(with Philip D. Ungerer)
UNGERER: What sorts of things are you thinking about now in comparison to the days of The Spirit of Zen?
WATTS: Well, I’m fundamentally interested today in the problems of human ecology, the double situation of our technological development on the one hand and our sense of human identity on the other. Because our technology in the hands of a man or being who feels alienated from his environment is an extremely dangerous thing. We are actively fouling our own nests at the moment, using technology to destroy and pollute the planet. I feel the reason we are doing that is because we have a hallucinatory sense of identity. Man experiencing himself as a skin-encapsulated ego is a completely false feeling. It’s against the facts of biology and ecology. I’m interested in talking in that sort of language because the scientific and academic community, as well as the political one, cannot understand the language of mysticism.
UNGERER: Are you saying that this is the first time that man cannot identify the problem? He knows the symbols.
WATTS: Yes. His problems have become all too real. Therefore, you get to the point where the man who regards himself as extremely hard-nosed and practical is forced by the logic of his condition to face up to the mystical.
UNGERER: How is it more real today than, say, the things that confronted the individual in the Middle Ages?
WATTS: Simply because technology has amplified everything we do. It’s like turning up the volume on the radio. So, the things we think we want and our strategy for getting them—here’s a situation which, in other words, has simply been turned up. So we see it so devastatingly clearly that it simply cannot be dodged. There’s no escape anymore. You can’t get away from civilization anymore. There are no far-off frontiers. People think about getting out into space, but more and more one sees there is no escape. So you have to turn around and face the fundamental questions: Who am I and what do I want? Everyone has to face this because there is nowhere else to go.
UNGERER: What sorts of things are you examining within this context?
WATTS: A number of things. The philosophy of war, for example. That’s a nitty-gritty question.
UNGERER: What can we do to further our self-knowledge on some of these things?
WATTS: It’s a matter of consistently thinking through your feelings. In other words, I was asked by the Air Force weapons research center in New Mexico a few years ago to be on a panel to discuss the question of what is your basis for personal morality. This was started by the chaplains because none of the senior officers indicated any religious preference. Apparently, this disturbed the chaplains. So they thought they’d better expose these senior officers to some sort of religious thinking. They had an Episcopalian, Jesuit, etc. I said to these people that my basis for personal morality, and I’ll tell you quite frankly because you people are supposed to be realistic people, my basis is that I am out for me. But I’m not going to be crude about it. I’m not going to trouble people. I’m going to make a pretense that I’m very nice and I’m all for them and that I love everybody and I’m ready to cooperate. But, I told them, I have a couple of problems. The two problems are, first of all, what do I want? The more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t know. There are two situations in which you don’t know what you want. The first is one in which you really haven’t thought about it at all. You think you want the things that Madison Avenue tells you you ought to want. The second situation is where you’ve been through all that. You’ve thought out what other things go with all the things you say you want and then you realize you cannot relate yourself to the world in the position of saying I want certain things out of this world because there are no things in this world. There are no separate things. Everything goes with everything else. Then you ask the question, you love yourself, you say, but who are you? And you find that you cannot ever find a separate definable entity that can be called you.
UNGERER: You are with the world?
WATTS: You are with it. You’re a symptom of the world. Fundamentally, you are the universe, as the universe is centered at a particular place one calls here and now. The universe centers itself at every center. It’s like on the surface of a sphere, every point on the surface can be regarded as the center of that surface. In the same way, the universe is an energy system centered wherever there is a center. The human organism is a center. So you discover that your whole notion of yourself as an ego inhabiting a bag of skin is an illusion or a social institution actually of a high civilization which has defined people in that way. People are hoaxed into believing that a social institution is a physical reality. So we get this situation of people actually feeling themselves in a sensory way of being this ego inside the bag of skin. They do not realize that this is simply brain washing imposed upon them in childhood.
UNGERER: Given this state of affairs, what can man do about it?
