simsonabim – What If God Got Bored - Podcast #4

What If God Got Bored? "I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if
you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream
and you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip,
say 75 years of subjective time into 8 hours of sleep. You would, I
suppose, start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design
for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life – love affairs,
banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, music beyond
belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing, 75
years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something
different, and you would move over to an adventurous dimension,
where there was sudden dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing
with dangers, and you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go
on dangerous journeys, make wonderful explosions and blow them up.
Eventually get into contest with enemies. And after you’ve done
that for some time, you’d think up a new wrinkle. To forget that
you were dreaming, so you’d think it was all for real, and to be
anxious about it. Because it’d be so great when you woke up, and
they you’d say, well, like children who dare each other on things,
how far out could you get? What could you take? What dimension of
being lost, of abandonment of your power, what dimension of that
could you stand? You could ask yourself this ‘cos you know you’d
eventually wake up. And after you’re gone on doing this, you see,
for some time, you’d suddenly find yourself sitting around in this
room, with all your personal involvements, problems, etc, talking
with me. How do you know that’s not what you’re doing? Could be,
because after all, what would you do if you were god? If you were,
what there is, the self, and do you punish us – The basic text of
Hinduism, one of them starts out saying in the beginning was the
self, and looking around it said, I am. And thus it is that
everyone to this day, when asked who is there, says that it is I.
If you were god, and in this sense that you knew everything, you
would be bored. Because, if looking at it from another way, we push
technology to its furthest possible development, and we had instead
of a dial telephone on one’s desk, a more complicated system of
buttons, and one touch would give you anything you wanted,
Aladdin’s lamp, you would eventually have to add a button labelled
surprise, because all perfectly know futures are past. They have
happened, virtually. It is only the true future that is a surprise.
So if you were god, you would say to yourself – man, get lost." -
Alan Watts Tracklist: Alan Watts - If God Got Bored DJ Koze - XTC
Jurny - Only When I'm Dreaming Heinrichs & Hirtenfellner - You
are I No Boundaries - Modular Pursuits (Daphni Mix) Martyn &
Four Tet - Glassbeadgames (8 Hours At Fabric Dub) Alan Watts -
Captivated By The Drama A.A.L. - I Never Dream Anthony Naples -
Abrazo Agoria - Les Violons Ivres (Super Remix) Axel Boman - No!
No! No! No! Floating Points - Nuits Sonores Flying Lotus - Dream To
Me Karlheinz Stockhausen - Helicopter String Quartet (Docu Excerpt)