Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
CHUCK HILLIG: I remember something that I heard Alan Watts
say once. Alan Watts was a great teacher for me, I only met him
one time but I used to listen to a lot of his lectures and speeches.
One of the things that I remember was that somebody asked him,
Alan, do you still use mind-altering substances? And he said,
“No.” They said, why not, you used a lot of them with Tim Leary
and Ralph Metzner and Walter Panke and all those people back
then? He said, well, it is like a telephone. When you get the
message, you can hang up the phone.
WIZARD: I was noticing in your little book you’re talking about it
and that reminded me of Alan Watts and his little book, This Is It.
CHUCK HILLIG: Yes, This is It, yes that page has meant a lot to
me, yes it did.
WIZARD: That was one of the first ones, one of the cracks in my
egg.
TRIP: Speaking of it, you have so many of these and I just love it,
you say, “Although the ego is compelled to go out looking for
consciousness, ironically it’s only real hope of ever surviving is not
finding.”
CHUCK HILLIG: That’s right. Again, it’s those paradoxes. It’s
funny to be able to hold both things at the same time. One of the
things that I did want to mention was that the people that I’ve
talked to, both individually and in groups, a whole lot of them
believe at some level that they are walking through a maze. we’ve
all been in corn mazes where you down dead ends and you get lost
and you make mistakes and you have to back and start over and
then try this one and back and forth; and that’s how they see their
lives––like they’re walking through a maze. And I say “No. No,
no, no. You’re not walking through a maze. You’re walking
through a labyrinth.” Now, a labyrinth we know is very different
from a maze because you can get lost in a maze without too much
trouble, but you can never, ever, ever get lost in a labyrinth. All
you need to do to get the center is to keep on keeping on.
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