WATTS: The question is the trouble. Because what can I do about it simply aggravates the situation of thinking in terms of a separate ego. So we’ve got a situation today when everybody feels powerless. We feel that things are out of control, that civilization is much too complicated, that nobody understands it. That even the President of the United States doesn’t know what he’s doing—and indeed he doesn’t. But the meaning of that situation is that we feel out of control because the individual we think ourselves to be is unreal. Of course you can’t control everything as an ego because you don’t exist as an ego. You exist as the total organism-environment-energy field that’s you. We’ve got models of the world that are hopelessly out of date. The Christian-Jewish model of the world is political. It’s the king. The God-King who is in charge of everything and rules it by spiritual violence. And that’s a totally obsolete model in a universe which is organic or at least quantum mechanics as distinguished from Newton’s mechanics. That’s why we are feeling our powerlessness. So to ask the question “what can we do about it?” is to ask the wrong question.
UNGERER: I remember one time you talking about the cork in the water. Isn’t what you’re saying now quite different from that?
WATTS: Yes. If you think of yourself as a cork in the water, that implies that you are completely passive, that you are a victim of circumstances and are moved around by your environment like a puppet. But that’s simply the other pole of the idea that you are separate from your environment and that you should dominate it. Both are based on the same false premise that you are separate from your environment. You’re only a puppet so long as you define yourself that way. But when you realize that what you are truly is that you are your whole physical organism, and that includes your brain and nervous system and all the rest—And the human brain is far more intelligent than any human ego because it is an organized system which we cannot yet describe in language yet—it is far too complicated.
UNGERER: How so the ego?
WATTS: The ego is merely a social institution. It’s a way of defining the mask, what role you play. But the brain, which is in a way what you are to begin with, organically, has as yet escaped full description. And because, therefore, it has a higher order of complexity than the most complex language we can use to describe it, it is more intelligent. So what we’ve got to do, as we say, is use your head. And that doesn’t mean think. It means use your nervous system, which is to say we have to relearn being spontaneous. A person only thinks when he doesn’t trust himself.
UNGERER: You’ve said, though, that when one is confronted by the command “Be You,” one finds it impossible. I see a departure in what you’re saying now.
WATTS: Yes, but the danger is with people who think they are going to be spontaneous, that they imitate their preconception of spontaneous behavior. We think that our culture is defined as nonspontaneous so we think spontaneous behavior must be the opposite of the way we normally behave. When you get an encounter group, for example, people say they are going to take off their social masks. Immediately, they start being hostile to each other because they think that’s more real. It isn’t necessarily. We see it only as too alternatives. We have to learn a new dimension: What do you really feel like? And to do that you have to stop categorizing, stop thinking. You have to be quiet. You have to look for you, whatever that is. It’s possible.
UNGERER: We’re trapped in words here, obviously.
WATTS: Of course, but the point is that we are completely spontaneous in growing hair, breathing, all that’s going on all the time. It’s highly intelligent, but it’s unpremeditated.
UNGERER: We really are there already?
WATTS: Yes, it’s a question of realization.
UNGERER: What, by the way, do you think of the approaches in psychiatry today?
WATTS: The whole domain of psychiatry is very exciting because in some ways it’s sharply divided between custodial psychiatry and adventurous psychiatry. Custodial psychiatry is a terrifying priesthood which is perpetrating in contemporary terms everything that was done by the Spanish Inquisition. In 1600, a person who had deviant religious opinions was considered an exceptionally dangerous person. Because he would, as a result of his unbelief, be damned eternally. And the people who said that had the same kind of authority in their culture as the professor of pathology at the University of Chicago. So if the professor of pathology says somebody has cancer there’s no question about it. He has cancer. If, in 1600, the professor of theology said someone had heresy, it too was a serious problem. And they were asking out of a sense of mercy; that this person had to be cured because he is going to suffer for all eternity. And anybody he infects is likewise going to suffer. So we are first going to reason with him and if he won’t listen to reason, we are going to put pressure on him and finally, we are going to burn him. Because just at the last moment, that might get a repentance out of him. These people were acting in a fully responsible sense that they were after mental health for the good of everybody. Today, religion is not important. In a sense, all religion is phony. People really don’t believe in it, but they think they ought to. The moment you get sermons on the subject of how one ought to have faith, religion is dead. Because the assumptions of religion have not become unquestioned common sense. So what has taken the place of heresy is not deviant opinion about religion, but a deviant state of consciousness. So a schizophrenic is a heretic because he is experiencing the world in an irregular way. So we can’t stand it. When we get this behavior, we say that fellow is all mixed up because he doesn’t go along with our feeling of what isn’t mixed up, what is straight conduct. So we put them in an institution where they are depersonalized. They become nonpeople. And then everything done to these people in the institution helps to confirm that. In order to get attention, he has to become violent. But that defines him as sick. So the whole thing is a vicious circle. They subject these people to torture—shock treatment, deprivation of all civil rights. You have the inquisition all over again.
