ALAN WATT    BLURB

"MEANING, MENTORS AND MASTERS

(OR)

SEEKERS, SPEAKERS AND SOPHISTS"

February 21, 2007

Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt – February 21, 2007 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)

WWW.CUTTINGTHROUGHTHEMATRIX.COM

www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu

Hi. I'm Alan Watt and this is cuttingthroughthematrix.com.  It is Wednesday the 21st of February 2007 and this month certainly is going in quick. That's good.

People have called me and asked if I am still teaching small classes and at the moment I'm not, because, to be honest with you, I'm just over my head with even these little blurbs. There's so much to do to get them up there and uploaded, especially when you're using dial-up, and the high-speed isn't in my area at the moment. It was supposed to come in, in February, but it's been postponed to some obscure later date and maybe never because there's no point for the big boys to run specific lines all the way to remote houses for one customer to pay and it doesn’t pay them. The alternative would be satellite, but satellite is extremely costly. I think it's around 800 or more dollars per year and they want two-year contracts, so it's all up in the air you might say. I'll just continue doing what I'm doing at the moment, so, yes, it takes a lot of time to upload to different sites and get it all ready. The talking part is no problem. It's all the things that come afterwards to get it up there and working. It takes hours, hours.

What I don't try and do is to teach a religion. There's lots out there for people who are seeking a religion to go to and pay their money. They'll find once they've done their circuits they're pretty well all the same, regardless of the avenue you first come in to, they end up going along the same road and regardless of what school or the country it seems to come from, it's all really the same.

Religion is to bind, to tie. That's what it means. You bind yourself to something. You're re-tied. Re-ligion, ligio. Everyone has been conditioned through their birth or their place of origin or whatever through the prevailing religion of their country to see the world in a specific way, even if you don't attend the religions or the churches in their countries, it's already in the culture. It's established – the mode of conduct, the behavior, all of that kind of stuff. The culture comes from what is or what has been the religion and it shapes your world view on things.

They say it's easy to get a person out of religion, but it's hard to get the religion out of the person; and that's probably very, very true. When you compare the different main religions in the world, you will see how each one would affect and shape the thoughts of you as a follower. They're all meant to create a form of social cohesion so that a system will work and it's also to teach obedience to the rulership of that system without question, either through punishments which will come from a deity or the forces which are out there, the yin and yang, that kind of thing.

There's bits of truth in everything. Bits of truth in everything. Cause and effect you might say. To bring people up to a higher truth out of their conditioning, whether it's religious or what they presume is cultural even, because your culture still is the same. It shapes a world view, how you will then see new information and then always go back to Plato's Cave to compare it to, and then if you can find it in the cave or something similar you'll think it's normal. That's what it really does to the individual person and we need something to believe in, something which we think is normal. Otherwise, you'd be flying all over space with no grounding at all, nothing to grab a hold of, so aspects of life and religions can also be tools or staging rockets to go higher into other understandings, if you have fully used them to their limit, it can help a person beyond.

Many people cannot leave traditional indoctrinations behind. They still will keep comparing what you're giving them as new concepts or ideas back to their old religion and back to Plato's Cave as I say. Some people are overly enthusiastic concerning where they are in their understanding. Someone recently had written in to say that they'd read Albert Pike's "Morals & Dogma" right through and he could understand it perfectly. He meant the language that was used at that time. Most people today, sure enough, can't get through it because it's more intricate a language than the simplistic form we use today. However, the fact of the statement was it showed me that, yes, you can read the exoteric straight through thinking that's it. If you'd understood the esoteric all through that, you would be astounded. It wouldn't be a matter of "well what's next?"

The world is full of schools of thought and you'll find that the students and pupils have spent their entire lives going from one school to the next just consuming information, often without understanding it. They're consumers.

Higher understanding will alter lives, your own life first and foremost, profoundly, without a set of dogmatic rules which you learn by rote. Rules and formula are for those who are seeking religions which compare to the old one, which have rules and formula; and why unshackle one chain to put on another?

