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The Epicureans share, for example, the Stoic goal of tranquility: according to Epicurus, “It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.”39 And like the Stoics, they thought we should be suspicious of the desires we find within us: “Every desire must be confronted with this question: what will happen to me, if the object of my desire is accomplished and what if it is not?”40 The suggestion is that if we ask this question, we will in many cases find that getting what we want will make us no better off than not getting it. "

"“We should not spoil what we have by desiring what we have not, but remember that what we have too was the gift of fortune.”41 Epicurus also agrees with the Stoics on the importance, if we seek happiness, of mastering our desires: “Unhappiness comes either through fear or through vain and unbridled desire: but if a man curbs these, he can win for himself the blessedness of understanding.”42 One important part of mastering desire will be mastering our desire for social status. Rather than seeking fame, our goal should be to “live unknown.”43 Like the Stoics, Epicurus disparages material wealth: “Poverty, when measured by the natural purpose of life, is great wealth, but unlimited wealth is great poverty.”44 Wealth, he argues, rarely compensates one for the drudgery necessary to acquire it.45 Furthermore, it is difficult to acquire possessions unless one is servile to “mobs or monarchs”;46 consequently, in gaining possessions we generally relinquish our freedom. “Many men,” he points out, “when they have acquired riches have not found the escape from their ills but only a change to greater ills.”47"

"

Pyrrho of Ellis (c. 360–270 B.C.) founded the Greek school of Skepticism (also known as Pyrrhonism). Five hundred years after Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus offered a fleshed-out development of Skepticism. Sextus argues that much of the suffering we experience is a consequence of the opinions we hold. "

" the actual pain of the needle will be multiplied many times by your sense of outrage at being thus attacked. The physical pain might be identical to that inflicted by the doctor, but the psychic pain will be extreme. (This claim echoes the Stoic claim that what hurts us is not so much the world around us as the thoughts inside our heads.) Skeptics hope to reduce the amount of pain they experience and gain a measure of tranquility and happiness in their lives by refusing to think that things are bad: “For though [a Skeptic] suffers emotion through his senses, yet because he does not also opine that what he suffers is evil by nature, the emotion he suffers is moderate.”49

"Besides withholding our belief about what is good and bad, Skeptics counsel us to withhold our belief about what is desirable and undesirable. After all, as soon as someone allows himself to believe that something is desirable or undesirable, he stirs up for himself, says Sextus, “a flood of evils.”51 If he doesn’t get what he wants, “he will be extremely perturbed because of his desire to gain it,” and if he does get what he wants, “he will never be at rest owing to the excess of his joy or on account of keeping watch over his acquisition.”52 

Sextus writes that “it is by pursuing earnestly and with extreme persistence what he himself believes to be good and desirable that each man unwittingly falls into the evil lying nextdoor.”54

", the following Buddhist advice on how to attain a tranquil mind: “The remedy . . . is to still the mind, to stop it from making discriminations and nurturing attachments toward certain phenomena and feelings of aversion toward others.” Likewise, “one should try to stop the mind from making the kinds of discrimination that lead to craving or attachment.”57 Taken at face value, this sounds a lot like Sextus’s recommendation that we withhold our belief about what is desirable and undesirable."

"

" observed that bad men obey their lusts as servants obey their masters.8"

"He rejected the common definition of success:
“If a man has spent all his days about some business by which he has merely got to be rich as it is called: i.e. has got much money, many houses and barns and wood lots, then his life has been a failure, I think.”29

Our desires, as we have seen, have a life of their own. We often don’t choose to desire what we desire; instead, we discover desires within us. Even when we consciously form new desires in an utterly rational manner, we usually find, when we examine them, that they are instrumental desires, the satisfaction of which will ultimately enable us to satisfy a desire we didn’t choose to have. "

"We shouldn’t trust our desires. Just because we detect a desire within us doesn’t mean we should take ownership of it. Many“natural” desires are parasitic: they take up residence in us without being invited, and while within us, try to hijack our plan for living. We should work to rid ourselves of these desires, much as we would try to rid ourselves of a tapeworm. We need to be careful about turning to other people for advice on dealing with desires . Most people, after all, are slaves to their desires and therefore have no helpful advice to offer. "

"Mastering desire will involve a two-stage strategy . In the first, we try to prevent the onset of unwanted desires: this might mean avoiding certain influences"

" In the second stage we try to extinguish those unwanted desires "

"examine the research of psychologists who have explored the role our unconscious plays in desire formation "

"That our desires generally don’t exist in isolation . Instead they come into existence because of something else we want; they are, in other words, instrumental desires. Furthermore, it is possible for a single desire to give rise to thousands or even millions of these instrumental desires. Desires, in other words, are like microorganisms dropped into a warm, nutrient-rich pond. Left to their own devices, they will reproduce until the pond is a fetid swamp. This in turn suggests that we should be very careful about what “initial” desires we form."

