Transcript of an improvised talk by Alan Watts given in the 1960s
We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat. We would like to be like that, and by and large, man's religions are attempts to cultivate that same power in ordinary people. But unfortunately, they normally go about this task as one would attempt to make the tail wag the dog. I remember when I was a small boy in school, I was enormously interested in being able to do my schoolwork properly, and everybody told me that I didn't work hard enough, and that I ought to work. I had an intense desire to do this, but when I asked `how do you work?`, everybody shut up like a clam. So I was extremely puzzled. But there were teachers who apparently knew how to work and had attained considerable heights of scholarship, and I admired them very much for their attainments, and so I thought that maybe I could learn the secret by copying their mannerisms. I would imitate the style of handwriting that they used, I would use the same kind of pen. I would affect the same mannerisms of speech and gesture, and in so far as I could get around the school uniform, even of clothing. I must assure you this, of course, was a private school in England, not a public school in America. But none of this revealed the secret, because I was as it were, copying the outward symptoms and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work, and exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love.
When we study the behavior of people who have the power of love within them, we can catalog how they behave in various situations, and out of this catalog formulate some rules. One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are apt, but not always so, to play it rather cool on sexual love. The reason for this is generally speaking, unknown to preachers, but it is because an erotic relationship with the external world operates so far as they're concerned, between that world and every single nerve ending. Their whole organism, in all its aspects - physical, psychological, and spiritual - is an erogenous zone. And therefore, their flow of love isn't specialized or canalized so exclusively in the genital system as it is with most other people, especially in a culture such as ours, where for so many centuries that particular expression of erotic love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable kind of love that there is. And so, we have as a result of 2000 years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the right place for it. Of course, people who exude love are also apt to give things away. They are in every way like rivers; they stream, and so when they collect possessions and things that they like, they are apt to give them to other people. Have you ever noticed that when you start giving things away you keep getting more? The same way as you 'empty out' - you create a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum - and more flows in, so noticing this, the codifiers of loving behavior write down that you should give so much money to tax deductible institutions, and to the poor, and that you should be nice to people, that you should act towards your relatives and your friends and indeed even your enemies as if you loved them, even if you don't. And of course for Christians and Jews and believers in God there is a peculiarly difficult task enjoined upon us, namely that thou shalt love the lord thy God. And not only here going through the motions of it externally, but with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and that is of course very demanding indeed. But you see what is happening, it is as if for example, we admired the music of a certain composer, and having studied his style very thoroughly we draw up rules of musical composition based on the behavior of this composer. We then send our children to music school to learn these rules in the hopes that if they apply them, they also will turn into first class musicians, which they usually fail to do. Because what might be called the technique of music, as well as the technique of morals and say, the technique of speech - of language, is very valuable, because it gives you something to express... IF , and I repeat IF, you have anything to express. But if you don't, if you don't have anything to say, not even the greatest mastery of English will stand you in good stead, unless you can manage to fool your listeners by talking beautiful nonsense and making it sound profound.
So the question and the puzzle remains: you cannot imitate this thing, there is no way of getting it, and yet it is absolutely essential that we have it. Because obviously, the human race is not going to flourish harmoniously unless we are able to love each other. But the question is, how do we get it? Is it something you simply have to contract like measles? Or is it as theologians say, a gift of divine grace, which somehow is dished out to some but not to others, and if there is no way of getting divine grace by anything you do as the Calvinists aver, then we better just sit around and wait until something happens, although Calvinists never did that. They were almost depressingly energetic. But surely we can't be left in that kind of a hopeless situation. There must be some way of getting the grace or getting divine charity or love, some sort of wangle, some sort of way in which we can, as it were, open ourselves so as to become conduit pipes for the flow. And so the more subtle preachers try to see if we can open ourselves and teach methods of meditation and spiritual discipline in hope that we can contact this power. The less subtle preachers say 'you don't have enough faith, you don't have enough guts, you don't have enough willpower.." If you only put your shoulder to the wheel and shoved you would be of course an exemplar and a saint. Actually, you will only be an extremely clever hypocrite.