Consumers of the vast movement which has been openly created since the times of Madame Blavatsky, has really pushed people into an endless seeking and searching and validation of what they learned previously in the previous schools. It's all to try to concretize something which they've done, they want to believe in but they just can't – deep down inside them, even though they say all the right things to their friends to make them think they still truly believe, they don't really, so they're on to the next thing looking for validation of what they've just learned elsewhere; rather than seeing that everything you learn is a staging rocket to the next level.

Many people get stuck in an experience and because of the experience, which can be induced in many ways, even scientifically. That's understood well in the behavioral sciences, but the experience seems so real and profound that they'll hang on to that for their entire lives and never go beyond that experience; rather than say, "is there something beyond this? Something more fulfilling on a mental level, a mind level, a level of meaning," and there's no question that you could ask in any time or in any era that hasn't been asked before over eons. The same questions will come up in every generation, regardless of the changes in the outward system; it's always the same basic questions.

It's a search for personal meaning. We live in a world where you can be surrounded with people, have a whole nation of people, a whole world of people and still be isolated within yourself. People have personas they project as they go around and talk to people. The persona you project is never the same as it's perceived by others, but that doesn't matter. You need this idea of this is who you seem to be to them. This is how they will see you and you try and act and live up to that, yet no one has gone through life, except maybe the occasional psychopath, who hasn't reflected on themselves personally when things seem to go wrong.

It's worse when you live in a system like today where we're given incessantly from birth, via media and movies and dramas, what's supposed to be normal. Even when they change the normal and we go along with it, it's bizarre because there's nothing normal about it. You're set an ideal life, an ideal standard of how things are supposed to be and they're simply not like that. There was a long running series a while back, a sitcom, which all took place in a bar and people watched that devotedly. I don't know how long it ran, maybe a couple of years, maybe longer, and every character in the bar was an independent character a scriptwriter had written, a composite for an individual and so everyone had their character and personality. A little bit in each you could identify with and that's the key to good writing and you go through little dramas as they all met in the bar after work.

However, the sad thing is, people who loved the characters whom they identified with didn't have any of that in their own life, their private life. That's why these comedies and dramas are so popular. They set an ideal where you think you belong, where you'd love to belong in a sense, in a fictionalized world of how it should be and how people really care about each other and you can't find it in your own life, because in your own life everybody's just as worried as you are about today and tomorrow and sometimes yesterday. Regret for the past, fear of the future and so you're being crucified today. That's the symbology of it, always was.

They're not really living at all. They're existing and getting through and putting a brave face on, perhaps, but they're not really living. You can't live when you anxious and terrified, and this world and this system certainly keeps that going, where the cost of anything can shoot up tomorrow and it's out of your hands and that makes us all obey and jump and pay attention. That's how it's set up and the only escape for many, many people is through fiction where they see the ideal settings, but it's a fiction which never existed.

I don't know if anyone out there ever read T.S. Elliot's "The Cocktail Party," because there's a character in there called Celia who’s gone through all these disillusioned love affairs and she goes to see a psychiatrist to try and get some help. She started her interview with the psychiatrist and I think she said, "I should really like to think there's something wrong with me, because if there isn't then there's something wrong with the world."

There's a truth in both parts. If you're emulating and trying to carry out a lifestyle where you've accepted the "fake norm" that's projected to you, this ideal standard that you're even bombarded with, with all the advertising telling you how you should look. How much you should weigh. What's going to make you happy with the youthful vigor?  It's all youthful, youthful, youthful and the kind of house you're supposed to have and the kind of car, and everything as I say is always happy, happy, happy.