"That the worst way to deal with our feelings of dissatisfaction is by working to satisfy the desires we find within us . If we do this, we practically guarantee that we will never experience lasting satisfaction, since the desire we satisfy will quickly be replaced by another desire. Trying to gain satisfaction by working to fulfill the desires that arise within us is like trying to deal with a heroin addiction by working to get a heroin fix. It is better, in the case of heroin, to kick the habit, and better, in the case of desire, to master our desires to the extent possible."

"That mastering desire won’t be easy . It will require sustained effort on our part, and there will be setbacks. Having said this, I should add that mastering desire will be less difficult than we might imagine. For one thing, once we come to understand our desires, many of them will simply vanish; they will fall away, as Bhikkhu Bodhi puts it,“like the leaves of a tree, naturally and spontaneously.” Furthermore, the effort required to master desire is probably less, all things considered, than the effort we will expend trying to fulfill whatever desires pop into our head. It is true that a person attempting to master desire will have to spend time reflecting on his desires and how best to overcome them and might have to spend some of his free time reading philosophers or meditating. But the alternative approach, working to satisfy a neverending stream of desires, will be far more arduous. "

According to the people examined in this book, our goal should not be the attainment of worldly success—the attainment of fame and fortune. It should instead be the attainment of satisfaction. What matters is not a person’s absolute level of fame and fortune but whether his level of fame and fortune are sufficient for him—whether he feels satisfied with it. The lower his expectations are with respect to fame and fortune, the easier it will be for him to gain satisfaction. Someone might argue that worldly success can bring satisfaction—indeed, that the reason people pursue worldly success is so they can become satisfied. But when we look at people who have gained worldly success, we find that their success did not extinguish the feelings of dissatisfaction that drove them to pursue it. In the words of Epicurus, “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”2 Suppose, for the sake of argument, Epicurus is wrong. Suppose we come across a person who, as the result of decades of effort involving unpleasant toil and considerable anxiety, gains worldly success, and suppose that on gaining it he gains lasting satisfaction. This person, despite having gained satisfaction, deserves our pity, for either he could have gained satisfaction with much less effort, or he could not. In the former case, we should pity him for wasting his effort—for working so hard to get something that could easily have been obtained, if only he had mastered his desires. He is like someone who traveled all the way to Tibet to get a certain kind of tea, even though it was readily available at his corner market. And if, turning to the second case, it was impossible for this person to gain satisfaction without first gaining worldly success, we should pity him for being so hard to satisfy. He is like someone who cans
become healthy only if he undergoes half a dozen operations. If only he could have enjoyed health without all this medical intervention! "

"For most of us, though, the choice between worldly success and satisfaction is mutually exclusive. Generally, to gain fame or fortune a person must be driven by ambition, and a driven person is unlikely to feel satisfied with his circumstances."

"The first is that it is quite unlikely that everyone will take the above advice to heart: across the millennia and across cultures, only a handful of individuals are sufficiently enlightened to recognize that there can and should be more to life than laboring daily in the service of one’s BIS"

"It is worth noting, by the way, that although Thoreau, Merton, and Epicurus, were not conventionally ambitious— they did not spend their days working to gain fame and fortune— it hardly follows that they were lazy. To the contrary, their days were full of activity they found to be satisfying, even though the activity in question was unlikely to gain them worldly success"

" I have documented the extent to which “our” choices aren’t so much made by us as they are made for us, at an unconscious level. Therefore it follows that any life plan “we” choose won’t really be our plan, any more than the plan set for us by evolution is our plan. But if it isn’t our plan, how can adopting it confer meaning on our lives? "

If you are more satisfied than they are, then it is entirely possible that they are less happy than you, despite their fame and fortune. And since it is unlikely that the billionaire and the actress would have achieved the success they did if they were easily satisfied, it is likely that you are more satisfied than they are and therefore are happier as well. It is true that by pursuing material wealth and social status we can earn the rewards offered by our BIS, but it is unlikely that these rewards will fully compensate us for the trouble involved in pursuing them—particularly when we recall how fleeting the rewards are likely to be. Is our goal in life to be rich? Then we would do well to take to heart the Taoist proverb, repeated in many cultures, that “he who knows contentment is rich.”4 Lao Tzu was right, I think, when he claimed that “there is no disaster greater than not being content.”5

 We developed very practical attitudes to the theatre. As Edward Bond said, 'The writers' group taught me that drama was about relationships, not about characters.' 

