Excerpt from the essay The Spirit of Violence and the Matter of Peace in Does It Matter? by Alan Watts

This quote about Israel captured my attention because of the war that broke out these past couple weeks. I’m astounded that this psalm was so prescient.

More and more, the scientists are saying that man must now take his future evolution into his own (i.e., the ego’s) hands, and rely no longer upon the caprices of “natural selection.” Yet those who speak thus do not seem to realize that this is going to require increasing violence against “deviant” forces within the individual and within society. The aspiration to direct evolution is also the aspiration to be “as God,” and thus—as God is generally conceived in the West—to be dictator of the world.

But, as the psalm says, “Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” This is really the same as the saying that “There is no peace for the wicked,” for those who, like the tyrant-image of God, take the law into their own hands. For our traditional model of the universe is basically military.

– Alan Watts, Does It Matter?, The Spirit of Violence and the Matter of Peace

A couple pages later this paragraph caught my attention:

Only a supernaturalist would deliberately press the button to set off nuclear warfare, in the belief that his spiritual values are more important than material existence. And this involves the open or tacit supposition that the spiritual dimension is immortal, that in heaven or on some higher level of vibration unaffected by bodily death he will continue his existence, congratulating himself on his fidelity to principle and wagging the finger of reproof at the surprisedly immortal souls of dialectical materialists, eating crow in the sky instead of pie. This simply goes to show that belief in the superiority and final authority of the rational, intellectual, conceptual, and symbolic domain as the ultimate reality may be inconsistent with the survival of mankind.

– Alan Watts, Does It Matter?, The Spirit of Violence and the Matter of Peace

It is perhaps the truth that the most horrible people have the best intentions.

I’m reminded of Alan when he talks about the priests who burned people at the stake in the hopes that they would repent because they truly believed that they had a chance of saving them from eternal damnation.

“Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.”

– Alan Watts (Goodreads.com link)