelic peyote cactus in their rituals,

are firmly opposed to any government control of this plant, even if they should be guaranteed the right to its

16

use. They feel that peyote is a natural gift of God to mankind, and especially to natives of the land where it
grows, and that no government has a right to interfere with its use The same argument might be made on
behalf of cannabis, or the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana Heim. All these things are natural plants, not processed
or synthesized drugs, and by what authority can individuals be prevented from eating theme There is no law
against eating or growing the mushroom Amanita pantherina, even though it is fatally poisonous and only
experts can distinguish it from a common edible mushroom. This case can be made even from the standpoint of
believers in the monarchical universe of Judaism and Christianity, for it is a basic principle of both religions,
derived from Genesis, that all natural substances created by God are inherently good, and that evil can arise
only in their misuse. Thus laws against mere possession, or even cultivation, of these plants are in basic conflict
with biblical principles. Criminal conviction of those who employ these plants should be based on proven misuse.
"And God said 'Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and
every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed- to you it shall be for meat.... And God saw every thing
that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Genesis 1:29, 31.

17

18

The New Alchemy

Besides the philosopher's stone that would turn base metal into gold, one of the great quests of
alchemy in both Europe and Asia was the elixir of immortality. In gullible enthusiasm for this
quest, more than one Chinese emperor died of the fabulous concoctions of powdered jade, tea,
ginseng, and precious metals prepared by Taoist priests. But just as the work of transforming
lead into gold was in many cases a chemical symbolism for a spiritual transformation of man
himself, so the immortality to be conferred by the elixir was not always the literally everlasting
life but rather the transportation of consciousness into a state beyond time. Modern physicists
have solved the problem of changing lead into gold, though the process is somewhat more
expensive than digging gold from the earth. But in the last few years modem chemists have
prepared one or two substances for which it may be claimed that in some cases they induce
states of mind remarkably similar to cosmic consciousness.
To many people such claims are deeply disturbing. For one thing, mystical experience seems
altogether too easy when it simply comes out of a bottle, and is thus available to people who
have done nothing to deserve it, who have neither fasted nor prayed nor practiced yoga. For
another, the claim seems to imply that-spiritual insight is after all only a matter of body
chemistry involving a total reduction of the spiritual to the material. These are serious
considerations, even though one may be convinced that in the long run the difficulty is found to
rest upon semantic confusion as to the definitions of "spiritual" and "material."
However, it should be pointed out that there is nothing new or disreputable in the idea that
spiritual insight Is an undeserved gift of divine grace, often conveyed through such material or
sacramental means as the water of baptism and the bread and wine of the mass. The priest
who by virtue of his office transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, ex
opere operato, by the simple repetition of the formula of the Last Supper, is in a situation not
radically different from that of the scientist who, by repeating the right formula of an
experiment, may effect a transformation in the brain. The comparative worth of the two
operations must be judged by their effects. There were always those upon whom the
sacraments of baptism and communion did not seem to "take," whose lives remained
effectively unregenerate. Likewise, none of these consciousness-changing chemicals are literally
mystical experience in a bottle. Many who receive them experience only ecstasies without
insight, or just an unpleasant confusion of sensation and imagination. States akin to mystical
experience arise only in certain individuals and then often depend upon considerable
concentration and effort to use the change of consciousness in certain ways. It is important
here, too, to stress the point that ecstasy is only Incidental to the authentic mystical
19

experience, the essence of which might best be described as insight, as the word is now used in
psychiatry.
A chemical of this kind might perhaps be said to be an aid to perception in the same way as
the telescope, microscope, or spectroscope, save in this case that the instrument is not an
external object but an internal state of the nervous system. All such instruments are relatively
useless without proper training and preparation not only in their handling, but also in the
particular field of investigation,
These considerations alone are already almost enough to show that the use of such
chemicals does not reduce spiritual insight to a mere matter of body chemistry. But it should be
added that even when we can describe certain events in terms of chemistry this does not mean
that such events are merely chemical. A chemical description of spiritual experience has
somewhat the same use and the same limits as the chemical description of a great painting. It is
simple enough to make a chemical analysis of the paint, and for artists and connoisseurs alike
there is some point in doing so. It might also be possible to work out a chemical description of
all the processes that go on in the artist while he is painting. But it would be incredibly
complicated, and in the meantime the same processes could be described and communicated
far more effectively in some other language than the chemical. We should probably say that a
process is chemical only when chemical language is the most effective means of describing it.
Analogously, some of the chemicals known as psychedelics provide opportunities for mystical
insight in much the same way that well-prepared paints and brushes provide opportunities for
fine painting, or a beautifully constructed piano for great music. They make it easier, but they
do not accomplish the work all by themselves.
The two chemicals which are of most use in creating a change of consciousness conducive to
spiritual experience are mescaline and lysergic acid diethylamide (known, for short, as LSD). The
former is a synthetic formulation of the active ingredients of the peyote cactus, and the latter a
purely synthetic chemical of the indole group which produces its effects even in such minute
amounts as twenty-five micrograms. The specific effects of these chemicals are hard to identify
with any clarity, and so far as is known at present they seem to operate upon the nervous
system by reducing some of the inhibitory mechanisms which ordinarily have a screening effect
upon our consciousness. Certain psychiatrists who seem overly anxious to hang on to the
socially approved sensation of realitymore or less the world as perceived on a bleak Monday
morningclassify these chemicals as hallucinogens producing toxic effects of a schizoid or
psychotic character. I am afraid this is psychiatric gobbledygook: a sort of authoritative rumble
of disapproval. Neither substance is an addictive drug, like heroin or opium, and it has never
been demonstrated that they have harmful effects upon people who were not otherwise
seriously disturbed. It is begging the question to call the changes of consciousness which they
educe hallucinations, for some of the unusual things felt and seen may be no more unreal than
20

the unfamiliar forms perceived through a microscope. We do not know. It is also begging the
question to call their effects toxic, which might mean poisonous, unless this word can also be
used for the effects of vitamins or proteins. Such language is evaluative, not descriptive in any
scientific sense.
Somewhat more than two years ago (1958) I was asked by a psychiatric research group to
take 100 micrograms of lysergic acid, to see whether it would reproduce anything resembling a
mystical experience. It did not do so, and so far as I know the reason was that I had not then
learned how to direct my inquiries when under its influence. It seemed instead that my senses
had been given a kaleidoscopic character (and this is no more than a metaphor) which made
the whole world entrancingly complicated, as if I were involved in a multidimensional
arabesque. Colors became so vivid that flowers, leaves, and fabrics seemed to be illumined
from inside. The random patterns of blades of grass in a lawn appeared to be exquisitely
organized without, however, any actual distortion of vision. Black ink or sumi paintings by
Chinese and Japanese artists appeared almost to be three dimensional photographs, and what
are ordinarily dismissed as irrelevant details of speech, behavior, appearance, and form seemed
in some indefinable way to be highly significant. Listening to music with closed eyes, I beheld
the most fascinating patterns of dancing jewelry, mosaic, tracery, and abstract images. At one
point everything appeared to be uproariously funny, especially the gestures and actions of
people going about their everyday business. Ordinary remarks seemed to reverberate with
double and quadruple meanings, and the role-playing behavior of those around me not only
became unusually evident but also implied concealed attitudes contrary or complementary to
its overt intention. In short, the screening or selective apparatus of our normal interpretative
evaluation of experience had been partially suspended, with the result that I was presumably
projecting the sensation of meaning or significance upon just about everything. The whole
experience was vastly entertaining and interesting, but as yet nothing like any mystical
experience that I had had before.
It was not until a year later that I tried LSD again, this time at the request of another research
team. Since then I have repeated the experiment five times, with dosages varying from 75 to
100 micrograms. My impression has been that such experiments are profound and rewarding
to the extent that I do my utmost to observe perceptual and evaluative changes and to describe
them as clearly and completely as possible, usually with the help of a tape recorder. To give a
play-by-play description of each experiment might be clinically interesting, but what I am
concerned with here is a philosophical discussion of some of the high points and recurrent
themes of my experiences. Psychiatrists have not yet made up their minds as to whether LSD is
useful in therapy, but at present I am strongly inclined to feel that its major use may turn out to
be only secondarily as a therapeutic and primarily as an instrumental aid to the creative artist,
thinker, or scientist. I should observe, in passing, that the human and natural environment in
21

which these experiments are conducted is of great importance, and that its use in hospital
wards with groups of doctors firing off clinical questions at the subject is most undesirable. The
supervising physician should take a human attitude, and drop all defensive dramatizations of
scientific objectivity and medical authority, conducting the experiment in surroundings of some
natural or artistic beauty.
I have said that my general impression of the first experiment was that the "mechanism" by
which we screen our sense-data and select only some of them as significant had been partially
suspended. Consequently, I felt that the particular feeling which we associate with "the
meaningful" was projected indiscriminately upon everything, and then rationalized in ways that
might strike an independent observer as ridiculousunless, perhaps, the subject were
unusually clever at rationalizing. However, the philosopher cannot pass up the point that our
selection of some sense-data as significant and others as insignificant is always with relation to
particular purposessurvival, the quest for certain pleasures, finding one's way to some
destination, or whatever it may be. But in every experiment with LSD one of the first effects I
have noticed is a profound relaxation combined with an abandonment of purposes and goals,
reminding me of the Taoist saying that "when purpose has been used to achieve
purposelessness, the thing has been grasped." I have felt, in other words, endowed with all the
time in the world, free to look about me as if I were living in eternity without a single problem
to be solved. It is just for this reason that the busy and purposeful actions of other people seem
at this time to be so comic, for it becomes obvious that by setting themselves goals which are
always in the future, in the "tomorrow which never comes," they are missing entirely the point
of being alive.
When, therefore, our selection of sense-impressions is not organized with respect to any
particular purpose, all the surrounding details of the world must appear to be equally
meaningful or equally meaningless. Logically, these are two ways of saying the same thing, but
the overwhelming feeling of my own LSD experiences is that all aspects of the world become
meaningful rather than meaningless. This is not to say that they acquire meaning in the sense
of signs, by virtue of pointing to something else, but that all things appear to be their own
point. Their simple existence, or better, their present formation, seems to be perfect, to be an
end or fulfillment without any need for justification. Flowers do not bloom in order to produce
seeds, nor are seeds germinated in order to bring forth flowers. Each stage of the process
seed, sprout, bud, flower, and fruit may be regarded as the goal. A chicken is one eggs way of
producing others. In our normal experience something of the same kind takes place in music
and the dance, where the point of the action is each moment of its unfolding and not just the
temporal end of the performance.
Such a translation of everyday experience into something of the same nature as music has
been the beginning and the prevailing undertone of all my experiments. But LSD does not
22

simply suspend the selective process by cutting it out. It would be more exact to say that it
shows the relativity of our ordinary evaluation of sense-data by suggesting others. It permits
the mind to organize its sensory impressions in new patterns. In my second experiment I
noticed, for example, that all repeated formsleaves on a stem, books on shelves, mullions in
windowsgave me the sensation of seeing double or even multiple, as if the second, third, and
fourth leaves on the stem were reflections of the first, seen, as it were, in several thicknesses of
window glass. When I mentioned this, the attending physician held up his finger to see if it
would give me a double image. For a moment it seemed to do so, but all at once I saw that the
second image had its basis in a wisp of cigar smoke passing close to his finger and upon which
my consciousness had projected the highlights and outline of a second finger. As I then
concentrated upon this sensation of doubling or repeating images, it seemed suddenly as if the
whole field of sight were a transparent liquid rippled in concentric circles as in dropping a stone
into a pool. The normal images of things around me were not distorted by this pattern. They
remained just as usual, but my attention directed itself to highlights, lines, and shadows upon
them that fitted the pattern, letting those that did not fall into relative insignificance. As soon,
however, as I noticed this projection and became aware of details that did not fit the pattern, it
seemed as if whole handfuls of pebbles had been thrown into-the optical space, rippling it with
concentric circles that overlapped in all directions, so that every visible point became an
intersection of circles. The optical field seemed, in fact, to have a structured grain like a
photograph screened for reproduction, save that the organization of the grains was not
rectilinear but circular. In this way every detail fitted the pattern and the field of vision became
pointillist, like a painting by Seurat.
This sensation raised a number of questions. Was my mind imperiously projecting its own
geometrical designs upon the world, thus "hallucinating" a structure in things which is not
actually there? Or is what we call the "real" structure of things simply a learned projection or
hallucination which we hold in common? Or was I somehow becoming aware of the actual grain
of the rods and cones in my retina, for even a hallucination must have some actual basis in the
nervous system? On another occasion I was looking closely at a handful of sand, and in
becoming aware that I could not get it into clear focus I became conscious of every detail and
articulation of the way in which my eyes were fuzzing the imageand this was certainly
perception of a grain or distortion in the eyes themselves.
The general impression of these optical sensations is that the eyes, without losing the normal
area of vision, have become microscopes, and that the texture of the visual field is infinitely rich
and complex. I do not know whether this is actual awareness of the multiplicity of nerveendings in the retina, or, for that matter, in the fingers, for the same grainy feeling arose in the
sense of touch. But the effect of feeling that this is or may be so is, as it were, to turn the senses
back upon themselves, and so to realize that seeing the external world is also seeing the eyes.
23