The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence; when you deal with the so called practical world, and people don't behave as you wish they would, you get out the army or the police force or the big stick, and if those strike you as somewhat crude, you resort to giving lectures. And I mean lectures in the sense of a solemn adjuration and exhortation to behave better next time. Now, let us look at some of the practical consequences of adjuring people and commanding people to love. Many a parent says to the child, "nice children love their mothers". And of course, "I'm sure you're a nice child, you ought to love mother but not because I, your mother say so, but because you really want to do so." Because one of the difficulties is none of us in our heart of hearts respect love which is not freely given. If for example you are an ailing parent, and you need you be looked after, and you have a son or daughter who feels dutifully that they should look after you, because after all, you've done so much for them. But somehow, living with your father or mother prevents you from having a home and life of your own, so naturally you resent this duty and your parent is well aware that you resent it, even if they pretend to ignore it. They therefore feel guilty that they have imposed upon your loyalty and you in turn can't really disclose from yourself the fact that you hate them for getting sick, even though they couldn't help it. Therefore, nobody enjoys the relationship. It is a painful duty carried out, and the same thing would naturally happen if after a number of years, having at the altar made a solemn and terrible promise that you would love your wife/husband come what may for ever and ever till death do you part, then suddenly you find you really haven't the heart in you to do it anymore. Then you feel guilty, that you ought to love your wife, family, or whatever, and naturally this is a sort of fiasco, as would be obvious: If you were to ask your wife, "do you really love me?", and she were to reply,"I'm trying very hard to do so".
You see, the difficulty of it is this - you cannot teach a selfish person to be unselfish by any means. That is to say, whatever a selfish person does, whether it be giving his body to be burned or giving all that he possesses to the poor, he will still do it in a selfish way of feeling. And he will be able to do this with extreme cunning and marvelous self-deception and deception of others besides. The consequences of fake love are almost invariably destructive, because they build up resentment on the part of the person who does the fake loving as well as on the part of those who are its recipients. This is why the foreign aid program has been such a dismal failure. Now of course, you may say that I'm talking in a very impractical way. You would say, "well, do we just have to sit around and wait until we become inwardly converted and learn through the grace of God, or some sort of magic, how to love and in the meantime do nothing about it and conduct ourselves as selfishly as we feel?" There is, as a matter of fact, something to be said for that. Because the first problem in the whole of this is honesty. And the reason why the lord God says at the beginning of things, "thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind" is not because the lord God is stupid, but because he's very clever. That which appears to be a commandment is actually a challenge, or what in Zen Buddhism would be called a koan, a spiritual problem.
If you exercise yourself resolutely in trying to love God and/or your neighbor, you will find that you get more and more tangled up. You will realize increasingly that the reason why you are attempting to obey this as a commandment is that you want to be the right kind of person, and obviously you want to be the right kind of person for your own reasons. And so if you do in the first place feel selfish, and come to the conclusion as a result of trying various experiments with love that you love yourself more than anybody else, the proper thing to do is to investigate your self love; to find out why you love yourself and what you mean by your Self when you say you love yourself. For the reason is this: love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity. Everybody has it. Existence is love. But it's like water flowing through a hose - it depends in which direction you point it. So everybody has the force running, and maybe the way in which you find the force of love operating in you is that you have a passionate like of booze or ice cream or automobiles or good looking members of the opposite or even the same sex. But there is love operating. And people of course intend to distinguish between the different kinds of love; there are good kinds, such as divine charity and allegedly bad kinds such as "animal lust." But it should be understood, I think, that they're all forms of the same thing. They differ in rather the same way that the colors of white light divide into the spectrum when passed through a prism. So we might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud's 'libido', and the violet end of the spectrum of love is agape, what is called divine love or divine charity, and that in the middle - the various yellows, blues, and greens - are friendship, human endearment, consideration, all that sort of fellow feeling. But it's all the same thing.
And so, the thing is first of all, to get it moving. To follow whatever kind of love you have in the first place, because you cannot control love until you have some to control, until you have it running. You've got to get your car running before you can learn how to drive it. You will not become a skillful driver by sitting at a still car in a garage any more than you will become a skilled dancer if you simply never more your arms and legs. So the first thing is then to discover what indeed you do love - and you will find there is something - and then go into the nature of that. Now it's said that selfish people love themselves. I'd say that is really a misunderstanding of the whole thing because your self is something that is really impossible to love. There are various reasons for this, but one obvious reason is that loving one's Self is as difficult as kissing your own lips. One's Self, when you try to focus on it to love it or to know it, is oddly elusive - it always slips away like the pursued tail of the dog who is trying to get hold of it. So to pursue your own end has some difficulty about it. If you explore what you love when you say you love yourself, you will make the startling discovery that everything you love is something which you thought was other than yourself.