"Don't Worry Be Happy"

By Bobby McFerrin

Don't worry be happy

Don't worry be happy

Don't worry be happy

Ain't got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed
Don't worry, be happy

The land lord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate
Don't worry, be happy

Look at me I am happy
Don't worry, be happy

If you follow that and really start to – or even let it get to you, then you will break down ultimately because it's nothing like reality. It's complete fake. It's projection. It's mass manipulation and it certainly isn't geared to bring you contentment.  If people in this system ever reached any level of contentment and stopped buying anything, you wouldn't need to buy anything and the system would collapse.  We have to keep the system going by allowing ourselves to be shown how discontented we are. Produce and consume. That's the definition of a "good citizen" by the United Nations standards, "a good producer-consumer."

Getting back to Celia, as I say she's been right on both counts. The world as she'd been taught is a fiction, the idealistic world that she wanted to believe in, but because she wanted to believe in it she expected it and the things of that world in her own personal life, so she was quite correct in concluding "there was something wrong with the world," but more so there was something wrong with her perception of the world.

If she started from there and started to figure out why she had been perceiving it that way, she would have come to many more answers in her own life.

Most people are terrified, and every generation is the same, of death. Eons ago that was understood and priesthoods formed to cast away demons that would take you off into the nether regions. Illness was also quite common. Child mortality especially in the old empires was awful because empires tended to have a rigid class or caste system, where those at the bottom got the least of everything, nourishment-wise, and often even scientifically they were given a particular type of diet which kept them able to work but not too bright, so offspring would suffer often in the early days or weeks after birth.  The lifespan too, of those below was often short too because of the conditions they had to live in.

In the old days storms were caused by nature. You could have your house blown away. You could have natural catastrophes in the old days. Now they can cause it through science, and so shamans, miracle workers, priests became important to try and confirm humankind's ability to defeat all of the bad things which could happen in life.  It was the collective belief that together you could defeat all of these ills. Unfortunately too, because everyone seeks something beyond themselves which they suspect is there, the priesthoods who caught on to this and who understood it very well began to supply the answers which became dogma, which became the systems, and so while seeking the answers you become imprisoned under the system to the benefit of those who rule it. Nothing new in that at all.

It's interesting to note that even in ancient times in different countries the people would come to those who'd left the civilizations of those periods to live on their own and think, because it's very difficult to work your way out of the "group mind" the "collective mind" and the system which runs the group. It's very difficult to do that when you're in amongst them.

Often people would go off on their own to try and find themselves and answers for themselves, and if they were at peace people would understand that they had a peace which they wanted and they'd want to find out how to attain that same peace, which meant that those who had gone off for peace and safety in the first place would go further and further away, because that person obviously had done without a lot of the world's things to get that peace of mind and the last thing he probably needed was the world coming to him.

Then there are the fakes who understand instinctively, intuitively what everyone's after. Their fear of death. Their need to believe in purpose. That part is true. You need purpose, but the charlatans would also clue into this and set themselves up as holy men and use the people for their own ends. It's happened up to the present day and it's allowable because you can't stop people from finding out for themselves.

Meaning and purpose is very important to going on in life, through all of its tragedies, upsets, heartaches, illnesses, deaths, and there's one thing we all have to accept – that in this life, at least for the majority of people, death will come. "You can't get out of this world alive," as they used to say, and no amount of money is going to alter that fact. Some people are terrified literally to the day they die of dying, utterly terrified. Others will take it more calmly, especially, although rarely today, if they've had a fulfilled life. Fulfilled meaning they've worked their way through for themselves all of the problems, personal and otherwise, of the world.

It's so rare today as I say because in a short period we've gone from a family orientated society with extended family, where everyone had purpose, where elderly had wisdom to pass on to the younger, to a commercially driven society which cast out all of the other groups and concentrated on the young; because it's always the young you're shaping and managing into the next phase. You always go for the young in long-term goals, always. Nothing new in that either.

Today it's more successful because the other parts of eliminating generational contact has been very successful. Something again written about by revolutionaries back in the 1800's. It has been accomplished and not only that, we don't have the reality of life because we don't experience the grandmother or the grandfather or great-grandfather living with the family who's dying, and that was common for everyone to help out and the young saw what death was; it was more real to them. It made them mature much quicker and have more of a concept of the value of life.