In other words, I became vividly aware of the fact that what I call shapes, colors, and textures in
the outside world are also states of my nervous system, that is, of me. In knowing them I also
know my self. But the strange part of this apparent sensation of my own senses was that I did
not appear to be inspecting them from outside or from a distance, as if they were objects. I can
say only that the awareness of grain or structure in the senses seemed to be awareness of
awareness, of myself from inside myself. Because of this, it followed that the distance or
separation between myself and my senses, on the one hand, and the external world, on the
other, seemed to disappear I was no longer a detached observer, a little man inside my own
head, having sensations. I was the sensations, so much so that there was nothing left of me, the
observing ego, except the series of sensations which happenednot to me, but just
happenedmoment by moment, one after another.
To become the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing
sense of freedom and release. For it implies that experience is not something in which one is
trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one must fight. The conventional
duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity:
the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a single event which
happens, not to me or from me, but of itself. The experiencer and the experience become a
single, ever-changing self-forming process, complete and fulfilled at every moment of its
unfolding, and of infinite complexity and subtlety. It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling
arabesque of smoke patterns in the air, or of ink dropped in water, or of a dancing snake which
seems to move from every part of its body at once. This may be a "drug-induced hallucination,"
but it corresponds exactly to what Dewey and Bentley have called the transactional relationship
of the organism to its environment. This is to say that all our actions and experiences arise
mutually from the organism and from the environment at the same time. The eyes can see light
because of the sun, but the sun is light because of the eyes. Ordinarily, under the hypnosis of
social conditioning, we feel quite distinct from our physical surroundings, facing them rather
than belonging in them. Yet in this way we ignore and screen out the physical fact of our total
interdependence with the natural world. We are as embodied in it as our own cells and
molecules are embodied in us. Our neglect and repression of this interrelationship gives special
urgency to all the new sciences of ecology, studying the interplay of organisms with their
environments, and warning us against ignorant interference with the balances of nature.
The sensation that events are happening of themselves, and that nothing is making them
happen and that they are not happening to anything, has always been a major feature of my
experiences with LSD. It is possible that the chemical is simply giving me a vivid realization of
my own philosophy, though there have been times when the experience has suggested
modifications of my previousthinking. (1) But just as the sensation of subject-object polarity is
confirmed by the transactional psychology of Dewey and Bentley, so the sensation of events
24

happening "of themselves" is just how one would expect to perceive a world consisting entirely
of process. Now the language of science is increasingly a language of processa description of
events, relations, operations, and forms rather than of things and substances. The world so
described is a world of actions rather than agents, verbs rather than nouns, going against the
common-sense idea that an action is the behavior of some thing, some solid entity of "stuff."
But the commonsense idea that action is always the function of an agent is so deeply rooted, so
bound up with our sense of order and security, that seeing the world to be otherwise can be
seriously disturbing. Without agents, actions do not seem to come from anywhere, to have any
dependable origin, and at first sight this spontaneity can be alarming. In one experiment it
seemed that whenever I tried to put my (metaphorical) foot upon some solid ground, the
ground collapsed into empty space. I could find no substantial basis from which to act: my will
was a whim, and my past, as a causal conditioning force, had simply vanished. There was only
the present conformation of events, happening. For a while I felt lost in a void, frightened,
baseless, insecure through and through Yet soon I became accustomed to the feeling, strange
as it was. There was simply a pattern of action, of process, and this was at one and the same
time the universe and myself with nothing outside it either to trust or mistrust. And there
seemed to be no meaning in the idea of its trusting or mistrusting itself, just as there is no
possibility of a finger's touching its own tip.
Upon reflection, there seems to be nothing unreasonable in seeing the world in this way. The
agent behind every action is itself action. If a mat can be called matting, a cat can be called
catting. We do not actually need to ask who or what "cats," just as we do not need to ask what
is the basic stuff or substance out of which the world is formedfor there is no way of
describing this substance except in terms of form, of structure, order, and operation. The world
is not formed as if it were inert clay responding to the touch of a potter's hand; the world is
form, or better, formation, for upon examination every substance turns out to be closely knit
pattern. The fixed notion that every pattern or form must be made of some basic material
which is in itself formless is based on a superficial analogy between natural formation and
manufacture, as if the stars and rocks had been made out of something as a carpenter makes
tables out of wood. Thus what we call the agent behind the action is simply the prior or
relatively more constant state of the same action: when a man runs we have a "manningrunning" over and above a simple "manning." Furthermore, it is only a somewhat clumsy
convenience to say that present events are moved or caused by past events, for we are actually
talking about earlier and later stages of the same event. We can establish regularities of rhythm
and pattern in the course of an event, and so predict its future configurations, but its past
states do not "push" its present and future states as if they were a row of dominoes stood on
end so that knocking over the first collapses all the others in series. The fallen dominoes lie
where they fall, but past events vanish into the present, which is just another way of saying that
the world is a self-moving pattern which, when its successive states are remembered, can be
25

shown to have a certain order. Its motion, its energy, issues from itself now, not from the past,
which simply falls behind it in memory like the wake from a ship.
When we ask the "why" of this moving pattern, we usually try to answer the question in
terms of its original, past impulse or of its future goal. I had realized for a long time that if there
is in any sense a reason for the world's existence it must be sought in the present, as the reason
for the wake must be sought in the engine of the moving ship. I have already mentioned that
LSD makes me peculiarly aware of the musical or dance-like character of the world, bringing my
attention to rest upon its present flowing and seeing this as its ultimate point. Yet I have also
been able to see that this point has depths, that the present wells up from within itself with an
energy which is something much richer than simple exuberance.
One of these experiments was conducted late at night. Some five or six hours from its start
the doctor had to go home, and I was left alone in the garden. For me, this stage of the
experiment is always the most rewarding in terms of insight, after some of its more unusual
and bizarre sensory effects have worn off. The garden was a lawn surrounded by shrubs and
high treesPine and eucalyptusand floodlit from the house which enclosed it on one side. As
I stood on the lawn I noticed that the rough patches where the grass was thin or mottled with
weeds no longer seemed to be blemishes. Scattered at random as they were, they appeared to
constitute an ordered design, giving the whole area the texture of velvet damask, the rough
patches being the parts where the pile of the velvet is cut. In sheer delight I began to dance on
this enchanted carpet, and through the thin soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground
becoming alive under my feet, connecting me with the earth and the trees and the sky in such a
way that I seemed to become one body with my whole surroundings.
Looking up, I saw that the stars were colored with the same reds, greens, and blues that one
sees in iridescent glass, and passing across them was the single light of a jet plane taking
forever to streak over the sky. At the same time, the trees, shrubs, and flowers seemed to be
living jewelry, inwardly luminous like intricate structures of jade, alabaster, or coral, and yet
breathing and flowing with the same life that was in me. Every plant became a kind of musical
utterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated from the main branches, through the stalks
and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the leaves, and to the fine capillary network between the
veins. Each new bursting of growth from a center repeated or amplified the basic design with
increasing complexity and delight, finally exulting in a flower.
From my description it will seem that the garden acquired an atmosphere that was distinctly
exotic, like the gardens of precious stones in the Arabian Nights, or like scenes in a Persian
miniature. This struck me at the time, and I began to wonder just why it is that the glowingly
articulated landscapes of those miniatures seem exotic, as do also many Chinese and Japanese
paintings. Were the artists recording what they, too, had seen under the influence of drugs? I
knew enough of the lives and techniques of Far Eastern painters to doubt this. I asked, too,
26

whether what I was seeing was "drugged." In other words, was the effect of the LSD in my
nervous system the addition to my senses of some chemical screen which distorted all that I
saw to preternatural loveliness? Or was its effect rather to remove certain habitual and normal
inhibitions of the mind and senses, enabling us to see things as they would appear to us if we
were not so chronically repressed? Little is known of the exact neurological effects of LSD, but
what is known suggests the latter possibility. If this be so, it is possible that the art forms of
other cultures appear exoticthat is, unfamiliarly enchantingbecause we are seeing the
world through the eyes of artists whose repressions are not the same as ours. The blocks in
their view of the world may not coincide with ours, so that in their representations of life we
see areas that we normally ignore. I am inclined to some such solution because there have
been times when I have seen the world in this magical aspect without benefit of LSD, and they
were times when I was profoundly relaxed within, my senses unguardedly open to their
surroundings.
Feeling, then, not that I was drugged but that I was in an unusual degree open to reality, I
tried to discern the meaning, the inner character of the dancing pattern which constituted both
myself and the garden, and the whole dome of the night with its colored stars. All at once it
became obvious that the whole thing was love-play, where love means everything that the
word can mean, a spectrum ranging from the red of erotic delight, through the green of human
endearment, to the violet of divine charity, from Freud's libido to Dante's "love that moves the
sun and other stars." All were so many colors issuing from a single white light, and, what was
more, this single source was not just love as we ordinarily understand it: it was also intelligence,
not only Eros and Agape but also Logos. I could see that the intricate organization both of the
plants and of my own nervous system, like symphonies of branching complexity, were not just
manifestations of intelligenceas if things like intelligence and love were in themselves
substances or formless forces. It was rather that the pattern itself is intelligence and is love, and
this somehow in spite of all its outwardly stupid and cruel distortions.
There is probably no way of finding objective verification for insights such as this. The world is
love to him who treats it as such, even when it torments and destroys him, and in states of
consciousness where there is no basic separation between the ego and the world suffering
cannot be felt as malice inflicted upon oneself by another. By the same logic it might seem that
with out the separation of self and other there can be no love. This might be true if individuality
and universality were formal opposites, mutually exclusive of one another, if, that is, the
inseparability of self and other meant that all individual differentiations were simply unreal. But
in the unitary, or nondualistic, view of the world I have been describing this is not so. Individual
differences express the unity, as branches, leaves, and flowers from the same plant, and the
love between the members is the realization of their basic interdependence.

