288 Allan Watts Warned Us

David: 00:00

More than 50 years ago, Alan Watts gave a speech describing a world where everybody would be connected. Instead of telephones or cameras, everyone would carry a little device in their pocket. It would have a dialing system and a television screen, and you'd be able to see the person you were talking to. This would change everything, he said, because your life would now become an interrupted life. He made this observation that once everybody could reach everyone else, you would be expected to answer. It would become almost unacceptable to be unavailable. You know, you look at your phone today and you think, how did he see that coming more than 50 years ago? But the part of his talk that interests me most is where he says this goes next. Because he starts with this idea that technology is actually an extension of our nervous system. And when all the nervous systems of all of humanity become connected, the result is beautifully surprising. And I want to bring that into the conversation we're having right now around artificial intelligence, because there's a dogma at work in the world. There's this idea that AI is going to become some sort of superintelligence, an oracle that we can ask everything, and then eventually robots that will either give us everything we want or destroy us. But even though that's the conversation that's making headlines, it's only one set of ideas about the future. And somewhere along the way, we've started treating those ideas as though the future has already been decided. I'm interested in a different possibility. I'm excited about creating a world that is not less human, but more human. About becoming more connected to each other, not less. And about using these extraordinary tools to help us discover more of what it means to be a human being. So in this episode, I want to break down what Watts was considering, where I think it speaks directly to the moment we are living in today and why I have so much hope for where we're going. Because the future is truly undecided, and you play an important role in creating that future, too. So let's get into it.

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All right, guys. The great teacher and philosopher Alan Watts starts with something pretty easy to understand. A radio extends what your ears can hear. A telephone extends your ability to speak to somebody. Television lets you see something happening anywhere you're not physically present. And he's looking at technology as an extension of human capacities, an extension of our nervous system. And when that system has broader reach, our relationships change. Right? The person who once had to come to your door can now interrupt you from somewhere on the other side of the world and think about how normal that's become. Somebody sends you a message you haven't answered yet, they hit you up a second time. Now you're explaining why you weren't looking at your phone. You could be sitting beside somebody that you love, and somebody who isn't even in the room is directing your attention. And there's nothing inherently wrong with answering a message, but it's worth noticing how easily access becomes obligation. Watts takes that all the way into a thought experiment. The technology now allows us to see and know more about just about everyone else, whether it's their profile on social media, what they post, or whether you are one of the big companies that's collecting and observing all this information. What you think and how you feel and what you say is now floating across this digital nervous system. And he suggests that this is not much different than being able to read each other's thought telepathy. So right now, your thoughts reside on the network. But the network, he says, will someday vanish, just as the old telephone lines are vanishing, just as the railroads will someday vanish. These communication lines predict an innate ability that we have. And at some point in time, you no longer need the initial structure to function that the thing they once served evolves into something more advanced that no longer needs the communication lines themselves. So what if it could advance so far as to be able to literally feel someone else's feelings and to hear or know someone else's thoughts? Now, this, of course, brings, um, up questions around the possibility of some power that can control the whole system. Watching and listening to what everyone says, particularly if everybody else was exposed while this person or organization in control remained concealed. That's a meaningful question. Who gets to see whom? Who has access? Is that access mutual? But Alan Watts main point is that he imagines our communication technology becoming less visible until eventually we Discover that capacities for connection that don't require the equipment at all. I think that's interesting. He describes this as some form of telepathy. And then he asks what we would actually discover. If we could know another person that thoroughly. And his answer, beautifully, is that we would recognize ourselves beneath all the variations. We would discover something that we share. That we all have the same fears, that we all have the similar desires, that we share similar visions. And that by being able to know what others think, we would come to know ourselves even more deeply. It's a really, really wonderful hypothesis. Now, I don't hear that as a reason to give up privacy. I value privacy. And I'm not presenting his speculation about