Today everything is like the meat you buy in a grocery store. It's prepackaged and shiny and very clean and hygienic looking. Well death is the same way. Strangers take care of great uncle so-and-so or great aunt or granny or whatever in places called hospitals and they take care of all the problems they go through, all the things which we don't want to see anymore, all the nasty little things, until they die; and so the children grow up just knowing so-and-so went to the hospital died. Another professional takes over, the undertaker, and dresses them up, makes them look as though they were alive and you might get a glimpse, and then he either goes up a chimney or else is put in a vault, but it’s all managed and taken care of. It's out of the family's hands and all of the experiences of those who go through death and taking care of them are also outside of the family's hands. Not only that, in today's society, because they ensured that women would also work and now you have the state rearing your children from kindergarten onwards in day school and all this stuff, the children don't participate and see all of what goes in to leaving this world and they don't have a conception of death or the value of life. If they had the understanding of the value of life, they would treat others around them differently.

We are where we are today because men like Darwin were put out to proclaim a new religion, a belief system, and Darwinism takes an awful lot of belief if you want to go along with it.  You also had Karl Marx who focused primarily on class struggles as though it were a science, the theory being that each generation has creative ones within at the bottom level who would fight and pull their way up to the top; and because it similarly or it was parallel to Darwinism, he wanted to dedicate I think the third or fourth edition to Darwin.

In fact, he said that Darwin validated the theory. They were all high Freemasons and I'm sure they were all in on the same little act, although apparently coming from different directions. They all coordinated together to create a new view of life, society and humanity and purpose, and in the process they devalued human life to an extent where once you have devalued it down to an animal's level, and since you don't have much regard for animals in the first place, those who are taught the sciences believe they can do with the human material that which they wish. We have been living through that, where I think beginning in or after World War II it was standard procedures to whip out tonsils and adenoids before the age of five in pretty well all British school children or children on the basis that these were appendages left over, sort of vestiges from a previous time and you don't need them anymore, and yet those were part of your immune system. You think that's an accident?

I've no doubt most doctors at the time and surgeons really believed their own indoctrination. That's the scary part about belief systems, how easy it is once it's on the go to train people to implement the next part of your belief system, which must follow by using that logic based on the belief system.

We've seen Nietzsche. We've seen all of the people including the founders of the Fabian Society write about man and superman and how they'd alter humanity and take the crème-de-la-crème and push them into the stature of gods basically; but along with that comes the other side of the coin.

As Bertrand Russell says: "What do you do with the useless eaters, the ones who have no function. The ones who haven't evolved enough, fast enough?"

We know that those that are trained to believe in this belief system will go the next step. It's logical for them to do so. We've had the eugenicists wreak havoc in the 20th century through the extermination of so-called "inferior species" and it wasn't just happening in Germany. It was happening throughout the United States with the great foundations backing them and sterilizing "the unfit" as they deemed them.  That is where the present belief system has got us, to the devaluation of human life and it must take the next step and the next step and the next step, as long as it has that belief system it will do so.

What was then unthinkable will be done, and worse. The sad part is many people at the bottom who will be the recipients of the techniques to be used also have been trained to believe in it. I've heard ordinary people talk about, "oh there's too many people in the world and in some of those third-world countries, my God how they breed," and yah de yah it goes on and on.

None of these systems could survive and work without individual cooperation and the acquiescence of the majority by their silence and sometimes even their applause. They used to say, "what goes around comes around," and it does because what you allow to be done to others will ultimately come around to your door; and how do you, personally, eugenically, measure up?

All of this again was discussed eons ago by other peoples and from them came out different schools of thought. You had the Cynics in Greece who realized that all forms of institutionalized religion were simply control mechanisms to keep a few in power and their offspring for as long as they could hold on to it. We had the Stoics who tried to use rationality for everything and cut out the emotion. You had the Atomists groups and schools who supposedly by their brain power understood that atoms were tiny parts of matter and everything revolved around them and nothing was solid. That wasn't dreamed up by them. That was inherited from previous ages. YOU CAN'T GUESS AT THAT KIND OF KNOWLEDGE.  Scientifically, knowledge is supposed to come from the next experiment, the next finding, which sets you off onto the next track. You can't jump whole massive areas of science and come down with the idea of atoms in ancient Greece.