"My bias against discussion is something I've learned to see as very English. I've known political theatre groups in Europe which would readily cancel a rehearsal, but never a discussion. My feeling is that the best argument may be a testimony to the skill of the presenter, rather than to the excellence of the solution advocated. Also the bulk of discussion time is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do with the problem to be solved. My attitude is like Edison's, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were approaching the problem theoretically. "

wise talk:

Tragedy also works on the see-saw principle: its subject is the ousting of a high-status animal from the pack. Super-intelligent wolves might have invented this form of theatre, and the lupine Oedipus would play high status at all times. Even when he was being led into the wilderness he wouldn't whine, and he'd keep his tail up. If he crumbled into low-status posture and voice the audience wouldn't get the necessary catharsis. The effect wouldn't be tragic, but pathetic. Even criminals about to be executed were supposed to make a 'good end', i.e. to play high status. When the executioner asked Raleigh if he wouldn't rather face the light of the dawn he said something like 'What matter how the head lie, if the heart be right', which is still remembered. When a very high-status person is wiped out, everyone feels pleasure as they experience the feeling of moving up a step. This is why tragedy has always been concerned with kings and princes, and why we have a special high-status style for playing tragedy. I've seen a misguided Faustus writhing on the floor at the end of the play, which is bad for the verse, and pretty ineffective. Terrible things can happen to the high-status animal, he can poke his eyes out with his wife's brooch, but he must never look as if he could accept a position lower. in the pecking order. He has to be ejected from it. Tragedy is obviously related to sacrifice. Two things strike me about reports of sacrifices: one is that the crowd get more and more tense, and then are relaxed and happy at the moment of death; the other is that the victim is raised in status before being sacrificed. The best goat is chosen, and it's groomed, and magnificently decorated. "

" The stage becomes an even more 'dangerous' area if you can't admit your disabilities. The young George Devine cried once because the audience laughed when the character he was playing was referred to as thin. I remember a flat-chested actress being destroyed on stage because an adolescent shouted out that she was a man. The actor or improviser must accept his disabilities, and allow himself to be insulted, or he'll never really feel safe. "

"'Salvini approached the platform of the Doges, thought a little while, concentrated himself and, unnoticed by any of us, took the entire audience of the great theatre into his hands. It seemed that he did this with a single gesture-that he stretched his hand without looking into the public, grasped all of us in his palm, and held us there as if we were ants or flies. He closed his fist, and we felt the breath of death; he opened it, and we felt the warmth of bliss. We were in his power, and we will remain in it all our lives ... .' "

"

 Torrance has a theory that 'many children with impoverished imaginations have been subjected to rather vigorous and stern efforts to eliminate fantasy too early. They are afraid to think.' Torrance seems to understand the forces at work, but he still refers to attempts to eliminate fantasy too early. Why should we eliminate fantasy at all? Once we eliminate fantasy, then we have no artists. Intelligence is proportional to population, but talent appears not to be related to population numbers. "

"I'm living in a city at the edge of the Rocky Mountains; the popUlation is much greater than it was in Shakespearian London, and almost everyone here is literate, and has had many thousands of dollars spent on his education. Where are the 
 poets, and playwrights, and painters, and composers? Remember that there are hundreds of thousands of 'literate' people here, while in Shakespeare's London very few people could read. The great art of this part of the world was the art of the native peoples. The whites flounder about trying to be 'original' and failing miserably"

"Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many 'well adjusted' adults are bitter, uncreative frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. "

 before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It's no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It's not surprising that great Mrican sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill orlack of skill, but simply for being what he is. Schiller wrote of a 'watcher at the gates of the mind', who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind 'the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.' He said that uncreative people 'are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators ... regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.' M.y teachers had the opposite theory. They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices."

My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people-and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way. Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they're a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role. Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. It's a matter of presenting yourself as safe

There is a link with status transactions here, since low-status players tend to accept, and high-status players to block. High-status players will block any action unless they feel they can control it. "

"Blocking is a form of aggression. I say this because if I set up a scene in which two students are to say 'I love you' to each other, they almost always accept each other's ideas. Many students do their first interesting, unforced improvisations during 'I love you' scenes."