telepathy as established scientific forecast. I'm interested in the consideration underneath it. What if our pursuit of connection. Eventually helps us recognize a connection that was there all along. Whether it was a connection with ourselves. Or whether it was an extra sensory capacity to know each other? And that's where I want to take this conversation in my own direction. Because there's a lot of talk right now around things like transhumanism, around enhancing ourselves through machines or embedding chips in our brains. Or integrating human beings with artificial intelligence. And sometimes the conversation gets to the point of asking whether we need human beings at all. And those can be scary conversations for a lot of people. But what it directs me toward is a conversation or a question. I am more interested in. What does it mean to become more human? My guess is that's closer to what the vast majority of the 8 billion people on planet Earth actually want. We want to understand ourselves. We want to be able to love each other without so much fear getting in the way. We want our children to have a good life. We want to feel that our lives mean something. And yet the conversation about the future can get dominated By a relatively small number of very loud people. With tremendous amounts of money and vested interest and influence. They have a vision. They have the resources to pursue it. And pretty soon, their vision starts to feel like the only possibility. Now they can have their vision. They're allowed to be interested in what they're interested in. If they want to integrate with machines, good for them. Enjoy chip implant. But we have to remind ourselves that we are capable of creating something, too. We're capable of coming together and expressing big ideas in the world, too. You know, a person can be brilliant at building a technology. And still have a philosophy of life that you don't share or that you violently disagree with. You can appreciate what they've Created without enrolling in everything they believe about where humanity should go. And I think that's where we lose ourselves sometimes. We hear an idea enough times from somebody who seems important enough, and we stop considering it. We start organizing our lives around it. That's the great anxiety that so many people are living in right now. And, you know, we do this personally, too. Somebody tells you what you're capable of. Somebody tells you how relationships work. Somebody tells you there's never enough money. And that idea becomes a reality that you live inside until you stop and you question it. So we can question the ideas that we're being handed about the future in the same way we can ask whether this is actually what we want to create. We can ask what else is possible. We can question the ideas we're being handed about the future. In the same way we can ask whether this is actually what we want to create. We can ask what else is possible. What excites me about Watts's consideration is this possibility that technology could help direct us back toward latent capabilities within ourselves that we haven't yet fully understood, uh, or activated. Because there's already something extraordinary about human beings, like your ability to imagine a life that you haven't lived yet, your capacity to forgive somebody, the way another person's presence can help someone feel safe enough to be honest and authentic. We tend to overlook these extraordinary things because they don't look as impressive as a machine solving some complicated mathematical formula or some other thing that we've never seen a machine do before. But I'm more interested in what happens when we develop those extra human capacities more fully. So in the Christian tradition, we have accounts of Jesus healing the sick, manipulating the material world, transcending death. And other spiritual traditions also contain accounts of extraordinary human capacities, including telepathy and levitation. These accounts raise a question that matters to me. Have we fully understood what a human being is capable of? In John 14, Jesus says, Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these. I understand that as an invitation to take our spiritual potential seriously. Perhaps there's much more available to us than we've allowed ourselves to imagine. Perhaps evolving as humans isn't about embedding chips in our brains, but about discovering capabilities that our current understanding of humans doesn't yet account for. And we can explore that while using technology. I'm excited about artificial intelligence. I'm interested in how it can support personal growth, how it can help us recognize patterns we keep Repe how it can free up over time so that we can pursue the things that we're passionate about and pursue actually becoming more human. But I want to be clear about the purpose. If a tool helps me understand why I keep reacting defensively, the opportunity is to take that understanding into my relationships, to have the conversation with a real person, to listen differently, to actually change how I'm showing up. That's the kind of development that I'm interested in. Where what we build helps us participate more fully in our human lives, not separate us from other human beings. And this is why personal growth and personal healing are so important. Because creation, as I understand it, is a byproduct of where we put our attention, where we put our focus. Your attention, your observation and the quality of your observation is for all