Alan Watts
From a Certain Point Of View
The web is a trap
Like the spider's web is a trap for flies
Also, the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men from a certain point of view

From a certain point of view
And I want to consider the web as something playful
You see there are so many ways of looking at it
And you will find that all these ways are right, but what we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
Of the view
From a certain point of view

The web is a trap
Like the spider's web is a trap for flies
Also, the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men from a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
And I want to consider the web as something playful
You see there are so many ways of looking at it
And you will find that all these ways are right, but what we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
Of the view
From a certain point of view

[Chorus]
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
There are people for example who can see the web as a trap, and get stuck with that
There are people to whom existence is simply hateful
They see it as nothing but a ghastly mistake
The Lord really erred when he created this world
Because he arranged it in such a way that everything lives by eating something else
And what I'm doing is I'm describing a certain point of view
(From a certain point of view)
I'm not exactly philosophizing, I'm describing a point of view
You can look at life in such a way that the whole thing is this ghastly mistake
For example, there's no such thing as genuine kindness or love
Everybody is really pretending that they are loving other people in order to get some advantage from it
And indeed there's a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia
Where people who don't seem to be real they are mechanisms, and you can think that out quite intensely with a good deal of intelligence
After all if you start from a good old Darwinian or Freudian basis
And see that man is a material machine, and that the consciousness of man is simply a very evolved and complicated form of chemistry
Well then these awful mechanical things, these Frankenstein's that everybody is, they come around and they say
"Well I'm alive, I'm a human being, I have a heart. I love, I hate, I have problems, I feel."
And you feel like saying
"Come off it, you're just a monster. And you put on the civilized act because really you're just a set of teeth on the end of a tube."

[Chorus]
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
What we need is the fullness of the view
From a certain point of view
From a certain point of view
And you've got a ganglion behind those teeth
Which you call your brain and your so alleged mind
And this thing is really basically there for two purposes
One to be cunning enough to get something to eat to put down the tube
And the other, you know what, Mr. Freud libido
And everything else you see can be construed as an elaborate subtle way of pretending that that's not really what you want to do, but you do
But you put on a great show
Now some people according to this view get mixed up, they are so repressed
That what they really want to do is to eat and to screw, they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities
And think that that's the real purpose of life
And then they become what's called neurotic
[Laugh]
Because they get involved in being pure camouflage
That's what’s called escaping from the facts
Not looking at life, not looking at reality correctly