27

I have not yet been able to use LSD in circumstances of great physical or moral pain, and
therefore my explorations of the problem of evil under its influence may appear to be shallow.
Only once in these experiments have I felt acute fear, but I know of several cases in which LSD
has touched off psychic states of the most alarming and unpleasant kind. More than once I
have invited such states under LSD by looking at images ordinarily suggestive of "the creeps"
the mandibles of spiders, and the barbs and spines of dangerous fish and insects. Yet they
evoked only a sense of beauty and exuberance, for our normal projection of malice into these
creatures was entirely withdrawn, so that their organs of destruction became no more evil than
the teeth of a beautiful woman. On another occasion I looked for a long time at a colored
reproduction of Van Eyck's Last Judgment, which is surely one of the most horrendous products
of human imagination. The scene of hell is dominated by the figure of Death, a skeleton
beneath whose batlike wings lies a writhing mass of screaming bodies gnawed by snakes which
penetrate them like maggots in fruit. One of the curious effects of LSD is to impart an illusion of
movement in still images, so that here the picture came to life and the whole entanglement of
limbs and serpents began to squirm before my eyes. (2)
Ordinarily such a sight should have been hideous, but now I watched it with intense and
puzzled interest until the thought came to me, "Demon est deus inversusthe Devil is God
invertedso let's turn the picture upside down." I did so, and thereupon burst into laughter for
it became apparent at once that the scene was an empty drama, a sort of spiritual scarecrow,
designed to guard some mystery from profanation by the ignorant. The agonized expressions of
the damned seemed quite evidently "put on," and as for the death's-head, the great skull in the
center of the painting, it became just what a skull isan empty shelland why the horror
when there is nothing in it?
I was, of course, seeing ecclesiastical hells for what they are. On the one hand, they are the
pretension that social authority is ultimately inescapable since there are post-mortem police
who will catch every criminal. On the other hand, they are "no trespassing" signs to discourage
the insincere and the immature from attaining insights which they might abuse. A baby is put in
a play pen to keep it from getting at the matches or falling downstairs, and though the
intention of the pen is to keep the baby closed in, parents are naturally proud when the child
grows strong enough to climb out. Likewise, a man can perform actions which are truly moral
only when he is no longer motivated by the fear of hell, that is, when he grows into union with
the Good that is beyond good and evil, which, in other words, does not act from the love of
rewards or the fear of punishments. This is precisely the nature of the world when it is
considered as self-moving action, giving out a past instead of being motivated by a past.
Beyond this, the perception of the empty threat of the death's-head was certainly a
recognition of the fact that the fear of death, as distinct from the fear of dying, is one of the
most baseless mirages that trouble us. Because it is completely impossible to imagine one's
28

own personal absence, we fill the void in our minds with images of being buried alive in
perpetual darkness. If death is the simple termination of a stream of consciousness, it is
certainly nothing to fear. At the same time, I realize that there is some apparent evidence for
survival of death in a few extraordinarily unexplainable mediumistic communications and
remembrances of past lives. These I attribute, vaguely enough, to subtler networks of
communication and interrelationship in the pattern of life than we ordinarily perceive. For if
forms repeat themselves, if the structure of branching trees is reverberated in the design of
watercourses in the desert, it would not be so strange if a pattern so intricate as the human
nervous system were to repeat configurations that arise in consciousness as veritable memories
of the most distant times. My own feeling, and of course it is nothing more than an opinion, is
that we transcend death, not as individual memory-systems, but only in so far as our true
identity is the total process of the world as distinct from the apparently separate organism.
As I have said, this sense of being the whole process is frequently experienced with LSD, and,
for me, it has often arisen out of a strong feeling of the mutuality of opposites. Line and plane,
concept and percept, solid and space, figure and ground, subject and object appear to be so
completely correlative as to be convertible into each other. At one moment it seems that there
are, for example, no lines in nature: there are only the boundaries of planes, boundaries which
are, after all, the planes themselves. But at the next moment, looking carefully into the texture
of these planes, one discovers them to be nothing but a dense network of patterned lines.
Looking at the form of a tree against the sky, I have felt at one moment that its outline
"belongs" to the tree, exploding into space. But the next moment I feel that the same form is
the "inline" of the sky, of space imploding the tree. Every pull is felt as a push, and every push
as a pull, as in rotating the rim of a wheel with one's hand. Is one pushing or pulling?
The sense that forms are also properties of the space in which they expand is not in the least
fantastic when one considers the nature of magnetic fields, or, say, the dynamics of swirling ink
dropped into water. The concepts of verbal thought are so clumsy that we tend to think only of
one aspect of a relationship at a time. We alternate between seeing a given form as a property
of the figure and as a property of the ground, as in the Gestalt image of two profiles in black
silhouette, about to kiss. The white space between them appears as a chalice, but it is intensely
difficult to see the kissing faces and the chalice simultaneously. Yet with LSD one appears to be
able to feel this simultaneity quite vividly, and thus to become aware of the mutuality of one's
own form and action and that of the surrounding world. The two seem to shape and determine
each other at the same moment, explosion and implosion concurring in perfect harmony, so
giving rise to the feeling that one is actual self is both. This inner identity is felt with every level
of the environmentthe physical world of stars and space, rocks and plants, the social world of
human beings, and the ideational world of art and literature, music and conversation. All are
grounds or fields operating in the most intimate mutuality with one's own existence and
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behavior so that the "origin" of action lies in both at once, fusing them into a single act. It is
certainly for this reason that LSD taken in common with a small group can be a profoundly
eucharistic experience, drawing the members together into an extremely warm and intimate
bond of friendship.
All in all, I have felt that my experiments with this astonishing chemical have been most
worth while, creative, stimulating, and, above all, an intimation that "there is more in heaven
and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy." Only once have I felt terror, the sense of
being close to madness, and even here the insight gained was well worth the pain. Yet this was
enough to convince me that indiscriminate use of this alchemy might be exceedingly
dangerous, and to make me ask who, in our society, is competent to control its use. Obviously,
this applies even more to such other powers of science as atomic energy, but once something is
known there is really no way of locking it up. At the present time, 1960, LSD is in the control of
pharmacologists and a few research groups of psychiatrists, and though there are unscrupulous
and frankly psychotic psychiatrists, this seems to me a far more reliable form of control than
that exercised by the police and the Bureau of Narcoticswhich is not control at all, but
ineffective repression, handing over actual control to the forces of organized crime.
On the whole, we feel justified in using dangerous powers when we can establish that there
is a relatively low probability of disaster. Life organized so as to be completely foolproof and
secure is simply not worth living, since it requires the final abolition of freedom. It is on this
perfectly rational principle of gambling that we justify the use of travel by air and automobile,
electric appliances in the home, and all the other dangerous instruments of civilization. Thus
far, the record of catastrophes from the use of LSD is extremely low, and there is no evidence at
all that it is either habit-forming or physically deleterious. It is, of course, possible to become
psychically dependent on stimuli which do not establish any craving that can be identified in
physiological terms. Personally, I am no example of phenomenal will power, but I find that I
have no inclination to use LSD in the same way as tobacco or wines and liquors. On the
contrary, the experience is always so fruitful that I feel I must digest it for some months before
entering into it again. Furthermore, I find that I am quite instinctively disinclined to use it
without the same sense of readiness and dedication with which one approaches a sacrament,
and also that the experience is worth while to the precise degree that I keep my critical and
intellectual faculties alert.
It is generally felt that there is a radical incompatibility between intuition and intellect, poetry
and logic, spirituality and rationality, To me, the most impressive thing about LSD experiences is
that these formally opposed realms seem instead to complement and fructify one another,
suggesting, therefore, a mode of life in which man is no longer an embodied paradox of angel
and animal, of reason fighting instinct, but a marvelous coincidence in whom Eros and Logos
are one.
30

Footnotes

(1) I have often made the point, as in The Way of Zen, that the "real" world is concrete rather than abstract, and
thus that the conceptual patterns of order, categorization, and logic which the human mind projects upon nature
are in some way less real. But upon several occasions LSD has suggested a fundamental identity of percept and
concept, concrete and abstract. After all, our brains and the patterns in them are themselves members of the
concrete, physical universe, and thus our abstractions are as much forms of nature as the structure of crystals or
the organization of ferns. (back)
(2) Later, with the aid of a sea urchin's shell I was able to find out something of the reasons for this effect. All the
small purple protuberances on the shell seemed to be wiggling, not only to sight but also to touch Watching this
phenomenon closely, I realized that as my eyes moved across the shell they seemed to change the intensity of
coloring, amounting to an increase or decrease in the depth of shadow. This did not happen when the eyes were
held still. Now motion, or apparent motion, of the shadow will often seem to be motion of the object casting it, in
this case the protrusions on the shell. In the Van Eyck painting there was likewise an alteration, a lightening or
darkening, of actual shadows which the artist had painted, and thus the same illusion of movement. (back)

31

32

The Cross of Cards

It is said that playing-cards were devised by the ancients to hide a secret where those not 'in
the know' would never think of looking for it. For heresy-hunters are serious-minded people
who would never think of looking for religion in a game. It is curious to think how men have
gambled, fought and slain one another over these unknown symbols, and it is interesting to
wonder whether the most accomplished 'poker face' would fall a little on discovering that he
was playing for lucre with emblems just as holy as the cross, the chalice and the crown of
thorns. Probably not, for men have done things just as terrible in the name of symbols whose
holiness they recognized. However, it is no less strange that the puritanic mind should see in
diamonds, spades, hearts and clubs the signs of vice, to be avoided at all times and more
especially on Sundays.

Today the forms of playing-cards are very different from the original Tarot, but an ordinary
modern pack is not without significance, even though it may not be quite the same significance
that was originally intended. What that was I do not know, but the living meaning of a symbol is
what it means for each man personally. Therefore my interpretation of this particular symbol is
not the result of research but my own intuition and has no claim to be \the\ interpretation. Like
the often-quoted Topsy, the idea 'just growed' when I laid out the four suits of the pack and
began to wonder what it was all about. It is said that 'the ways of the One are as many as the
lives of men,' and as I worked at the symbol itself but also from the many possible
interpretations that might be given it. However, we begin by laying out the cards in the form of
a cross, thus:

33

34

To the North are Diamonds, to the South Spades, to the East Hearts and to the West Clubs,
running inwards to the centre from the two to the Ace. The first question was to decide the
meaning of the four suits, and at once the four elements of Fire, Earth, Water and Air suggested
themselves together with the four faculties of the human mind, Intuition, Sensation, Feeling
and Intellect. But which belonged to which? It was at once obvious that Spades belonged to
Earth and Hearts to Feeling. Sensation is the avenue whereby we receive our impressions of
material things, and so this was accorded to Earth and Spades. Feeling is a passive, feminine
faculty, not usually well developed in men; we talk about 'feminine intuition' but as a rule we
generally mean feminine feeling - a certain sensitivity to emotional values, to psychological
'atmospheres' and feeling-situations where men are apt to be 'slow in the uptake.' It was thus
decided to place Hearts and Feeling under the feminine element of Water - that passive
substance that always yields but can never be defeated. Opposite Hearts we have Clubs, and it
was not at once easy to decide whether Fire or Air should be called the opposite of Water. Fire
and Water are hostile, but Air and Water are creative, for in the beginning 'the spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters,' and, 'except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he
cannot enter into the kingdom of God.' It was therefore decided to make the figure harmonious
instead of hostile, regarding the four suits as compliments rather than opposites. Thus as Air
complements Water being the active agent which shaped the passive substance intot he forms
of waves. Thought or Intellect, as Air, was put opposite Feeling, as Water. Feeling is passive but
Intellect - a masculine quality - is active and often aggressive, and so belongs appropriately to
lubs. Intuition and Fire remain to be classed with Diamonds, for intuition is the spiritual faculty
which compliments Sensation, the sensual or material faculty. Fire is not hostile to Earth, but
it's lightness (in both senses) compliments the soil's darkness and heaviness. To Buddhist
philosophers the diamond (vajra) is the symbol of spiritual consciousness because of its
strength and luminous clarity. It has been said that 'a diamond is a piece of coal which has stuck
to its job,' being that which results from intense fire working upon black carbon. Therefore the
four suits are understood as follows:

Diamonds (Fire & Intuition) - Spades (Earth & Sensation)

Hearts (Water & Feeling) - Clubs (Air & Intellect)

But what about the rest of the figure? We see that there is a progression of numbers and court
cards from the extremity of each arm of the cross to the centre - four ways of approach to the
Divinity as present represented by a question mark as He is unknown. Corresponding to the
four faculties, the Hindus devised four kinds of yoga for awakening man's understanding of his
35

union with Brahman, the Self of the Universe: karma yoga, the way of Action, Bbakti yoga, the
way of Devotion, gnana yoga, the way of Intellect, and raja yoga, the way of developing the
higher faculties of Intuition. But it will be seen that in our figure each path is of a like pattern,
running:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Knave Queen King Ace

The Progression shows, among other things, each stage of man's path to supreme
Enlightenment from the child and the primitive to the sage. From 2 to 10 the path seems to be
going backwards, as will shortly be apparent, because it often seems that civilized man is
further from spirituality than the child and the primitive. Actually this is not true, for in the
parable of the Prodigal Son it is the prodigal for whom the fatted calf is slain and not the faithful
son, for one has to be divided from union with the Father before one can truly appreciate it. To
adapt a line of Kipling's, 'He does not know Union who only Union knows.'

We begin with the 2, for with every one of the four faculties the first thing of which we are
aware, the very foundation of our experience, is the difference between that which we call our
self and that which is not the self, between the thing which we call 'I' and the outer universe.
This is the first of all the pairs of opposites of which life is composed, the subjective and the
objective. But these two things do not exist in our consciousness without a third factor, namely
the relationship between them, which is shown by the 3. That relationship may be attraction or
repulsion, of love or fear, or of balance between the two which is called indifference. Without
trinity, duality has no more meaning than man and woman without child, and unless there is a
relationship between ourselves and the universe we can have no consciousness of our
existence - indeed, we could not even exist. To some things in the universe we react with love
or attraction, and to others with fear or repulsion, and this is as natural as that fire should make
us warm and ice make us cold.