practical purposes, you. I want you to think about this. What makes you you? What makes you who you are? It's certainly not the way you look or the job you have. Those things change or how much money is in your bank account. Those things matter to some degree, but they do not indicate who you are. Who you are is the one who stands in awe of a beautiful sunset and has that experience. It is the one who cries while watching an animated movie with your four year old. It is the one who craves to do more and be more and create more. And becomes frustrated in a world that seems so overwhelmingly chall challenging. That's you. It's the quality of your consciousness. That is your soul, that is your spirit. That is your observation. That is your attention. Your attention is the creative force of the universe. Because you are a human being. And human beings have the unique, exclusive capacity to create their reality. Where you direct your attention, this vital force, you shape the material world into the physical reality that you live in. Just as fish were born to swim and birds were born to fly, human beings were born to create reality, to create something out of nothing through the thoughts they think, the emotions they feel, and the attention they direct. But if your attention is constantly captured by fear, you can spend your life reacting from inside someone else's reality rather than creating your own. Watching another prediction. Waiting to find out what somebody else is going to do. And I'm asking you to consider what happens when you liberate your attention. We don't all have the same resources or influence. I understand that. But the capacity to begin working with our attention matters in every single life. You don't have to be the person with the most money in the room to decide what you're going to think Today, where you're going to focus your energy, what you're going to believe. This is the work I'm always talking about. Becoming aware of the beliefs that keep you trapped inside of a reality that you do not want and changing those beliefs because you can be concerned about the world and still have access to your creativity. You can recognize that there are serious problems and still decide to contribute to solving them. But you can't do that if you have not healed. You cannot do that if fear out there continues to trigger fear inside your nervous system. If we want to become more human, we must learn to direct our attention freely. If we want to be free, we have to free our attention. The scripture doesn't just tell us, it commands us so many times. One of my favorites is Joshua 1:9. Have I not commanded you be strong and courageous? Do not be frightened and do not be dismayed. Why? For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. It's fine that some people want to populate Mars. They're excited about rocket ships and what it could take to live on another planet that has red dirt and water where you eat granola bars. That's their vision and that's fine. But there are. These are people who are uninterested in Earth. They are uninterested in preserving life on Earth. They are uninterested in protecting the Earth. They are uninterested in enhancing the Earth. I don't know about you, but, like, I'm not done with this planet. And I'm pretty sure Earth is not done with herself. I'm more interested in making more with Earth. This extraordinary once in a galaxy kind of place. That is a floating Garden of Eden amongst the stars. The place that God hung in the firmament for his children to flourish. That's what I'm interested in. Not so much Mars. I'm interested in removing plastics from the ocean. I'm interested in restoring the forests and the jungles and giving the people their resources so that they don't need to sacrifice nature for nourishment. In helping the tens of thousands of species struggling to survive and protecting the places where they live and figuring out how we can live here in ways that allow life to flourish beyond anything we've yet experienced. There's a lot of space here. You know, we've just scratched the surface of it. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise because they're probably the same people trying to convince you to abandon this planet to go hang out on another one. And we can be working on these Things. Now we can direct our intelligence and our technology and our attention towards them. That doesn't mean every problem is easy to solve. It means there's work available to us. This is the challenge that we've been called for at this time. There are things we already know how to begin doing, and there are things we can learn to do better. I don't know whether the particular sequence Watts imagined will ever happen. Much of it has. But the aspiration speaks to me. Can we become more capable while also living more harmoniously with the place that sustains us? Can the things we create help restore the world we love rather than destroy it? Can we use technology to give us more time with each other, to know each other and to love each other more deeply? Can they help us cooperate on things that we couldn't ever accomplish alone? Those are questions we can bring to the tools that we use and the things we choose to support. And they give our excitement about technology a, uh, direction. Now, underneath all of this is something personal for me. I believe in God. I believe in the goodness of the future. I believe that good ultimately wins over evil. One of my favorite Bible passages, it's known as the first