The motto of scared improvisers is 'when in doubt, say "NO".' We use this in life as a way of blocking action"

" In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very 'gifted' improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action'

"A block is anything that prevents the action from developing, or that wipes out your partner's premise. & If it develops the action it isn't a block. 

Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made-which is something no 'normal' pcr~on would do. Also they may accept offers which weren't really intended. 1 tell my actors never to think up an offer, but instead to assume that oue has already been made. "

 The actor who will accept anything that happens seems supernatural; it's the most marvellous thing about improvisation: you are suddenly in contact with people who are unbounded, whose imagination seems to function without limit. By analysing everything into blocks and acceptances, the students get insight into the forces that shape the scenes, and they understand why certain people seem difficult to work with. These 'offer-block-accept' games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding."

"The stages I try to take students through involve the realisation (I) that we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; (2) that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and (3) that we are not, as we are taught to think, our 'personalities', but that the imagination is our true self. 

"When I meet a new group of students they will usually be 'naysayers'. This term and its opposite, 'yeasayers'"

'We have arrived at a fairly consistent picture of the variables that differentiate yeasayers from naysayers. Yeasayers seem to be "id-dominated" personalities, with little concern about or positive evaluation of an integrated control of their impulses. They say they express themselves freely and quickly. Their "psychological inertia" is very low, that is, very few secondary processes intervene as a screen between underlying wish and overt behavioural response. The yeasayers desire and actively search for emotional excitement in their environment. Novelty, movement, change, adventure-these provide the external stimuli for their emotionalism. They see the world as a stage where the main theme is 'acting out' libidinal desires. In the same way, they seek and respond quickly to internal stimuli: their inner impulses are allowed ready expression ... the yeasayer's general attitude is one of stimulus acceptance, by which we mean a pervasive readiness to respond affirmatively or yield willingly to both outer and inner forces demanding expression.

'The "disagreeing"naysayers have the opposite orientation. For them, impulses are seen as forces requiring control, and perhaps in some sense as threats to general personality stability. The naysayer wants to maintain inner equilibrium; his secondary processes are extremely impulsive and value maintaining forces. We might describe this as a state of high psychological inertia-impulses undergo a series of delays, censorships, and transformations before they are permitted expression. Both internal and external stimuli that demand response are carefully scrutinised and evaluated: these forces appear as unwelcome intruders into a subjective world of "classical" balance. Thus, as opposed to the yeasayers, the naysayers' general attitude is one of stimulus rejectiona pervasive unwillingness to respond to impulsive or environmental forces.' 

"Polanski: There you go, asking me how to shrink my head again. I don't know why. I was interested in creating a mood, an atmosphere, and after the film came out, a lot of critics found all sorts of symbols and hidden meanings in it that I hadn't even thought of. It made me sick. (Playboy, December, 1971.)

I started my work on narrative by trying to make the improvisers conscious of the implications of the scenes they played. I felt that an artist ought to be 'committed', and that he should be held responsible for the effects of his work-it seemed only common sense. I got my students to analyse the content of Red Riding Hood and The Sleeping Beauty and Moby Dick and The Birthday Party, but this made them even more inhibited. I didn't realise that if the people who thought up Red Riding Hood had been aware of the implications, then they might never have written the story. This was at a time when I had no inspiration as a writer at all, but I didn't twig that the more I tried to understand the 'real' meaning, the less I wrote."

"Moby Dick may be a symbol for the 'life-force', or for 'evil' and we can add anything it suggests to us, but the area of legitimate association is limited. There are things the white whale doesn't symbolise, as well as things it does, and once you start combining signs together in a narrative the whole thing becomes too complex. A story is as difficult to interpret as a dream, and the interpretation of a dream depends on who's doing the interpreting. When King Lear really gets going-the mad King, the man pretending to be mad, the fool paid to be mad, and the whole mass of overlapping and contradictory associations-what can the spectator sensibly do but be swept away on the flood, and experience the play, instead of trying to think what it 'means'."