But here the difficulties begin, because man does not stop with that basic reaction to life. It is
not just that he likes some things and dislikes others; ha has also decided feelings about the
state of liking and disliking, and so from 3 we proceed to 4. This stage marks the beginning of
self- consciousness and civilization, for man becomes attached to loving or liking and wishes to
have about him only those things in the universe which arouse attraction. At the same time he
36

becomes afraid of fear because it makes him ashamed, being a menace to his pride and selfesteem. But this does not get rid of his fear; it only adds one fear on top of another. Thus as
soon as man becomes self-conscious and self-esteeming and fully aware of his reactions to
things, he starts trying to interfere with the processes of his soul. And this is called civilization.
He is not content to be the primitive who just loves and fears things without shame, thinking no
more about it. He must now control his reactions and shape them in accordance with some
preconceived pattern of character development. Fear must not exist in his vocabulary and socalled 'love' must be cultivated under such names as ambition and happiness. But this
interference with the natural processes of the soul (psychologists call it repression) removes us
further and further from basic realities, precipitating us into a sort of tail chasing procedure.
Like dogs trying to catch their tails, cats runnign after their own shadows and lunatics trying to
lift themselves up by their own belts, men try to make themselves what they think they ought
to be - a form of self-deception which receives rude shocks when the surface of civilization is
removed. This regression from basic realities is represented by the cards from 4 to 10, the latter
being the point where man has completely forgotten his union with life, where his selfconsciousness has reached the stage of utter isolation and where he is hopelessly bewildered
by what the Chinese call 'the ten thousand things' - or the manifold and apparently separate
and chaotic objects and events of the universe.

This is the moment of crisis in human evolution. Man becomes acutely aware of his
unhappiness and insufficiency, and realises, appropriately enough, that he is a Knave. What is
he to do about it? Look at the next card, the Queen - the feminine, passive principle - and if you
look carefully at the card you will see that each of the four Queens holds an open flower. The
Knaves hold swords, spears and daggers, emblems of their hostility to the life from which they
have so estranged themselves, but the flower which is open to sun and rain alike is the symbol
of acceptance. The Knave has estranged himself from life by his pride and false morality, by
fighting the natural processes of the soul and trying to make out that he is greater than he is.
('Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature!') But the Queen accepts
those processes, both the love and the fear and all the other opposites by which those feelings
are aroused - life and death, pleasure and pain, good and evil. She knows that man must accept
all the aspects of life if he is to be happy, and that if he would see the god in himself he must
not deny the demon. 'Demon' runs the Hermetic aphorism, 'est deus inversus' - the demon is a
god upside-down. Therefore the Queen stands for that acceptance and spiritual love which, like
His sun, God 'maketh to shine upon both the just and the unjust.' As yet, however, this
acceptance is incomplete, for the Queen is only the female or passive aspect of acceptance. The
complete union and harmony with life which is the goal of all these four paths is not simply a
quietistic state of spiritual laisser-faire in which man just allows life to live him. That is, indeed,
37

a step on the way, but the very idea of allowing life to live you, of submitting to your destiny, to
the will of God, or whatever it may be called, still implies a distinction between yourself and
life, nature or God.

When this distinction is overcome there is no longer any question of yourself being ruled by life
and destiny or of yourself ruling your life and destiny; the problem of fate or free will then
disappears, for the ruler and the ruled are united, and you do not know whether you are living
life or whether life is living you. It is as if two dancers were dancing together in such perfect
accord that the lead of one and the response of the other were one and the same movement,
as if action and passivity became a single act. In our figure this is symbolized by the King. In
their hands the Kings hold swords and axes like the Knaves; in fact, the Kings are Knaves but
with this difference: that the Knaves are compelled to be Knaves and cannot help themselves,
whereas the Kings are free to be Knaves. This is the difference between the man who is moral
(who fights the dark side of life) because he fears evil, and the man who is moral because he
knows he is perfectly free to be immoral. In the stage of the Queen we discover our freedom to
be moral instead of our compulsion. For when you feel that you are free to be as evil as you like
you will find the idea rather tedious.

Thus in the Queen and the King we have the free, royal pair, symbols of spiritual liberty - liberty
to love and to fear, to fight and the yield, to resist and to accept and - yes - to be free and to be
compelled, for freedom is not absolutely free unless it is also free to be bound! Therefore the
combination of these two is represented in the Ace, symbol of the union between oneself and
life which arises from this complete acceptance of life. Here the four paths meet, but an
uncomfortable empty space is left in the middle of the cross and something seems to be
needed to tie the whole figure together - shall we say to make it holy? We have reduced the
many, represented by the 2, to the One, represented by the Ace, but the Buddhist problem
asks, 'When the many are reduced to the One, to what shall the One be reduced?' For as the
figure stands it would seem that there is a difference between the many and the One, that in
going along the path from the 2 to the Ace you have actually acquired something which you did
not have before. Spirituality, however, is not acquired; it is only realized, because union with
life is something we have all the time even though we do not know it. Our seeming loss of
union in the civilized, self-conscious world is only apparent, only something which occurs in
Time but not in Eternity. From the standpoint of Eternity, every stage in the path is both
beginning and end and middle; there is neither coming nor going, gain nor loss, ignorance nor
enlightenment.
38

What shall we put in the middle? I think we have forgotten a card - the one we usually leave in
the box. What about the Joker?

A profane symbol? Not at all. For the joke about the whole thing is that, wherever we stand on
the paths, we are really at the Goal - only we do not know it. It is like looking all over the house
for your keys only to find that you are carrying tham in your hand, whereat you sit down and
laugh at yourself.

But the Joker makes an appropriate centre for another reason: in games he is allowed to
represent any other card in the pack. So also in this figure he is the 2 and the Ace and all that
lies in between - Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending . . . the first and the last.

Indeed, as Chesterton said, there is a closer connection between 'cosmic' and 'comic' than the
mere similarity of the words!

39

40

Taoism

In order to go into Taoism at all, we must begin by being in the frame of mind in which it can be
understood. You cannot force yourself into this frame of mind, anymore than you can smooth
disturbed water with your hand. But let's say that our starting point is that we forget what we
know, or think we know, and that we suspend judgment about practically everything, returning
to what we were when we were babies when we had not yet learned the names or the
language. And in this state, although we have extremely sensitive bodies and very alive senses,
we have no means of making an intellectual or verbal commentary on what is going on.

You are just plain ignorant, but still very much alive, and in this state you just feel what is
without calling it anything at all. You know nothing at all about anything called an external
world in relation to an internal world. You don't know who you are, you haven't even the idea
of the word you or I-- it is before all that. Nobody has taught you self control, so you don't know
the difference between the noise of a car outside and a wandering thought that enters your
mind- they are both something that happens. You don't identify the presence of a thought that
may be just an image of a passing cloud in your mind's eye or the passing automobile; they
happen. Your breath happens. Light, all around you, happens. Your response to it by blinking
happens.

So, on one hand you are simply unable to do anything, and on the other there is nothing you
are supposed to do. Nobody has told you anything to do. You are completely unable to do
anything but be aware of the buzz. The visual buzz, the audible buzz, the tangible buzz, the
smellable buzz-- all around the buzz is going on. Watch it. Don't ask who is watching it; you
have no information about that yet. You don't know that it requires a watcher for something to
be watched. That is somebody's idea; but you don't know that.

Lao-tzu says, "The scholar learns something every day, the man of tao unlearns something
every day, until he gets back to non-doing." Just simply, without comment, without an idea in
your head, be aware. What else can you do? You don't try to be aware; you are. You will find, of
course, that you can not stop the commentary going on inside your head, but at least you can
41

regard it as interior noise. Listen to your chattering thoughts as you would listen to the singing
of a kettle.

We don't know what it is we are aware of, especially when we take it altogether, and there's
this sense of something going on. I can't even really say 'this,' although I said 'something going
on.' But that is an idea, a form of words. Obviously I couldn't say something is going on unless I
could say something else isn't. I know motion by contrast with rest, and while I am aware of
motion I am also aware of at rest. So maybe what's at rest isn't going and what's in motion is
going, but I won't use that concept then because in order for it to make sense I have to include
both. If I say here it is, that excludes what isn't, like space. If I say this, it excludes that, and I am
reduced to silence. But you can feel what I am talking about. That's what is called tao, in
Chinese. That's where we begin.

Tao means basically "way", and so "course"; the course of nature. Lao-tzu said the way of the
functioning of the tao is "so of itself"; that is to say it is spontaneous. Watch again what is going
on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing a
happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at things there is no difference
between what you do, on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. It is all the
same process. Just as your thought happens, the car happens outside, and so the clouds and
the stars.

When a Westerner hears that he thinks this is some sort of fatalism or determinism, but that is
because he still preserves in the back of his mind two illusions. One is that what is happening is
happening to him, and therefore he is the victim of circumstances. But when you are in primal
ignorance there is no you different from what is happening, and therefore it is not happening to
you. It is just happening. So is "you", or what you call you, or what you will later call you. It is
part of the happening, and you are part of the universe, although strictly speaking the universe
has no parts. We only call certain features of the universe parts. However you can't disconnect
them from the rest without causing them to be not only non-existent, but to never to have
existed at all.

When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is
liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows
42

necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your
primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see
the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake
goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away,
and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and
everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with
your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it.
They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds
came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory,
which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now, and therefore it is
spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's
another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but
of course we don't really know what randomness is. What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin,
means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real
meaning of virgin birth.

That is the world, that is the tao, but perhaps that makes us feel afraid. We may ask, "If all that
is happening spontaneously, who's in charge? I am not in charge, that is pretty obvious, but I
hope there is God or somebody looking after all this." But why should there be someone
looking after it, because then there is a new worry that you may not of thought of, which is,
"Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care?" Who
guards the guards? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God? You may say "God
doesn't need looking after" Oh? Well, nor does this.

The tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we
arrange everything geometrically in boxes, or in rows. That is a very crude kind of order, but
when you look at a plant it is perfectly obvious that the plant has order. We recognize at once
that is not a mess, but it is not symmetrical and it is not geometrical looking. The plant looks
like a Chinese drawing, because they appreciated this kind of non-symmetrical order so much
that it became an integral aspect of their painting. In the Chinese language this is called li, and
the character for li means the markings in jade. It also means the grain in wood and the fiber in
muscle. We could say, too, that clouds have li, marble has li, the human body has li. We all
recognize it, and the artist copies it whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, an
abstract painter, or a non-objective painter. They all are trying to express the essence of li. The
interesting thing is, that although we all know what it is, there is no way of defining it. Because
tao is the course, we can also call li the watercourse, and the patterns of li are also the patterns
43

of flowing water. We see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, as sculpture in the
grain in wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles. All these things are
patterned according to the basic principles of flow. In the patterns of flowing water you will all
kind of motifs from Chinese art, immediately recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle of
yang-yin.

So li means then the order of flow, the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid, because Lao-tzu
likens tao to water:

The great tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right, It loves and nourishes all things, but
does not lord it over them.

For as he comments elsewhere, water always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor, because
we are always trying to play games of one-upmanship, and be on top of each other. But Lao-tzu
explains that the top position is the most insecure. Everybody wants to get to the top of the
tree, but then if they do the tree will collapse. That is the fallacy of American society.

Lao-tzu says the basic position is the most powerful, and this we can see at once in Judo, or in
Aikido. These are self-defensive arts where you always get underneath the opponent, so he falls
over you if he attacks you. The moment he moves to be aggressive you go either lower than he
is, or in a smaller circle than he is moving. And you have spin, if you know Aikido. You are
always spinning, and you know how something spinning exercises centrifugal force, and if
someone comes into your field of centrifugal force he the gets flung out, but by his own
bounce. It is very curious.

So, therefore, the watercourse way is the way of tao. Now, that seems to white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, lazy, spineless, and altogether passive. I am always being asked when I talk about
things, "If people did what you suggest wouldn't they become terribly passive?" Well, from a
superficial point of view I would suggest that a certain amount of passivity would be an
excellent corrective for our kind of culture because we are always creating trouble by doing
good to other people. We wage wars for other peoples benefit, and attempt to help those living
in "underdeveloped" counties, not realizing that in the process we may destroy their way of life.
44

Economies and cultures that have coexisted in ecological balance for thousands of years have
been disrupted all around the world, with often disastrous results.