UNGERER: And the adventuresome kind?
WATTS: A great many people in psychotherapy realize that’s not the answer. They may quarrel with the whole model of mental illness as being an illness at all. The work of a psychiatrist, many of these people think, is not to cure sick people, but to cure normal people. Get rid of the normal hallucinations that are fouling up the whole of human society. You can call a number in Chicago, for example. It’s called “Let Freedom Ring.” You get a taped spiel against sensitivity training, encounter groups, all these things, equating them to Chinese Communist techniques of self-criticism, where everybody gets themselves into a group and reduces themselves to a common denominator. These Bircher people haven’t the faintest idea of the difference of that on the one hand and on the other hand a group that has nothing to do with self-criticism at all. It’s self-realization. You can only have self-criticism in relation to some preconceived standard of how you ought to be. Here, a truly operating encounter group is one where you don’t know where you are going. No preconceived idea of what you ought to be.
UNGERER: Do you find this perhaps the most hopeful technique?
WATTS: That’s rather the wrong question, again. The only truly hopeful thing for the future is people who know how to live in the present. The schizophrenic is somebody who feels that there is something wrong, but doesn’t know what it is. Beyond schizophrenia is the same sort of person who is enlightened, like a Buddha, and he knows what’s the matter, he knows how to negotiate with society. The schizophrenic doesn’t know how to negotiate with society because he cannot live both on his level of consciousness and pretend to live on the level of consciousness of ordinary people.
UNGERER: In a sense they are both wearing masks.
WATTS: Sure, but in the latter case you’ve got a conscious mask instead of an unconscious one. You know what you’re doing. I said earlier that the only people who have a hopeful future are those who can live in the present. Because plans are only useful to people who know how to live in the present. Because if your plans materialize, that materializing of those plans can be useful only if you can enjoy them. If, when plans mature, you always are making other plans, you never get there. So now, we should realize there is no place to be except the present. It’s even nonsense to talk about exercises to live in the present because you can’t do anything else. So we have to see that’s the situation. In the same way it’s not a question of how do I overcome my egocentricity. You are not an ego in a real sense. So it’s a matter of simply seeing what is already is the case. So, in this sense, everything I’m trying to do is not to be understood in the context of preaching. Of saying you should. I’m only interested in what’s happening. If one can show to people in government, in terms of, say, military strategy, that what is happening is in flat contradiction to what they say they want, we say to them you are not immoral, you are simply stupid. Because you don’t know what you want and what you think you want you aren’t getting. Take the war in Viet Nam. It would be a perfectly understandable war if we were over there to capture the territory and carry off all those beautiful girls and bring them back to the United States and screw them. Because if that were our intention, it would be perfectly understandable, human and merciful, for we’d be careful to preserve the territory and keep the girls in good shape. As it is, we are fighting for a pure abstraction. We are fighting an ideology called Communism in the name of another ideology called Free Enterprise, neither of which actually exist in reality. But because we are fighting for an ideology, not anything real, we are absolutely ruthless. There can be no agreement, no compromise because we are just as hung up on our ideology as they are on theirs. Until we get away from these ideologies and go back to being ordinary, scurrilous human beings, we’ll never understand each other.
UNGERER: I’d like to get you back to therapy for a moment. Could you elaborate a bit on your feelings about the encounter approach?
WATTS: I think on the whole this sort is better than the couch approach, the psychoanalysis ritual because it’s focused on the here and now. Psychoanalysis has always considered that what you are today is the result of your past and, therefore, you have to go back into the past. That’s like saying the wake drives the ship. What I think is developing, and what I think many therapists understand today, is that you’re not the consequence of an abstract past, but that right now you are creating your problems. Therefore, let’s watch the problem in the act of being created.
UNGERER: And the use of drugs?