Even if it be very ordinary, like ice cream or booze... in the conventional sense, booze is not you, nor is ice cream. It certainly turns into you, in a manner of speaking, when you consume it, but then you don't have it anymore. So you look around for more in order to love it once again but so long as you love it it's never you. When you love people, even however selfishly you love them - because of the pleasant sensations they give you, still it is somebody else that you love. And as you inquire into this, as you follow honestly your own selfishness, many interesting transformations begin to come about in you. One of the most interesting transformations of being directly and honestly selfish in the same way that, for example cats are, is that you stop deceiving people. A great deal of damage is done in practical human relations by saying that you love people, when what you mean is that you ought to and you don't really. You give the wrong impression and people begin to expect things of you which you're never going to come through with. We've been taught for example that we ought to love our enemies. Now, we don't really understand what it means to love our enemies. We think it means to be charitable towards them in the hope that we will convert them and that they will cease to be our enemies. The real reason for loving enemies is that one needs enemies. They're terribly important to you.
For example, I think that some of you here feel that you belong to a nice set of people. It may be an ordinary kind of bourgeois coterie of pleasant squares or it may be a church group of some kind, a club, or a special cult, or just a group of friendly drinkers, but at any rate you feel that by virtue of membership in this society, you belong to a special in group of nice, or saved, people. Now when you consider what nice people talk about when they sit 'round the dinner table and have an opportunity to nurture their collective ego, you'll find that the most fascinating topic of conversation is the nasty people; how awful they are, what dreadful things they do, and 'what is it all coming to?'. This very, very satisfactory condemnatory conversation nurtures your ego, but people who do that don't seem to realize that they thereby depend on the nasty people in order to know that they're nice. They are as a matter of fact highly indebted to them. On the other side of the picture the nasty people, they on their side consider that they really are the best people and nurture their collective ego by blasting the bourgeoisie, the squares, the wasps, the know nothings, or whoever they may be. So for the collective ego of the non-squares the squares are extremely necessary.
If they were to disappear tomorrow many of us would lose a cause... The minute you begin to become aware of this it's rather embarrassing, because at once you begin to realize how much you depend on an enemy or an outsider or a group of damned people as distinct from your own group for saved people. So you begin to realize that your collective ego, or your Self, depends on your being on the in, but you can only be on the in with the relation to something that is out, and since the in and the out are inseparable - if there is to be any in or any out - you suddenly discover that your self is bigger than you thought it was. It includes the other, and you can't do without it. This brings about a fundamental change in the understanding of the meaning and nature of Self, and thereupon there becomes a change of attitude to other people, even if you continue with some formal opposition to them and disapproval of them.
When you are honestly clear with yourself what you like and what you dislike, and then at the same time your Self begins more and more to include things that were hitherto defined as being not yourself, your love, which is what you are, begins to express itself quite naturally and unaffectedly in a wider way. To trust one's Self is to be capable of love, to bring out love. In other words, to function in a sociable way and in a creative way is to take a risk; it's a gamble because you may not come through with it, and in the same way when you fall in love or you form an association with somebody else they may, as a matter of fact, not fulfill your expectations. But that risk has to be taken. The alternative to taking that risk is much worse than trusting and being deceived. To live together, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks but in the long run it will work out.
My point is that if you don't take them, the results will be so much worse than any kind of wild anarchy that could be conceived. You see, here we are now, as a highly disciplined human race, with all kinds of rules and religions and what are we about to do? Blow ourselves completely to pieces. Was this all a good game? Because you see, in tying up love in knots and becoming incapable of it you can't destroy the energy; when you won't love and you won't let it out the thing comes out in the form of self-destruction. The alternative to self-love in other words is self-destruction, because you won't take the risk of loving yourself properly, so you will be compelled instead to destroy yourself. So which would you rather have? Would you rather have a human race which isn't always very well controlled and sometimes runs amok a little bit, but on the whole continues to exist with a good deal of honesty and delight - when delight is available - or would you rather have the whole human race blown to pieces and cleaned off the planet reducing the whole thing to a nice scoured rock with no dirty disease on it called life? But I repeat: the point that is necessary to understand this whole thing is that love is a spectrum. There is not as it were nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other... these are all forms of the same energy, and you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. If you find that only one of these forms exist in you, if at least you will water it, the rest of the plant will blossom as well. But the essential prerequisite, from the beginning, is to let it have its way.