In India, a complete social structure was instituted by a people who understood how to implement it and what they were after, where life could be so terrible for many people and you could still train them to believe that this was natural, nothing mattered, the world was composed of opposing forces in balance and sometimes one overtook the other for a little while and you'd either have prosperity or poverty, famine, plagues and warfare. You could make them almost punch drunk with this kind of idea and make them accept it.

The Chinese philosophy, yin and yang, was the same, the same idea. You had Pantheism in various stages, a form of believing that everything was inhabited by a spirit, even a stone. Eventually that could lead a person to distraction and terror because compulsive-obsessional behavior comes in there, where you must start to appease everything when you've a run of "bad luck."  You must appease the stone. You must appease the tree. You must appease the sky, the clouds, the storm clouds and appease the sun, and in comes sacrifice of some kind or another and much of sacrifice is ritual. Even time can be sacrifice, the time that you spend going through formula of appeasement, until you're tied up in bondage and you can't move because of "unseen forces" outside of your control.

The ancient Greeks had many gods. Ancient Babylon had many too, and you had to appease them all, all of them. Eventually, there were so many you couldn't keep up with them, but you had to try and appease them all because if you didn't there was always the fear that the gods would start fighting amongst themselves and there'd be chaos.

You find eventually that most religions are simple projections from the individual personality or the group personality outwards, until they personify their own faults and fears and apprehensions in something they try and make tangible and outside of themselves. They used to say that "if there was no devil, we'd have to invent him," because the alternative would be that you'd have to look into yourself and admit that you had the abilities to do all those things you could stone others to death for.

When I was small in Scotland there were remnants of the old clan system and the clans kept getting demolished and disintegrating and moved around and integrated into society over a long period of time, yet there were still stragglers that kept apart from the system. They called them "tinkers."  If you went up north into the highland areas, you'd often see these people with, they called them "prams," the go-chairs for children and they'd have all of their belongings in these things and they'd be pushing them along the streets – I'm talking about in the country, the roads, and they skirted the towns. Sometimes they'd go into the rubbish dumps and set up camp and scrounge for scrap, which they'd take to the scrap dealers, and somehow they survived separate from the system and alongside the system. Wherever they went they were called "tinkers" and they had derogatory terms for them. Yet to me, when I was really small, they looked tall and healthy, probably because they had no inoculations and such, and they could survive in the climates of winter and the hot of summer, and there'd be men and women and children.

The authorities went out full blast eventually to get them into the housing schemes, re-educate them, get their children into the system because they couldn't have that. In Ireland they still had gypsies, too, who traded primarily in horses in southern Ireland and they'd go around town to town. We had some of them, too, that would go door to door and I can remember them coming around to doors, the housing schemes, the units all sort of joined together, rows of houses, and they'd always come to the back door during the day and sell handmade clothespins and things. Very quiet, never obnoxious and yet I used to wonder why society had such a hatred for them, and it was because they were different ultimately and they wouldn't join the system.

You'll find that people will turn on you if you don't join the hell that they're already in and they hate difference, and no one would care when eventually the authorities were given teeth to go in and disband their camps and haul off children to Children's Aid and such. Yet to me they represented maybe the last vestige of a freedom which I knew I would never see.

I also know that when peoples come into your country (which you think is your country) and they look different, like the Mexicans are doing in the U.S. at the moment, and their customs are different because they're used to a third-world survival situation, how everyone suddenly looks down and "oh my goodness. They're so different. I can't live along side them."  And in comes the moral justification of why you think that way and the people are put down for having chickens and things we should all really have and stuff like that.  In fact, things which your fairly recent ancestors had themselves, and they remind me very much like the tinkers.