WATTS: I think this is not a new situation because drugs have been used for centuries because, after all, we are what we eat. When we find what we are is somehow not right, we eat a little something to adjust our feelings. So we take medicine when we get sick and all drugs are medicine rather than diet because they are correctives. So we have to beware of living on drugs as diet. The drugs like LSD, etc. are correctives. You don’t need to take LSD very often. Two or three times in a lifetime may be quite adequate. That can give a person a completely different perspective about who he is and what’s going on. That should be enough. Once you get the message, you hang up the phone. It can be very helpful, but not just by itself. LSD is not bottled wisdom. We’ve found that what it does to them is proportional to what they bring to it. If you give LSD to a very creative person, it helps him be more than he already is. But if you give it to someone who is basically an adolescent, he doesn’t get much out of it. I know a lot of kids who are saying they are through with the drug scene because there was nothing in it. Well, the point is, there wasn’t enough in them. If you do know how to use it, LSD can be as valuable to an investigator of the mind as a microscope is to a biochemist.
UNGERER: What do you consider to be the most insidious things being done in psychiatry today?
WATTS: Things like lobotomies, shock treatments. All those things that are done to normalize people forcibly. It doesn’t work. It’s a frantic passion to maintain reality in the form of the world as seen on a bleak Monday morning. It’s a matter of not having any expectations. You see, that’s the whole problem of education today. The university thinks they know what the future is for which they should prepare these children. The truth of the matter is the world is changing so rapidly, we don’t know what the future is. So the function of an educational institution is to put young people into a situation where they learn how to face the unknown or unpredictable. That means that everybody in the university, faculty, that is, or students, are all students engaged in a cooperative opening of our minds to not what we know but what we don’t know. Everybody’s engaged in research. You ask questions. The Socratic method is the model. The highest compliment, by the way, that you can pay to a scholar’s book is not that he has the answers, but that he asks the right questions.
UNGERER: Do reviewers say that about your books?
WATTS: I don’t very often get reviewed. I don’t know why. Whenever, for example, I’ve written books that start from a theological basis, you see what I do in my books is go around a wheel and approaching the hub along different spokes. The spokes can be theology, logical positivism, psychiatric assumptions, it makes no difference where I start, but because I’m headed for that hub which is the point about man’s identity that he is not this separate thing, but that he is the whole universe. Now, when I write a theological book, the theologians never will review it except that they’ll misrepresent it entirely and then argue against that misrepresentation. Niebuhr did this with one of my books years ago. He simply stated that the case presented by the book was the exact opposite of the case that the book did, in fact, represent. Then he attacked it. I wrote a book about the relationship between Christianity and Hinduism and the reviewer in the Christian Century said it’s about Christianity and Buddhism. He hadn’t even read it! I find this occurs quite often. I really don’t get reviewed. For example, the last book I wrote was called The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and sold thousands and thousands of copies. It’s hardly been reviewed at all.
UNGERER: Do you still consider yourself an exponent of Zen? You seemed to have moved away from it in many ways.
WATTS: I don’t use a label. I try to say I’m not any kind of religionist. Zen is something like ophthalmology. It’s correction of conception. I don’t say Zen is what I’m trying to sell. Because to Western ears, that sounds exotic, like an imported fad. I want to think and talk within the framework of Western science and discourse so that we don’t have to appeal to any kind of exotic mumbo-jumbo, although at the same time, I want to say that, from studying these things in Oriental culture, I have learned a great deal. They’ve been very valuable to me. But what I have learned is not something that I should come on with like a missionary. Missionaries have the preconceived idea that they know what’s right without examining, except in the most patronizing way, that what we believe is right.
UNGERER: Do you think there is a growing awareness at the so-called grass-roots about what you are trying to get at?
WATTS: Yes, I do.
UNGERER: The trouble in this country. What is your view about it?