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46

From Time to Eternity

When St. Augustin of Hipo was asked "What is time?" he replied, "I know what it is, but when
you ask me I don't." And funnily enough, he is the man most responsible for the average
commonsensical idea of time that prevails in the West. The Greeks and the East Indians thought
of time as a circular process. And anyone looking at his watch will obviously see that time goes
around. But the Hebrews and the Christians think of time as something that goes in a straight
line. And that is a very powerful idea which influences everybody living in the West today. We
all have our various mythologies. And I don't mean when I say the word "mythology," or
"myth," something that is false in the popular sense. By myth I mean an idea or an image in
terms of which people make sense of the world. And the Western myth under which our
common sense has been nurtured over many centuries, is that the world began, if you look at
the marginal notes in your copy of the King James Bible, which of course descended from
heaven with an angel in the year 1611, you will see that the world was created in the year 4000
B.C., before which, and naturally the Lord God existed forever and ever and ever through
endless time backwards. And then the world was created and of course the world fell apart,
and so in the middle of time, the second person of the Trinity incarnated himself in Jesus Christ
to save mankind, and established the Church. And when this institution has not altogether
successfully done its work, there is expected the end of time. There will be a day which is called
"The Last Day" in which God, the Son, will again appear in glory with his legions of angels. And
the Last Judgment will be held. And those who are saved will live forever and ever
contemplating the vision of the Blessed Trinity and those who did not behave themselves will
squirm forever and ever, that is to say, through everlasting time in hell. And this, you see, is a
one directional process. It happened once - it will never be repeated because St. Augustin fixed
on the idea that when God the Son came into this world and sacrificed himself for the remission
of all sins, this was an event that happened once and once only. I don't know why he thought
that, but he sure did think it. And so we have got the idea that the universe of time is a unique
story which had a beginning and it is going to have an end, and which will never never never
happen again. And so although most Westerners do not believe in this story anymore, although
a great many of them think they ought to believe in it, but they in fact do not. They still retain
from this way of thinking a linear view of time, that we are going in a single direction. We will
never again go back over the course which we have followed. And we hope that as we go on in
time, things will get better and better. And this version of time lies in very strange and
fascinating contrast to the view of time held by most other people in the world. And as a special
example I will take the view of time of the Hindus. The Hindus had no such small-minded
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provincial idea as that the world was created in a mere 4000 B.C. They reckoned the ages of the
universe in units of four million, three hundred and twenty thousand years. That is your basic
counting unit, and it is called a kalpa. And their understanding of the world is of course quite
different from ours. We in the West think of the world as an artifact, something made by a
grand technician, the Creator. But the Hindus do not think that the world is created at all. They
look upon the world as a drama, not as created, but as acted. And they see God as the supreme
actor, or what is called the cosmic self, playing all the parts. In other words, you and the birds
and bees and the flowers, the rocks and the stars are all a big act being put on by God, who is
pretending in order to amuse himself, through the many eternities, who is pretending that he is
all of you. And this is not, after all, an unreasonable idea because if I were to ask you very
seriously to consider what you would do if you were God, you might find, I think, that being
omniscient for always and always and always, and being in control of everything would be
extremely boring. You would want a surprise. After all, what are we trying to do with our
technology - we are trying to control the world. And if you will imagine the ultimate fulfillment
of technology, when we really are in control of everything, and we have great panels of push
buttons whereon the slightest touch will fulfill every wish, you will eventually arrange to have a
special red button on it marked "surprise." And you would touch that button and you will
suddenly disappear from your normal consciousness, and find your self in a situation very much
like the one you are now in, where you feel a little bit out of control of things, subject to
surprises, and subject to the whims of a not altogether predictable universe. And so the Hindus
figure that that is what God does every so often. That is to say, God, for a period of four million,
three hundred and twenty thousand years, knows who he is. And then he gets bored with it and
forgets who he is for an equal period of four million, three hundred and twenty thousand years.
As it were, he goes to sleep and has a dream. And this dream is called the manvandara , but the
period in which he wakes up and doesn't have the dream is called the pralaya., and that is a
state of total bliss. But when he has a dream, he manifests the world. And the manifestation of
the world is divided into four ages, and these ages are named after the four throws in the
Indian game of dice. The first throw is called krita,, which is the throw of four, the perfect
throw. And that lasts for a very long time. And in this period of manifestation, the world is
absolutely delightful. It would be the same, for example, if you had the privilege of dreaming
any dream you wanted to dream when you went to sleep at night. For at least a month you
would dream out all your wishes. You would have banquets and music and dancing girls and
everything that you ever thought you wanted, you would have. But then after a few weeks of
this you would say "well, this is getting a little dull, and let's have an adventure and let's get into
trouble.' It is all right because we know we are going to wake up at the end of it. So you would
engage dragons and rescue princesses from them and all that sort of thing. And then you
would, after awhile you would get more and more far out. You would arrange to forget that you
were dreaming, and think you were really involved in danger, and what a surprise that would
48

be when you woke up. And one of those nights when you were dreaming any dream you
wanted to dream, you would find your self right now sitting in this auditorium listening to me,
with all your special problems and hang-ups and involvement. How do you know that that is not
what is happening?
So then, after the first round in which everything is perfect, the krita yuga it is called, that
epoch of time, there comes a somewhat shorter epoch called the ______ yuga , that is the
throw of three, and you know in the same way that a three-legged table isn't quite as stable as
a four legged table. In ______ yuga, the light goes on but there is something a little bit off. It is a
little bit insecure, though as it were the fly in the ointment. And then when that comes to an
end there is next a still shorter period called the davapala yuga , which is named after dava, the
throw of two, in which period the forces of good and evil are equally balanced. And when that
comes to an end, there follows a still shorter period called the kali yuga . Yuga means epoch.
And the kali means the throw of one, or the worst throw. And in this period the forces of
negation and destruction are finally triumphant. And this is supposed to have begun shortly
before 3000 B.C., and we have got another 5000 years of it to run. In this period everything falls
apart, and gets worse and worse and worse until finally at the end the Lord himself appears in
the disguise of Shiva, the destroyer, blue-bodied, ten arms with a necklace of skulls, each hand
holding clubs and knives, but one hand in this (visual) gesture, which means don't be afraid, it is
a big act. And there upon the entire cosmos is destroyed in fire, and in every soul the Lord
wakes up again and discovers who he is, and abides for a pralaya of four million, three hundred
and twenty thousand in a state of total bliss. And this process goes on and on and on forever
and ever and ever. For these kalpas, these periods of four million, three hundred and twenty
thousand years are the days and nights, the in breathing and the out breathing of Brahma, the
supreme self. And they ad up into years of Brahma, each one of three hundred and sixty kalpas.
And these add up again into centuries and it goes on and on and on. But it never gets boring
because every time the new monvontara, the new play starts, the Lord God forgets what
happened before, and becomes completely absorbed in the act, just as you did when you were
born and you opened your eyes on the world for what you thought was the first time. And all
the world was strange and wonderful. You saw it with the clean eyes of a child. And of course as
you get older you get more used to things. You have seen the sun again and again, and you
think it is just the same old sun. You have seen the trees until you regard them as the same old
trees. And finally when you pass about 55 years old or so, you begin to get bored and you start
to fall apart and disintegrate, and finally you die because really and truly you have had enough
of it. But then after you die, another baby is born who is of course you, because every baby calls
itself "I", and sees the whole thing from a new point of view again, and is perfectly thrilled. You
see. And so in this wonderfully arranged way, so that there is never absolutely intolerable
boredom, the thing goes on and on and on and round and round and round. These are two, I
would say, of the great myths of time in the world. And we really, in our day and age now, need
49

to consider this very seriously. Because we, as a highly technological civilization, with enormous
power over nature, really need to consider time. Let me ask the question that was asked St.
Augustin "What is time?" I am not going to give you the same answer. I know what it is, and
when you ask me I will tell you. Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion. And we have
agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and
watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is
a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which
is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible. And when we think of
a moment of time when we think what we mean by the word "now," we think of the shortest
possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline on the watch.
And as a result of this fabulous idea, we are a people who feel that we don't have any present,
because the present is instantly vanishing - it goes so quickly. As this is the problem of Faust of
Goethe's version of the story, where he attains his great moment and says to it "Oh still delay
thou art so fair" that the moment never stays. It is always becoming past. And we have the
sensation, therefore, of our lives as something that is constantly flowing away from us. We are
constantly losing time. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to wasted. Time is
money. And so because of the tyranny of this thing, we feel that we have a past, and we know
who we are in terms of our past. Nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you
who they were. And we think we also have a future. And that is terribly important, because we
have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply what we are looking for. You see,
if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely
frustrated. And also, when you ask a person "What did you do yesterday?" they will give you a
historical account of the sequence of events. They will say "Well, I woke up at about seven
o'clock in the morning. I got up and made myself some coffee, and then I brushed my teeth and
took a shower, got dressed, had some breakfast and went down to the office and did this and
that," and so on. And they give you a historical outline of a course of events. And people really
think that is what they did. But actually that is only the very skeleton account of what you did.
You lived a much richer life than that, except you did not notice it. You only paid attention to a
very small part of the information received through your five senses. You forgot to say that
when you got up first thing in the morning and made some coffee, that your eyes slid across the
birds outside your window. And the light on the leaves of the tree. And that your nose played
games with the scent of the boiling coffee. You didn't even mention it because you were not
aware of it. Because you were not aware of it you were in a hurry. You were engaged on getting
rid of that coffee as fast as possible so that you could get to your office to do something that
you thought was terribly important. And maybe it was in a certain way - it made you some
money. But you, because you were so absorbed with the future, had no use for the money that
you made. You did not know how to enjoy it. Maybe you invested it so that you would be sure
that you would have a future in which something finally might happen to you, that you were
50

looking for all along. But of course it never will because tomorrow never comes. The truth of
the matter being that there is no such thing as time. Time is a hallucination. There is only today.
There never will be anything except today. And if you do not know how to live today, you are
demented. And this is the great problem of Western civilization, not only of Western
civilization, but really all civilization, because what civilization is, is a very complex arrangement
in which we have used symbols - that is to say words, numbers, figures, concepts to represent
the real world of nature, like we use money to represent wealth, and like we measure energy
with the clock. Or like we measure with yards or with inches. These are very useful measures.
But you can always have too much of a good thing, and can so easily confuse the measure with
what you are measuring; the money with the wealth; or even the menu with the dinner. And at
a certain point, you can become so enchanted with the symbols that you entirely confuse them
with the reality. And this is the disease from which almost all civilized people are suffering. We
are therefore in the position of eating the menu instead of the dinner. Of living in a world of
words, symbols and are therefore very badly related to our material surroundings. The United
States of America as the most progressive country of the West is of course is the great example
of this. We are a people who are believed by our selves, although we are slightly ashamed of it,
and by the rest of the world to be the great materialists. And this is an absolutely undeserved
reputation. A materialist would, in my way of thinking of it, be a person who loves material, and
therefore reverences it, respects it, and enjoys it. We don't. We are a people who hate
material, and are devoting ourselves to the abolition of its limitation. We want to abolish the
limits of time and space. Therefore we want to get rid of space. We call it the conquest of
space. We want to be able to get from San Francisco to New York in nothing flat. And we are
arranging to do just that. We do not realize that what the result of doing this will be - that San
Francisco and New York will become the same place. And therefore it will not be worth going
from one to the other. When you go to another place you say you think you would like a
vacation and so let's go to Hawaii where we think we will find girls in grass skirts dancing the
hula on sandy beaches under the sun and the lovely blue ocean and coral reefs and all that sort
of jazz. But tourists increasingly ask if such a place, "has it been spoiled yet," by which they
mean "Is it exactly like Dallas?" And the answer is "yes." The faster you can get from Dallas to
Honolulu, Honolulu is the same place as Dallas, so it wasn't worth taking the trip. Tokyo has
become the same place as Los Angeles and increasingly, as you can go faster and faster from
place to place, that they as I say, they are all the same place. So that was the result of
abolishing the limitations of time and space. Also, we are in a hurry about many things. Going
back to this account of one's day - you got up in the morning and you made yourself some
coffee. I suppose you made instant coffee because you were in too much of a hurry to be
concerned with the preparation of a beautiful coffee mixture. And so your instant coffee was a
punishment for a person in too much hurry. This is true of everything instant. There is
something about it that is phony and fake. Where were you going? What do you think the
51