of the good news, the proto evangelion. In Genesis 3:15, God says to the serpent, I will put division between you and the woman, between her offspring and yours. You will strike his heel, but he will crush your head. And I remember this almost every day when I'm tempted by the media, by the transhumanist agenda, by the doom and gloom and the fear that tempts me to doubt my sovereignty in this world. God does not wait long to let us know that good wins over evil, that faith stands victorious over fear. And that is my belief. And it has a very practical effect on how I live because it allows me to participate without carrying the assumption that everything is destined to fall apart. And I return to that because fear can become so convincing. You hear something enough times, you imagine it enough times, pretty soon you're experiencing a future that hasn't happened, as though you're already inside of it. And my faith helps me come back to the life that's actually here, right here, right now, to the people that I love, to the work that I can do, to the opportunity to contribute today. That's being human and believing in, um, the goodness of the future calls me to take responsibility for how I participate. If I want a more loving world, I have to practice that. If I want people to feel less alone, I have to reach out and connect with somebody. I don't need to know every detail of how the future unfolds to live that way. Right now, I can trust in goodness and act on what's available to me. I. And whether you use the word God or understand something different, I want to invite you into that possibility that you can meet this moment with hope that your life can contribute to something beautiful. This brings me back to where Watts ends. If you could know another person deeply enough, he suggests, you would recognize yourself. Think about how often that already happens when somebody is honest with you. They tell you what they've been struggling with and you realize, wow, I felt that too. The person you thought was so different from you becomes somebody that you understand. And that's part of what becoming more human means to me. Coming to know ourselves well enough that we can recognize our humanity in everybody else. Understanding our own fears so we don't have to keep organizing our relationships around them. And you can't get that unique human to human feedback from a machine. Maybe technology can help us find each other. Maybe it can introduce people who would never otherwise have connected. And then we have the opportunity to actually know each other. That's the future. I'm interested in creating a greater humanity, a human to human economy. A world where our growing capabilities support our capacity to care for each other and for this beautiful planet. So consider this in your own life. Where have you accepted somebody else's idea about the future as though it's already decided? And what would you like to create instead? Give that some of your attention today. Share your different ideas rather than keeping them secret or feeling helpless because you're not. Take a small step toward the thing you care about. Begin working with the belief that says your contribution does matter, because it does. The future is being created by the way we live together and how we participate in each other's lives today. And I believe we have so much more available to us than fear is allowing us to see. More capacity to heal, more capacity to understand each other. More opportunity to create a life here that we're excited to be a part of. That's what I want to put my attention towards. That's what I want to help create. And I believe there are a great many people who want to create it with us. It just takes the courage to think differently. And that's my invitation to you. And hey, if you want to become a part of what we're creating, jump on over right now before this episode ends. To wholehuman.com or click the link in the show notes. We have been working for the last 18 months on creating a platform for people just like you to connect and grow and to learn to become more human and from that deeper humanity create real change in the world. Right now we've got our free AI power powered mindset assessment@wholehuman.com it's a unique technology we've developed to help you heal and go deeper on transforming your fear and your limiting beliefs so that you can become even more human. It's absolutely free. It only takes about three minutes and when you register you'll be added to our email list and be invited to the big announcement that I'll be sharing live on December 4th and 5th that I really believe is going to transform the personal development industry forever. If you haven't yet, please subscribe. This is so important. It is the way that we grow this community, spread the work and if you hit the bell icon, you'll get announcements twice a week when I release new episodes. And if you know someone who would be inspired by this video, pay it forward. Share the episode with them. Lastly, if you're part of our audio community on Apple and you want to follow the show, all you need to do is just go back to the show page, hit the three dots in the top, right click follow. We're on our way to the top 10 on Apple and by following you can help us achieve that together. So I love you so much. Thank you for bringing your attention, your soul, your energy here with me today and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David.

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