"Even at the level of geometrical signs 'meaning' is ambiguous. A cross, a circle, and a swastika contain a 'content' quite apart from those which we assign to them. "

Witcher book summaries:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr3ZxhhdViS_h2DRru5aCFw/videos

My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn't a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn't realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he's trying to fake up a personality he doesn't actually have, or to express views he really isn't in accord with. I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. If you want to write a 'working-class play' then you'd better be working class. If you want your play to be religious, then be religious. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent. "

"At this point a child would probably say 'And is that the end?' because clearly some sort of pattern has been completed. Yet at no time have I thought about the content of the scene. I presume it's about sexual anxieties and fear of old age, or whatever. Had I 'known' this, then I wouldn't have constructed that particular story, but as usual the content has looked after itself, and anyway is only of interest to critics or psychologists. What matters to me is the ease with which I 'free-associate' and the skill with which I reincorporate. "

"

"She can now invent a story easily, but she doesn't feel obliged to be 'creative', or 'sensitive' or whatever, because she believes the story is my invention. She no longer feels wary, and open to hostile criticism, as of course we all are in this culture whenever we do anything spontaneously. "

" people who claim to be unimaginative would think up the most astounding stories, so long as they remained convinced that they weren't responsible for them."

" It must be obvious that when someone insists that they 'can't think up a story', they really mean that they 'won't think up a story'-which is OK by me, so long as they understand it's a refusal, rather than a 'lack of talent'. 

"The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still 'balance' it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn't tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure. Sometimes they even cheer! They admire the improviser's grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may hav<; temporarily forgotten. "

I say 'Freeassociate', and then when they've produced unconnected material, I say 'Connect', or 'Reincorporate'. A knowledge of this game is very useful to a writer. First of all it encourages you to write whatever you feel like; it also means that you look back' when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you've shelved, and then reinclude them. If I want people to free-associate, then I have to create an environment in which they aren't going to be punished, or in any way held responsible for the things their imagination gives them. I devise techniques for taking the responsibility away from the personality. Some of these games are very enjoyable and others, at first encounter, are rather frightening; people who play them alter their view of themselves. I protect the students, encourage them and reassure them that they'll come to no harm, and then coax them or trick them into letting the imagination off its leash. One way to bypass the censor who holds our spontaneity in check is to distract him, or overload him. I might ask someone to write out a paragraph on paper (without premeditation) while counting backwards aloud from a hundred. I'll try it now as I'm typing:"

" I say, 'just name me a list of objects, but as quick as you can.' 'Er ... cat, dog, mouse, trap, dark cellar .. .' He trails off, because he feels that the list is somehow revealing something about himself. He wants to keep his defences up. When you act or speak spontaneously, you reveal your real self, as opposed to the self you've been trained to present. Nonsense results from a scrambling process, and takes time. You have to consider your thought, decide whether it gives you away, and then distort it, or replace it with something else. The student's 'trap' and 'dark cellar' were threatening to release some anxiety in him. If he'd continued with the list, speaking as quickly as possible, he'd have revealed himself as not quite so sane and secure as he pretends. I'll try typing out some nonsense as fast as I can and see what I get. "

This is still partly scrambled, because I can't type quickly enough. I managed to censor some of it, but I wasn't able to remove all the sexual content. I veered away from the lobster suspecting the image to be vaguely erotic, but it got worse. The only way I could have made it meaningless would be to type more slowly, and to substitute other images. This is what my students do all the time. I ask them for an idea and they say' ... oh ... aahh ... urn .. .' as if they couldn't think of one. The brain constructs the universe for us, so how is it possible to be 'stuck' for an idea? The student hesitates not because he doesn't have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited. 

An improviser can study status transactions, and advancing, and 'reincorporating', and can learn to free-associate, and to generate narrative spontaneously, and yet still find it difficult to compose stories. This is really for aesthetic reasons, or conceptual reasons. He shouldn't really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines. "

". It may be interesting to have a vet rectally examining an elephant, or to show brain surgeons doing a particularly delicate operation, but these activities remain routines. If two lavatory attendants break a routine by starting a brain operation, or if a window cleaner begins to examine the elephant, then this is likely to generate a narrative. "

It doesn't matter how stupidly you interrupt a routine, you will be automatically creating a narrative, and people will listen.

"We could introduce this concept by getting each actor in a scene to prearrange something that'll surprise his partner. In a scene where a couple are about to go to bed, maybe the husband suddenly turns into a boot fetishist, or maybe the wife will suddenly start to laugh hysterically, or find she's growing feathers. If you set out to do something in a scene that your partner can't anticipate, you automatically generate a narrative. Sometimes stories themselves become so predictable that they become routines. Nowadays if your princess kisses the frog, it's probably better if she becomes a frog herself, or if the frog she kissed just becomes six feet higher. It's no good the knight killing the dragon and deflowering the virgin any more. Killing the virgin and deflowering the dragon is more likely to hold the audience's attention. "