Countries don’t get risen up because people are really hard working or any harder working than anyone else. In the history books of economics they admit that countries are designed to come up and flourish and do so with the easy availability of credit and the absence of bureaucracies in all kinds of local and national laws. That's why they come up. Not because of any specialty on our part or because our god is better than your god or anything less or anything like that. It's completely different.  Understood again but not by those who come head on with the culture class, which is an upsetting time for everyone, and yet everything that's happening is designed to do so and planned and encouraged by those who own your culture and your nation. However, we shouldn't turn on those because they're the effect or side effect of the agenda.

It's also interesting that if you fight something long enough you hate it and that which you hate you become. You become until you lose that which you started to fight for in the first place. You become your enemy and the enemy is you.  You will see that in peoples who've been persecuted who become the persecutors and eventually all the moral justification sounds flat even to those who participate.

The bottom line is this world is run to a system that writes about their plans. They use professors and VIPs. They make sure that we know their names and they write boring books that most people don't want to read. They get the occasional quote maybe from a magazine once in a while and that's all they'll go into. Not the rest. And they hate and they don't want to admit that they're being controlled. They don't want to admit that to themselves, that we're born into a system which is all encompassing, which doesn’t want to lose control, that actually plans the future.  Orwell said it, "he who controls the past," et cetera, et cetera."   He knew because he'd been trained by those who ran this system, he'd been picked and chosen to participate in bringing it all around until he understood there was no sides. There was only one at the top, the capstone that had its own vision of where it was taking the world and the last people to really know were all those different groups that were fighting each other. They were helping bring it about, completely oblivious of it in fact. They only saw their short-term goal as a group, not all the side effects and ripples and how it would intermesh with all other parts of an agenda which would change the world into a different world than the one they had initially envisaged.

The simplest things said by wise people can be missed completely by people who are too impatient who want something more, something which has to knock them off their feet, something terribly profound which offers them a personal hope, and so that when you actually give them something that offers them hope but not in the way they expect it, it goes right over their heads. They don't see what you've given them. They have no appreciation. They can't fathom. In fact, it's discarded. It's like deleting something on your computer. It doesn’t even stay to be registered. People will phone me up asking me things and I always listen to see something, which is very important, because if they want to learn something I have to see if they listen. Many of them will do more talking than listening and you know that's how they would continue. When they do more talking than listening, it's because whatever you've said so far isn't good enough, and that's what extra talking and endless repetitive questions tell me.

Understanding anything is a process and you can't take shortcuts. The shortcuts are what religions promise for the exoteric masses. And some people also say to me, "aren't you ever afraid of reprisal or whatever, or the authorities, or speaking out about the agenda?" and the answer is "why live in fear? What can they do to you?"  They could cut off your arms. They could cut off your legs or cut out your tongue or – well, I'll let this song say it all.

For me and Hamish, it's good night and may your god or gods go with you.

"Moonshadow"

By Cat Stevens

I'm being followed by a moon shadow
moon shadow-moon shadow
leaping and hopping on a moon shadow
moon shadow-moon shadow
and if I ever lose my hands
lose my plough, lose my land
oh, if I ever lose my hands
oh, if...

I won’t have to work no more
and if I ever lose my eyes
If my colours all run dry
yes, if I ever lose my eyes
oh if …
I won't have to cry no more.

Yes, I'm being followed by a moon shadow
moon shadow - moon shadow
leaping and hopping on a moon shadow
moon shadow - moon shadow
and if I ever lose my legs
I won't moan and I won't beg
oh if I ever lose my legs
oh if...
I won't have to walk no more.

And if I ever lose my mouth
all my teeth, north and south
Because if I ever lose my mouth
oh if...
I won't have to talk...

Did it take long to find me
I ask the faithful light
Ooh did it take long to find me
And are you going to stay the night

I'm being followed by a moon shadow
moon shadow - moon shadow
leaping and hopping on a moon shadow
moon shadow - moon shadow
moon shadow - moon shadow
moon shadow - moon shadow

(Transcribed by Linda)