Alan Watts
Complete Honesty
Jung had a tremendous humor
And he knew
[Chorus]
That nobody can be completely honest
You will try and have a great deal of success
Exploring your motivation and your dark unconscious depths
That nobody can be completely honest
You will try and have a great deal of success
But there will be a certain point at which you will say
"Well I've had enough of that," you know?
And do you see how in a strange way there’s a certain sanity in that?
When a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity of deception
There is something, you all laughed when I said that, there's something humorous about it
And this humor is [a] very funny thing
Basically humor is an attitude of laughter about ones self
There is malicious humor, which is laughing at other people
But real deep humor
Is laughter at ones self
Now why fundamentally do you laugh about yourself?
What makes you laugh about yourself?
Isn't it because you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside?
That if I hint
You see, that you’re inside is the opposite of your outside it makes people laugh, if I don't do it unkindly
If I get up in the attitude of a preacher
And say you're a bunch of miserable sinners and you ought to be different
Nobody laughs
But if I say “Well, after all, boys will be boys, and girls will be girls,”
We all know, then, people laugh
[Chorus]
That nobody can be completely honest
You will try and have a great deal of success
Exploring your motivation and your dark unconscious depths
That nobody can be completely honest
You will try and have a great deal of success
But there will be a certain point at which you will say
"Well I've had enough of that," you know?
Now, you see what's happening when we do that?
Now, I passed you around a lot of embroidery to look at
Before we started
And I'm perfectly sure that you got the point
That there's a big difference between the front and the back
In some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front
Because people take shortcuts
In the front everything is orderly, and it is supposed to be kinda messy on the back side
See, which side will you wear?
You got to be sure you get the front in the front, and the back in the back
The back has all the little tricks in it, all the shortcuts
All the low down that people don't acknowledge
And it’s exactly the same with the way we live
You know, like sweeping the dust under the carpet in a hurry just before the guests come
I mean we do ever so many things like that
And if you don’t do it, if you don't think you do it, and you think
“Well, really my embroidery is the same on both sides.”
See? Well you’re deceiving yourself
Because what you're doing is you're taking the shortcuts in another dimension
Which you're keeping out of consciousness
Everybody takes the shortcuts, everybody plays tricks
Everybody has in himself an element of duplicity, of deception
Because you see from this point of view that I’m discussing, where the web is the trap
To be is to deceive
[Chorus]
That nobody can be completely honest
You will try and have a great deal of success
Exploring your motivation and your dark unconscious depths
That nobody can be completely honest
You will try and have a great deal of success
But there will be a certain point at which you will say
"Well I've had enough of that," you know?
To be – is to deceive
To be – is to deceive