WATTS: Don’t forget, we are the richest country in the world. People are bothered because they are not rich enough and they think everything will be solved if they get enough. Then they get it and they start worrying about their health. There’s always something to worry about. When you compare the U. S. with India, India is in the most ghastly poverty. Even our slum dwellers are rich beyond the dreams of a Calcutta slum dweller. But we have a different worry. The technology we have has just amplified this worry so that it becomes extraordinarily dangerous. So our particular problems are about the ghettos, race, and one of the great problems, the older people hating the young people. They actually want to get rid of them. There are too many of them. The population is increasing. This manifests itself with all sorts of rationalizations to divert attention from the actual fact that older people want to get rid of their kids—don’t take them to a party, get a sitter, get them out of sight, etc. So we send them to Viet Nam to get killed off. And this lies behind the whole Chicago incident during the convention. The police today stand as the hired agents of the people who feel that they have only certain security and don’t want anybody to rock the boat. So they get these unconscious homosexuals, the tough guy types, the over-specialized males, to beat up the so-called sissies. Because, you see, that kind of man, when he sees the long hair and the flower power stuff thinks it’s sissified. They feel that way about the kids. Because these kids characteristically are quiet. They are only moved to aggression by the sorts of things that happened in Chicago. This goes back, of course, to some very fundamental questions in our culture. The paradox in American culture is that we are a republic which is a form of government in which the people are supposed to rule themselves, but our metaphysical presuppositions are monarchical. Any Christian or Jew believes the universe is a monarchy. Well, then, how can you say the republic is the best form of government? So when we take the republic seriously, the monarchy people feel threatened. We have, in other words, a very serious problem about the conflict of church and state. What has created the crime problem is basically that we are asking the police to be armed clergymen and enforce laws against prostitution, gambling, fornication, etc., which primarily are a matter of personal morals. Now a question that needs no answer is what kind of person would volunteer to serve on a vice squad? What kind of man would volunteer to peek through holes in toilets to detect homosexual acts? We know the only kind of persons who could possibly volunteer are creeps. So, you can’t reform the police. You can’t say let’s upgrade training, etc.; you can’t do it. But what you can do with one stroke of the pen is take all matters of private morals out of the hands of their jurisdiction.
UNGERER: Do you think we are coming to that?
WATTS: Well, it’s got to happen because the police are overburdened. Their energies are vitally needed to control traffic, prevent ordinary street muggings, etc. If they were restricted to that, we wouldn’t have the police problem we have today.
UNGERER: Is it a matter of doing some of these things or we’ll all go under?
WATTS: Yes it is. One of the people running around the U.S. today and talking about these things and one with whom I have a great deal of personal sympathy is Buckminster Fuller. He’s the most hopeful man talking today and I very much agree with him. He has the idea that he calls synergy. This means that in any complex organization the intelligence of the whole organization is greater than any one of its parts. Therefore, organic man may be a great deal more intelligent than conceptual man. Man, as he is, the brain, the nervous system, is more intelligent than man as he conceives himself to be ideologically, religiously, politically, psychologically. So, through the extension of the nervous system, through radio communication, jet aircraft, everything is being tied together. Thus, an organization is developing that is not being controlled by any kind of conscious programming, but by its own nature. And he’s saying that that organization is more intelligent. An example. It’s the nature of jet planes that they must keep flying or they will deteriorate. So we have a tremendous interest in maintaining this transportation system. Now all customer barriers, passport barriers are in the way of the air lines. They are a nuisance. They are going to have to go. Also, any sort of war interferes with the schedule. People want to travel. Wars get in the way. What technology is doing is that it’s a process where we progressively realize where we were in the first place. The bat has something like radar. The human being temporarily has lost his instincts and is creating them technologically. Then he may rediscover that he had them all the time.
UNGERER: And then we’ll talk to the porpoise.
WATTS: Sure. I was talking to John Lilly, who knows more about the porpoise than anybody. He was saying, look, this creature does not need any appliances. It lives in the water with the grocery right in front of it and if it isn’t right there, it’s just a matter of a short swim away. It doesn’t need clothes, a house, books, records, because the body of the creature is its culture. These are highly intelligent, essentially playful beings. Their only problem is that they cannot stay under the water very long. They have to keep surfacing, therefore, they have to stay alert. Beyond that, they have it made.
UNGERER: And man’s problems?
WATTS: His problems seem to lie largely in his system of thinking. That is to say, thinking is a method of representing events in the physical world with symbols. Now this has great advantages, but its disadvantage is that one confuses the world as symbolized with the world that is. You can’t confuse the map with the territory, the menu with the meal. We have to get back to a direct relationship with the physical world. Even when one says “physical world,” that is a concept. Physical is an Aristotelian idea about the nature of things. The problem is in confusing the world thought about with the world that is; we eat the menu and not the dinner. We’ve created a culture which has a reputation for being materialistic and isn’t materialistic at all. It’s sort of the reverse of Plato’s cave, where the people are looking at the shadows on the walls.
From Existential Psychiatry (1969), 7(summer–fall), 109–117. Copyright © 1969 by Seven Bridges Publishing. Reprinted by permission of Jordan M. Scher, editor of Existential Psychiatry.