future is going to bring you? Actually you don't know. I've always thought it an excellent idea to
assign to freshmen in college, the task of writing an essay on what you would like heaven to be.
In other words, what do you really want. And be specific because be careful of what you desire
- you may get it. You see, the truth of the matter is, as I have already intimated, there is no such
thing as time. Time is an abstraction. So is money. As so are inches.
Pause
Do you remember the Great Depression? One day everything was going on all right. Everybody
was pretty wealthy and had plenty to eat. The next day everybody was in poverty. What had
happened? Had the fields disappeared, had the dairy vanished into thin air, had the fish of the
sea ceased to exist, had human beings lost their energy, their skills and their brains? No. But on
the morning after the Depression a man came to work building a house, and the foreman said
to him "Sorry chum you can't work today,. there ain't no inches." He said "What do you mean
there ain't no inches?" "Yeah" he said, "Yeah, we got lumber, we got metal, we even got tape
measures." The foreman said "The trouble with you is you don't understand business. There are
no inches. We have been using too many of them and not enough to go around." Because what
happened in the Great Depression was that money, there was a slump in money. And human
beings are so unbelievably stupid, that they confused money with wealth. And they don't
realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that meters are a measure
of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that get
into unbelievable trouble, in exactly the same way time is nothing but an abstract measure of
motion. And we keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug
ourselves with this. And as we sit and watch the clock, supposing you are working, are you
watching the clock? If you are, what are you waiting for. Time off. Five o'clock. We can go home
and have fun. Yeah, fun. What are you going to do when you get home? Have fun? Or are you
going to watch tv, which is an electronic reproduction of life which doesn't even smell of
anything. And eat a tv dinner which is a kind of a warmed over airline nastiness until you just
get tired and have to go to sleep. You know, the great society. This is our problem, you see. We
are not alive, we are not awake. We are not living in the present. Let's take education. What a
hoax. You get a little child, you see, and you suck it into a trap and you send it to nursery
school. And in nursery school you tell the child "You are getting ready to go on to kindergarten.
And then wow-wee, first grade is coming up, and second grade, and third grade." You are
gradually climbing the ladder towards, towards, going on towards progress. And then when it
gets to end of grade school, you say "high school, now you're really getting going." Wrong. But
otherwise business, you are going out into the world and you get your _________ on and your
diploma.
Second Side
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And then you go to your first sales meeting, and they say "Now get out there and sell this stuff,"
because then you are going on up the ladder in business, and maybe you will get to a good
position. And you sell it and then they up your quota. And then finally about the year 45 you
wake up one morning as Vice President of the firm, and you say to yourself looking in the mirror
"I've arrived. But I feel slightly cheated because I feel just the same as I always felt. Something is
missing. I have no longer a future." "Uh uh" says the insurance salesman, "I have a future for
you. This policy will enable you to retire in comfort at sixty five, and you will be able to look
forward to that." And you are delighted. And you buy the policy and at sixty five you retire
thinking that this is the attainment of the goal of life, except that you have prostate trouble,
false teeth and wrinkle skin. And you are a materialist. You are a phantom, you are an
abstractionist, you are just nowhere, because you never were told, and never realized that
eternity is now. There is no time. What will you do? Can you discover for me the pop of a
champagne cork that popped last night? Can you hand me a copy of tomorrow's Dallas Morning
Herald, whatever it is? It just isn't here. There is no time. This is a fantasy. It is a useful fantasy,
like lines of latitude and longitude. But you are not going to ever tie up a package with the
equator. It is the same as time, it is an abstraction. It is a convenience so that I can arrange to
meet you at the corner of Main and lst, or whatever it is, at 4 o'clock. Great. But let us not be
fooled by it. It is not real. So people who do not live in the present, have absolutely no use for
making plans. Because you see ordinary people who believe in time, and who believe that they
are living for their future, they make plenty of plans. Yeah. But when the plans mature, and
they come off, the people are not there to enjoy them. They are planning something else. And
they are like donkeys running after carrots perpetually that is attached to their own collars. And
so they are never here, they never get there, they are never alive, they are perpetually
frustrated, and therefore they are always thinking. The future is the thing with ______.
Someday it is going to happen. And because it never does, they are frantic to survive. They
want more time, more time please, more time. They are terrified of death because death stops
the future. And so you never got there. You never have it. There is always, somewhere around
the corner. Now please, wake up. I am not saying, you see, that you should be improvident,
that you shouldn't have an insurance policy, that you shouldn't be concerned about how you
are going to send your children to college or whatever other thing may be useful for them. The
point is, there is no point in sending your children to college and providing for their future if you
don't know how to live in the present because all you will do is to teach your children how not
to live in the present, and to keep dragging on for the alleged benefit of their own children who
will drag on in a boring way for the alleged benefit of their children. Everybody is so beautifully
looking after everybody else, that nobody has any fun at all. See we say of a person who is
insane, he is not all here. Or he is not all there. And that is our collective disease. In the
beginning of the regime of communism in Russia, when they had five year plans, and everything
was going to be great at the end of the five year plan, and you got through that and they had
53

another one. As some philosopher said, "You are making all human beings into ________. Now
you know what a ______ is, it is a pillar in the form of a being holding up the next floor. You are
making everybody into _______ for a floor upon which posterity shall dance. But of course they
never get around to it. Posterity also is the _______ holding up another floor. And they hold up
another floor. And they hold up another floor, forever and ever and nobody ever dances. But
you see our philosophy and the philosophy of the communists is exactly the same. In fact we,
our system is their system. And increasingly we become more alike because of this lack of
perception of reality. We are obsessed with time. And so it is always coming. So Mao Tse Tung
can say to all the Chinese, "Let's live a great boring life and everybody wear the same clothes
and work and carry around a little red book so that one day, some day perhaps it will be great."
But we are in exactly the same situation. We are the richest people in the world, and most of
our males go around looking like undertakers. We eat Wonder Bread which is styrofoam
injected with some chemicals that are supposed to be nutritive. We do not even know how to
drink. In other words, living, we live in the abstract, not in the concrete. We work for money,
not for wealth. We look forward to the future, and do not know how to enjoy today. So as a
result of this, we are destroying our environment, we are Los Angelizing the world instead of
civilizing it. And we are turning the air into gas, the water into poison, and tearing the
vegetation off the face of the hills, for what? To print newspapers. In our colleges, we value the
record of what goes on more than what happens. The records in the Registrar's office are kept
in safes under lock and key, but not the books in the Library. The record of what you do is of
course much more important than what you did. We go out to a party and have a picnic and
somebody says "Oh we are having a lovely time, what a pity somebody didn't bring a camera,
so we could record it." People go on tours and they've got these wretched little boxes and
instead of being with the scene, whatever it is, they go click, click, click, click, click_______a
little box so they can get home and show it to their friends and say "See what happened." Of
course I wasn't there, I was just photographing it.
So when the record becomes more important than the event, we are really up the creek with
no paddle. So the most serious need of civilization is to come to now. Think of all the trouble
we would save. Think of how peaceful things would become, we would not be interfering with
everybody. We would not be dedicated to doing everybody else good, like the General who the
other day destroyed a village in Vietnam for its own safety. That is what he said. "Kindly let me
help you or you will drown" said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree. Now you see is
the meaning of eternal life. When Jesus said "Before Abraham was," he didn't say "I was," he
said "I am." And to come to this, to know that you are and there is no time except the present.
And then suddenly you see you attain a sense of reality. And you want always to be looking
ahead for the things that you wanted to happen. You have to find it now. And so really, the aim
of education is to teach people to live in the present, to be all here. As it is, our educational
system is pretty abstract. It neglects the absolutely fundamentals of life, teaching us all to the
54

bureaucrats, bankers clerks, accountants and insurance salesmen; all cerebral. It entirely
neglects our relationships to the material world. There are five fundamental relationships to
the material world: farming, cooking, clothing, housing and lovemaking. And these are grossly
overlooked. And so it was like a little while ago, the Congress of the United States passed a law
making it a grave penalty for anyone to burn the flag. And they did it with great flourishes of
patriotic speeches. Yet those same Congressmen, by acts of commission or omission, are
responsible for burning up what the flag stands for - for the erosion of the natural resources of
this land. Although they say they love their country, they don't. They love their flag. So I think it
is a great time to get back to reality, that is to say, to get back from time to eternity, to the
eternal now, which is what we have, always have had, and indeed always will have. So now I
have monologued at you enough. There will be one minute intermission in case any of you have
to leave. Thereafter I will be most happy to entertain questions from the audience and try to
answer them as best I can.

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56

A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy?

Since at least 1500 B.C. men have, from time to time, held the view that our normal vision of
the world is a hallucinationa dream, a figment of the mind, or, to use the Hindu word which
means both art and illusion, a maya. The implication is that, if this is so, life need never be
taken seriously. It is a fantasy, a play, a drama to be enjoyed. It does not really matter, for one
day (perhaps in the moment of death) the illusion will dissolve, and each one of us will awaken
to discover that he himself is what there is and all that there isthe very root and ground of
the universe, or the ultimate and eternal space in which things and events come and go.
This is not simply an idea which someone "thought up," like science fiction or a philosophical
theory. It is the attempt to express an experience in which consciousness itself, the basic
sensation of being "I," undergoes a remarkable change. We do not know much about these
experiences. They are relatively common, and arise in every part of the world. They occur to
both children and adults. They may last for a few seconds and come once in a lifetime, or they
may happen repeatedly and constitute a permanent change of consciousness. With baffling
impartiality they may descend upon those who never heard of them, as upon those who have
spent years trying to cultivate them by some type of discipline. They have been regarded,
equally, as a disease of consciousness with symptoms everywhere the same, like measles, and
as a vision of higher reality such as comes in moments of scientific or psychological insight. They
may turn people into monsters and megalomaniacs, or transform them into saints and sages.
While there is no sure way of inducing these experiences, a favorable atmosphere may be
created by intense concentration, by fasting, by sensory deprivation, by hyper-oxygenation, by
prolonged emotional stress, by profound relaxation, or by the use of certain drugs.
Experiences of this kind underlie some of the great world religionsHinduism, Buddhism and
Taoism in particular, and, to a much lesser extent, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As
expressed in the doctrines of these religions, they purport to be an account of "the way things
are" and therefore invite comparison with descriptions of the universe and of man given by
physicists and biologists. They contradict common sense so violently and are accompanied with
such a powerful sense of authenticity and reality (more real than reality is a common
description) that men have always wondered whether they are divine revelations or insidious
delusions.
This problem becomes all the more urgent now that the general public has become aware
that experiences of this type are available, with relative ease, through the use of such chemicals
57

as the so-called psychedelic drugsLSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, hashish, and marijuana, to

