TRUST - ALAN WATTS

Courtesy of Organism.Earth

It’s very funny to come to California—you know, when you’ve lived elsewhere and it’s been an ideal—and suddenly you wake up and you realize you’re there! You know? You’re on vacation, you’ve got there, and everybody else envies you. And so we have to learn how to be there—or rather, to be here. Of course, it is always possible to construe the thing in another way and to say, “Yes, it may be a game, but it’s a ghastly game; it’s a grim game.” It’s like a child who’s caught a fly alive and is picking the wings off it. The universe is that sort of scheme. It’s a trap. It’s a thing that gives you hope, is always dangling possibilities in front of you to keep you going, but then it grinds you up. And then it revives you a little, like a master torturer keeping a person alive in order to experience pain. There is a kind of inverted mystical experience that people occasionally have where they see the whole universe as this sort of trap, and everything looks crummy. People look as if they’re made of plastic, and aren’t really people but only make-believe people. They’re mechanisms which are going “Yakety yak” and pretending that they are really there and alive. And everything looks as if it were made of patent leather or enameled tin, and just a nasty, dead scene. That’s the inverted mystical experience. And one might ask, “Well, you could take that view, too.” And here you come to what Albert Camus said: “The fundamentally important philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.”

Now, this is the real question: Is the game worth the candle? If you think “No,” then you’d better commit suicide. That’s the logical thing to do. If—on the other hand—you’re not sure, then you’d better make up your mind. Because if you’re going to go on with the game of life and not be sure as to whether it’s really worth going on, you’ll make a mess of it. That’s quite certain. It’s like doing something evil, like telling a lie. If you’re going to tell a lie at all, you have to make it stick, and so, make it good. Don’t wobble when you lie, because someone will find you out and it’ll all fall apart, and it’ll be worse than if you never did it. So if you make up your mind that you’re going to do something evil, you have to have—like a golf swing—follow-through. And so, in the same way, with going on living at all: if you’re going to gamble, gamble! And so, either suicide or gamble seem to me to be the great alternatives of this life.

And what will the gamble be? The gamble—or the gaming—has to rest on the assumption that this game is superb. No other assumption will work. If I may put it in another way: the game is to be trusted. The universe—you, yourself—it is fundamentally to be trusted, and this is the act of faith which underlies all gambling. Because if you don’t make that assumption as absolutely basic, the game will not work. Now, this is where one must consider game theory in relation to ethics. What are the characteristics of a workable game? A viable game, as biologists would call it; a game that is worth the candle?