name only the better known. The reality status of the modes of consciousness induced by these
chemicals becomes, then, a matter of most serious concern for the guardians of our mental
health, for psychiatrists and psychologists, philosophers and ministers, for every scientific
investigator of the nature of consciousness, and, above all, for a large section of the general
public curious and eager to get "the experience" for reasons of all kinds.
A proper study of the question runs, at the very beginning, into two obstacles. The first is that
we know very little indeed about the structure and chemistry of the brain. We do not know
enough of the ways in which it gleans information about the outside world and about itself to
know whether these chemicals help it (as lenses help the eyes) or confuse it. The second is that
the nature and use of these chemicals is surrounded with an immense semantic fog, whose
density is increased by people who ought to know better. I mean psychiatrists.
What we know, positively and scientifically, about psychedelic chemicals is that they bring
about certain alterations of sense perception, of emotional level and tone, of identity feeling, of
the interpretation of sense data, and of the sensations of time and space. The nature of these
alterations depends on three variables: the chemical itself (type and dosage), the psychophysiological state of the subject, and the social and aesthetic context of the experiment. Their
physiological side effects are minimal, though there are conditions (e.g., disease of the liver) in
which some of them may be harmful. They are not physiologically habit-forming in the same
way as alcohol and tobacco, though some individuals may come to depend upon them for other
(i.e., "neurotic") reasons. Their results are not easily predictable since they depend so largely
upon such imponderables as the setting, and the attitudes and expectations of both the
supervisor and the subject. The (enormous) scientific literature on the subject indicates that a
majority of people have pleasant reactions, a largish minority have unpleasant but instructive
and helpful reactions, while a very small minority have psychotic reactions lasting from hours to
months. It has never been definitely established that they have led directly to a suicide. (I am
referring specifically here to LSD-25, mescaline, the mushroom derivative psilocybin, and the
various forms of cannabis, such as hashish and marijuana.)
Thus what we know for certain implies that these chemicals cannot be used without caution.
But this applies equally to antibiotics, whiskey, household ammonia, the automobile, the
kitchen knife, electricity, and matches. No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite
current American superstitions to the contraryas that passing laws can prevent people from
being immoral and that technological power can be made foolproof. The question is therefore
whether the risks involved in using these chemicals are worthwhile, and it seems to me that
what is worthwhile should be judged not only in terms of useful known edge or therapeutic
effect, but also in terms of simple pleasure. (I have heard addiction to music described in just
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the same vocabulary as addiction to drugs.) If it turns out that psychedelics offer valid ways of
exploring man's "inner world," the hidden ways of the mind and brain, we should surely admit
that new knowledge of this inmost frontier may be worth quite serious risks. Psychoses and
compulsive delusions are, after all, no more dangerous than the Indians and the mountain
ranges that stood in the way of the first settlers of the American West.
Psychiatrists often wonder why colleagues in other branches of medicine and specialists in
other fields of science do not take them quite seriously. A typical reason may be found in their
haste to define the nature and effects of these chemicals in terms which are simply prejudicial,
and which boil down to nothing more than gobbledygook with an authoritative rumble. For
example, the chemicals in question are commonly classified as "hallucinogenics" or
"psychotomimetics." The first word means that they generate hallucinations, and the second
that their effects resemble, or mimic, certain forms of psychosis or insanity. Only rarely do they
give the impression of events in the external world which are not actually happening (i.e.,
hallucinations) and the ten-year-old notion that they induce "model psychoses" such as
temporary schizophrenia has long been abandoned by those who are still in active research.
But even if these findings were to be contested, the words "hallucination" and "psychosis" are
loaded: they designate bad states of mind, whereas a clean scientific language should say only
that these chemicals induce different and unusual states of mind.
It is almost a standard joke that psychiatry has pejorative or "put-down" words for every
human emotion, as "euphoric" for happy, "fixated" for interested, and "compulsive" for
determined. The discussion of psychedelic chemicals, both in the scientific literature and the
public press, is thoroughly swamped with question-begging language of this kind in articles that
purport to be impartial and authoritative. Right from the start the very word "drug," when used
in this connection, evokes the socially reprehensible image of people who are "drugged" or
"doped"glassy-eyed, staggering, or recumbent wrecks of humanity, withdrawn from reality
into a diabolical paradise of bizarre or lascivious dreams. The image of the Fu Manchu opium
den, with screaming meemies at the end of the line.
Thus it is most common to find the action of psychedelics called "toxic" (i.e., poisonous), and
the sensory and emotional changes induced referred to as "distortions," "delusive
mechanisms," "dissociations," and "regressions," or as "loss of ego structure" and "abnormal
perception of body image." This is the language of pathology. Used without explicit
qualification, it implies that a consciousness so changed is sick. Likewise, whenin the context
of a scientific articlethe writer reports, "Subjects experienced religious exaltation, and some
described sensations of being one with God," and leaves it at that, the implication is plainly that
they went crazy. For in our own culture, to feel that you are God is insanity almost by definition.
But, in Hindu culture, when someone says, "I have just found out that I am God," they say,
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"Congratulations! You at last got the point." Obviously, the word "God" does not mean the
same thing in both cultures. Yet psychiatrists toss off such utterly damning remarks without
scruple, and feel free to use their diagnostic jargon of mental pathology for states of
consciousness which many of them have never even bothered to experience. For they expect to
get accurate information about these states from subjects untrained in scientific description,
fearing that if they themselves entered into any new mode of consciousness it would impair
their scientific objectivity. This is pure scholasticism, as when the theologians said to Galileo,
"We will not look through your telescope because we already know how the universe is
ordered. If your telescope were to show us anything different, it would be an instrument of the
devil."
Similarly, so many practitioners of the inexact sciences (e.g., psychology, anthropology,
sociology) let it be known most clearly that they already know what reality is, and therefore
what sanity is. For these poor drudges reality is the world of non-party: it is the reduction of the
physical universe to the most banal and desiccated terms conceivable, in accordance with the
great Western myth that all nature outside the human skin is a stupid and unfeeling
mechanism. There is a sort of "official psychiatry" of the army, state mental hospital, and of
what, in California, they call "correctional facility" (i.e., prison), which defends this
impoverished reality with a strange passion.
To come, then, to any effective evaluation of these chemicals and the changed states of
consciousness and perception which they induce, we must begin with a highly detailed and
accurate description of what they do, both from the standpoint of the subject and of the
neutral observer, despite the fact that in experiments of this kind it becomes startlingly obvious
that the observer cannot be neutral, and that the posture of "objectivity" is itself one of the
determinants of the outcome. As the physicist well knows, to observe a process is to change it.
But the importance of careful description is that it may help us to understand the kind or level
of reality upon which these changes in consciousness are taking place.
For undoubtedly they are happening. The dancing, kaleidoscopic arabesques which appear
before closed eyes are surely an observation of some reality, though not, perhaps, in the
physical world outside the skin. But are they rearranged memories? Structures in the nervous
system? Archetypes of the collective unconscious? Electronic patterns such as often dance on
the TV screen? What, too, are the fern-like structures which are so often seenthe infinitude
of branches upon branches upon branches, or analogous shapes? Are these a glimpse of some
kind of analytical process in the brain, similar to the wiring patterns in a computer? We really
have no idea, but the more carefully observers can record verbal descriptions and visual
pictures of these phenomena, the more likely that neurologists or physicists or even
mathematicians will turn up the physical processes to which they correspond. The point is that
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these visions are not mere imagination, as if there had ever been anything mere about
imagination The human mind does not just perversely invent utterly useless images out of
nowhere at all. Every image tells us something about the mind or the brain or the organism in
which it is found.
The effects of the psychedelics vary so much from person to person and from situation to
situation that it is well nigh impossible to say with any exactitude that they create certain
particular and invariable changes of consciousness. I would not go so far as to say that the
chemical effects are simply featureless, providing no more than a vivid mirror to reflect the
fantasies and unconscious dispositions of the individuals involved. For there are certain types of
change which are usual enough to be considered characteristic of psychedelics: the sense of
slowed or arrested time, and the alteration of "ego boundary"that is, of the sensation of
one's own identity.
The feeling that time has relaxed its pace may, to some extent, be the result of having set
aside the better part of a day just to observe one's own consciousness, and to watch for
interesting changes in one's perception of such ordinary things as reflected sunlight on the
floor, the grain in wood, the texture of linen, or the sound of voices across the street. My own
experience has never been of a distortion of these perceptions, as in looking at oneself in a
concave mirror. It is rather that every perception becomesto use a metaphormore
resonant. The chemical seems to provide consciousness with a sounding box, or its equivalent,
for all the senses, so that sight, touch, taste, smell, and imagination are intensified like the voice
of someone singing in the bathtub.
The change of ego boundary sometimes begins from this very resonance of the senses. The
intensification and "deepening" of color, sound and texture lends them a peculiar transparency.
One seems to be aware of them more than ever as vibration, electronic and luminous. As this
feeling develops it appears that these vibrations are continuous with one's own consciousness
and that the external world is in some odd way inside the mindbrain. It appears, too, with
overwhelming obviousness, that the inside and the outside do not exclude one another and are
not actually separate. They go together; they imply one another, like front and back, in such a
way that they become polarized. As, therefore, the poles of a magnet are the extremities of a
single body, it appears that the inside and the outside, the subject and the object, the self and
the world, the voluntary and the involuntary, are the poles of a single process which is my real
and hitherto unknown self. This new self has no location. It is not something like a traditional
soul, using the body as a temporary house. To ask where it is, is like asking where the universe
is. Things in space have a where, but the thing that space is in doesn't need to be anywhere. It
is simply what there is, just plain basic isness!

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How easily, then, an unsophisticated person might exclaim, "I have just discovered that I am
God!" Yet if, during such an experience, one retains any critical faculties at all, it will be clear
that anyone else in the same state of consciousness will also be God. It will be clear, too, that
the "God" in question is not the God of popular theology, the Master Technician who controls,
creates, and understands everything in the universe. Were it so, a person in this state should be
able to give correct answers to all questions of fact. He would know the exact height of Mount
Whitney in millimeters. On the other hand, this awareness of a deeper and universal self would
correspond exactly with that other type of God which mystics have called the "divine ground"
of the universe, a sort of intelligent and superconscious space containing the whole cosmos as a
mirror contains images... though the analogy fails in so far as it suggests something immense:
we cannot picture sizelessness.
Anyone moving into completely unfamiliar territory may at first misunderstand and
misinterpret what he sees, as is so evident from the first impressions of visitors to foreign lands
where patterns of culture differ radically from their own. When Europeans depicted their first
impressions of China, they made the roofs of houses exaggeratedly curly and people's eyes
slanted at least 45 degrees from the horizontal. Contrariwise, the Japanese saw all Europeans
as red-haired, sunken-eyed goblins with immensely long noses. But the unfamiliarities of
foreign cultures are nothing to those of one's own inner workings. What is there in the
experience of clear blue sky to suggest the structure of the optical nerves? Comparably, what is
there in the sound of a human voice on the radio to suggest the formations of tubes and
transistors? I raise this question because it is obvious that any chemically induced alteration of
the nervous system must draw the attention of that system to itself. I am not normally aware
that the sensation of blue sky is a state of the eyes and brain, but if I see wandering spots that
are neither birds nor flying saucers, I know that these are an abnormality within the optical
system itself. In other words, I am enabled, by virtue of this abnormality, to become conscious
of one of the instruments of consciousness. But this is most unfamiliar territory.
Ordinarily, we remain quite unaware of the fact that the whole field of vision with its vast
multiplicity of colors and shapes is a state of affairs inside our heads. Only eyes within a nervous
system within a whole biological organism can translate the particles and/or waves of the
physical world into light, color, and form, just as only the skin of a drum can make a moving
hand go "Boom!" Psychedelics induce subtle alterations of perception which make the nervous
system aware of itself, and the individual suddenly and unaccustomedly becomes conscious of
the external world as a state of his own body. He may even go so far as to feel a confusion
between what other people and things are doing, on the one hand, and his own volition, on the
other. The particular feeling, or "cue," attached to thoughts and actions normally understood to
be voluntary may then be attached to what is ordinarily classified as involuntary. (Similarly, in

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deja vu or "hasn't-this-happened-before?" experiences, perceptions of the immediate here and

now come through with the cue or signal usually attached to memories.)
Under such circumstances the naive observer might well take these impressions so literally as
to feel that the universe and his own body are in fact one and the same, that he is willing
everything that happens, and that he is indeed the God of populartheology. If that were all, the
psychedelics might certainly be dismissed as hallucinogens. We might conclude that they
merely confuse the "wiring" of the nervous system in such a way that volition or "I-am-doingthis" signals get mixed up with messages about the external world.
Yet the problem cannot be set aside so simply. Let us suppose that a biologist wants to make
a very detailed and accurate description of the behavior of some particular organism, perhaps
of a sea bird feeding on the beach. He will be unable to describe the behavior of the bird
without also describing the behavior of the water, of the sandworms or shellfish which the bird
is eating, of seasonal changes of tide, temperature, and weather, all of which go together with
the behavior of the bird. He cannot describe the behavior of the organism without also
describing the behavior of its environment. We used to attribute this to the fact that organisms
are always reacting to things that happen in their environments, and are even determined by
their environments in all that they do. But this is to speak as if things were a collection of
perfectly separate billiard balls banging against one another. Today, however, the scientist
tends more and more to speak of the behavior of the organism and the behavior of the
environment as the behavior of a single "field," somewhat awkwardly named the
"organism/environment." Instead of talking about actions and reactions between different
things and events, he prefers to speak of transactions. In the transaction of buying and selling,
there is no selling unless there is simultaneously buying, and vice versa. The relation of
organism to environment is also considered a transaction, because it has been found that living
creatures exist only in a balanced relationship to one another. The present natural state of this
planet "goes with" the existence of human beings, just as buying goes with selling. In any
radically different environment, man could survive only by becoming a different type of being.
The implications of this organism/environment relationship are somewhat startling, for what
is really being said is this: The entity we are describing is not an organism in an environment; it
is a unified field or process, because it is more simple and more convenient to think of what the
organism does and what the environment does as a single "behavior." Now substitute for
"entity we are describing" the idea of the self. I myself am not just what is bounded by my skin.
I myself (the organism) am what my whole environmental field (the universe) is doing. It is,
then, simply a convention, a fashion, an arbitrary social institution, to confine the self to some
center of decision and energy located within this bag of skin. This is no more than the rule of a
particular social game of cops and robbers, that is, of who shall we praise and reward, and who
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shall we blame and punish? To play this game, we pretend that the origin of actions is
something inside each human skin. But only force of long ingrained habit makes it hard to
realize that we could define and actually feel ourselves to be the total pattern of the cosmos as
focussed or expressed here. This would be a sense of our identity consistent with the scientific
description of man and other organisms. It would involve, too, the sensation that the external
world is continuous with and one with our own bodiesa sensation very seriously needed in a
civilization where men are destroying their environment by misapplied technology. This is the
technology of man's conquest of nature, as if the external world were his enemy and not the
very matrix in which he is brought forth and sustained. This is the technology of the dust bowls,
of polluted air, poisoned streams, chemical chickens, pseudo-vegetables, foam-rubber bread,
and the total Los Angelization of man.
Yet how is this long-ingrained sense of insular identity to be overcome? How is twentiethcentury man to gain a feeling of his existence consistent with twentieth-century knowledge?
We need very urgently to know that we are not strangers and aliens in the physical universe.
We were not dropped here by divine whim or mechanical fluke out of some other universe
altogether. We did not arrive, like birds on barren branches; we grew out of this world, like
leaves and fruit. Our universe "humans" just as a rosebush "flowers." We are living in a world
where men all over the planet are linked by an immense network of communications, and
where science has made us theoretically aware of our interdependence with the entire domain
of organic and inorganic nature. But our ego-feeling, our style of personal identity, is more
appropriate to men living in fortified castles.
There seems to me a strong possibility that the psychedelics (as a medicine rather than a
diet) may help us to "trigger" a new sense of identity, providing the initial boost to get us out of
the habit of restricting "I" to a vague center within the skin. That they make us aware that our
whole knowledge of the external world is a state of our own bodies is not a merely technical
and trivial discovery. It is the obverse of the fact that our own bodies are functions, or
behaviors, of the whole external world. Thisat firstweird and mystical sensation of "unity
with the cosmos" has been objectively verified. The mystic's subjective experience of his
identity with "the All" is the scientist's objective description of ecological relationship, of the
organism/environment as a unified field.
Our general failure (over the past three thousand years of human history) to notice the
inseparability of things, and to be aware of our own basic unity with the external world, is the
result of specializing in a particular kind of consciousness. For we have very largely based
culture and civilization on concentrated attention, on using the mind as a spotlight rather than
a floodlight, and by this means analyzing the world into separate bits. Concentrated attention is
drummed into us in schools; it is essential to the three R's; it is the foundation of all careful
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thought and detailed description, all high artistic technique and intellectual discipline. But the
price we pay for this vision of the world in vivid detail, bit by bit, is that we lose sight of the
relationships and unities between the bits. Furthermore, a form of attention which looks at the
world bit by bit doesn't have time to examine all possible bits; it has to be programmed (or
prejudiced) to look only at significant bits, at things and events which are relevant to certain
preselected endssurvival, social or financial advancement, and other fixed goals which
exclude the possibility of being open to surprises, and to those delights which are extra special
because they come without being sought.
In my own experience, which is shared by very many others, the psychedelics expand
attention. They make the spotlight of consciousness a floodlight which not only exposes
ignored relationships and unities but also brings to light unsuspected detailsdetails normally
ignored because of their lack of significance, or their irrelevance to some prejudice of what
ought to be. (For example, the tiniest hairs on people's faces and blotchy variations of skin
color, not really supposed to be there, become marvelously visible.) There is thus good reason
to believe that the psychedelics are the opposite of hallucinogens insofar as they decrease the
selectivity of the senses and expose consciousness to events beyond those that are supposed to
deserve notice.
Time after time, this unprogrammed mode of attention, looking at things without looking for
things, reveals the unbelievable beauty of the everyday world. Under the influence of
programmed attention, our vision of the world tends to be somewhat dusty and drab. This is
for the same reason that staring at things makes them blurred, and that trying to get the
utmost out of a particular pleasure makes it something of a disappointment. Intense beauty
and intense pleasure are always gratuitous, and are revealed only to senses that are not
seeking and straining. For our nerves are not muscles; to push them is to reduce their
efficiency.
What, finally, of the strong impression delivered both by the psychedelics and by many forms
of mystical experience that the world is in some way an illusion? A difficulty here is that the
word "illusion" is currently used pejoratively, as the negative of everything real, serious,
important, valuable, and worthwhile. Is this because moralists and metaphysicians are apt to be
personality types lacking the light touch? Illusion is related etymologically to the Latin ludere, to
play, and thus is distinguished from reality as the drama is distinguished from "real life." In
Hindu philosophy, the world is seen as a drama in which all the partseach person, animal,
flower, stone, and starare roles or masks of the one supreme Self, which plays the lila or
game of hide and seek with itself for ever and ever, dismembering itself as the Many and
remembering itself as the One through endless cycles of time, in the spirit of a child tossing
stones into a pond through a long afternoon in summer. The sudden awakening of the mystical
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experience is therefore the one Self remembering itself as the real foundation of the seemingly
individual and separate organism.
Thus the Hindu maya, or world illusion, is not necessarily something bad. Maya is a complex
word signifying the art, skill, dexterity, and cunning of the supreme Self in the exercise of its
playful, magical, and creative power. The power of an actor so superb that he is taken in by his
own performance. The Godhead amazing itself, getting lost in a maze.
Classical illustrations of maya include the apparently continuous circle of fire made by a
whirling torch, and of the continuity of time and moving events by the whirring succession of
Asana, or atomic instants. Physicists use similar metaphors in trying to explain how vibrating
wavicles produce the illusion of solid material. The impenetrability of granite, they say, is
something like the apparently solid disk made by the blades of an electric fan: it is an intensely
rapid motion of the same minute orbits of light that constitute our fingers. Physics and optics
have also much to say about the fact that all reality, all existence is a matter of relationship and
transaction. Consider the formula where a is the sun, b is moisture in the atmosphere, and c is
an observer, all three being at the same time in a certain angular relationship. Deduct any one
term, a, b or c, or arrange them in positions outside the correct angular relationship, and the
phenomenon "rainbow" will not exist. In other words, the actual existence of rainbows depends
as much upon creatures with eyes as it depends upon the sun and moisture in the atmosphere.
Common sense accepts this in respect to diaphanous things like rainbows which back off into
the distance when we try to reach them. But it has great difficulty in accepting the fact that
chunky things like apartment buildings and basic things like time and space exist in just the
same wayonly in relation to certain structures known as organisms with nervous systems.
Our difficulty in accepting for ourselves so important a part in the actual creation or
manifestation of the world comes, of course, from this thorough habituation to the feeling that
we are strangers in the universethat human consciousness is a fluke of nature, that the world
is an external object which we confront, that its immense size reduces us to pitiful
unimportance, or that geological and astronomical structures are somehow more real (hard
and solid?) than organisms. But these are actually mythological images of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuriesideas which, for a while, seemed extremely plausible, mostly for the
reason that they appeared to be hard-boiled, down to earth and tough-minded, a currently
fashionable posture for the scientist. Despite the lag between advanced scientific ideas and the
common sense of even the educated public, the mythology of man as a hapless fluke trapped in
a mindless mechanism is breaking down. The end of this century may find us, at last, thoroughly
at home in our own world, swimming in the ocean of relativity as joyously as dolphins in the
water.

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67

The Complete Alan Watts Bibliography

http://www.alanwatts.net/watts.htm#books

Publications

1936 The Spirit of Zen: A way of life, work and art in the Far East, paperback 1969. ISBN 0-80213056-9 A preview from Google Books
1937 The Legacy of Asia and Western Man

1940 The Meaning of Happiness, paperback, 1970. ISBN 0-06-080178-6

1944 Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius (translation from Greek of Pseudo-Dionysius, available
online)
1947 Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, Vintage, 1972, ISBN 0-39471761-9
1950 Easter: Its Story and Meaning

1950 The Supreme Identity, Vintage, 1972. ISBN 0-394-71835-6

1951 The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage, 1968. ISBN 0-394-70468-1

1953 Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Beacon Press, 1971. ISBN 0-8070-1375-7

1957 The Way of Zen, Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1999. ISBN 0-375-70510-4

1958 Nature, Man, and Woman, Vintage reissue, 1991. ISBN 0-679-73233-0

1959 Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen, paperback, ASIN B000F2RQL4

1960 This Is IT and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Vintage reprint, 1973. ISBN 0394-71904-2
1961 Psychotherapy East and West, Vintage ed. 1975, ISBN 0-394-71609-4 An excerpt

1962 The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

1963 The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

1964 Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship, Vintage, 1973. ISBN 0-394-71923-9

1966 The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Vintage reissue, 1989. ISBN 0-67972300-5 An excerpt
1967 Nonsense. ISBN 0-525-47463-3. (A spiritual application of literary nonsense).

1970 Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality, Vintage ed. 1971. ISBN 0-394-716655
1971 The Temple of Konarak: Erotic Spirituality (Thames and Hudson, London). Photographs by Eliot
Elisofon; text by Alan Watts. Published as Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak by Macmillan, NY
1972 In My Own Way: An Autobiography 19151965, Vintage, 1973. ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview
from Google Books
1973 Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal, Vintage, 1974. ISBN 0-394-719999

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Posthumous publications

1974 The Essence of Alan Watts, ed. Mary Jane Watts, Celestial Arts

1975 Tao: The Watercourse Way, with Al Chung-liang Huang, Pantheon

1976 Essential Alan Watts, ed. Mark Watts,

1978 Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life

1979 Om: Creative Meditations, ed. Mark Watts

1982 Play to Live, ed. Mark Watts

1983 Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self, ed. Mark Watts

1985 Out of the Trap, ed. Mark Watts

1986 Diamond Web, ed. Mark Watts

1987 The Early Writings of Alan Watts, ed. John Snelling, Dennis T. Sibley, and Mark Watts

1990 The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of the Early Writings of Alan Watts, ed. John Snelling and
Mark Watts
1994 Talking Zen, ed. Mark Watts

1995 Become What You Are, Shambhala, expanded ed. 2003. ISBN 1-57062-940-4

1995 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion, ed. Mark Watts A preview from Google Books

1995 The Philosophies of Asia, ed. Mark Watts

1995 The Tao of Philosophy, ed. Mark Watts, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing, 1999. ISBN 08048-3204-8
1996 Myth and Religion, ed. Mark Watts

1997 Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking, ed. Mark Watts

1997 Zen and the Beat Way, ed. Mark Watts

1998 Culture of Counterculture, ed. Mark Watts

1999 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion, ed. Mark Watts, edited transcripts, Tuttle
Publishing. ISBN 0-8048-3203-X

2000 What Is Zen?, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library. ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google
Books

2000 What Is Tao?, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library. ISBN 1-57731-168-X

2000 Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library. ISBN 1-57731214-7
2000 Eastern Wisdom, ed. Mark Watts, MJF Books. ISBN 1-56731-491-0, three books in one
volume: What is Zen?, What is Tao?, and An Introduction to Meditation (Still the Mind). Assembled
from transcriptions of audio tape recordings made by his son Mark, of lectures and seminars given by
Alan Watts during the last decade of his life.
2002 Zen, the Supreme Experience: The Newly Discovered Scripts, ed. Mark Watts, Vega

2006 Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks, 1960-1969, New World Library

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Audio and video works, essays

Including recordings of lectures at major universities and multi-session seminars.

???? Myth and Religion (here)

1960 Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, television series, Season 1 (1959) and Season 2 (1960)

1960 Essential Lectures

1960 Nature of Consciousness (here)

1960 The Value of Psychotic Experience

1960 The World As Emptiness

1960 From Time to Eternity

1960 Lecture On Zen

1960 The Cross of Cards

1960 Taoism

1962 This Is IT

1968 Psychedelics & Religious Experience, in California Law Review (here)

1969 Why Not Now: The Art of Meditation

1971 A Conversation With Myself (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4)

1972 The Art of Contemplation, Village Press

1972 The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts Journal, vol. 2, nr 1

1994 Zen: The Best of Alan Watts (VHS)

2005 Do You Do It, or Does It Do You?: How to let the universe meditate you (CD)

2007 Zen Meditations with Alan Watts, DVD (here)

Biographical publications

1976 Alan Watts: The Rise and Decline of the Ordained Shaman of the Counterculture, by David
Stuart (pseudonym for Edwin Palmer Hoyt, Jr.), Chilton Book Co, PA
1986 Genuine Fake: a Biography of Alan Watts, by Monica Furlong, published by Heinemann
(published by Houghton Mifflin as Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts)

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Many thanks to:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/DivineMoments/

http://alanwatts.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheKineticTypography

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