I just spent the past hour combing through videos to find where he said that and all I can find is this:
Start at 10:00
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eVb0qCPA4[/youtube]
And then some text from here beingsakin.wordpress.com/tag/alan-watts/page/2/
[i]Now another interesting thing about this is that I can show you how the present changes the past. Let’s take for example the order of words. Now words are strung out in a line just like we think events in time are strung out in a line and I can change a past word by a future word. If I say (taking a line from the poet Thomas Hood), “They went and told the sexton, and the sexton tolled the bell.” You don’t know what the first told means until you get the sexton; you don’t know what the second tolled means until you get to the word bell. And so the later event changes the meaning of the former. Or you can say for example, “The bark of the tree,” and the word bark has a certain meaning. Then I say, “The bark of the dog,” and the later word has changed the meaning of the former one.
And so, in this way, when we write history we find that writing history is really an art. The historian keeps putting a fresh interpretation on past events and in that sense he is changing it. He is changing their meaning just like we were changing the meaning of a former word by a later word by saying, “They went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell.”
In this way you can experience a curious liberation from what the Hindus and the Buddhists call karma. The word karma in Sanskrit actually means doing, action. Karma comes from the root kri which simply means to do. When something happens to me, an accident or an illness, a Buddhist or a Hindu will say, “Well, it was your karma.” In other words, you had done something in the past and you reap the unfortunate consequence in a later time. Now that’s not the real meaning of karma. Karma does not mean cause and effect. It simply means doing. In other words, you are doing what is happening to you. And that, of course, depends upon how you define the word you. For example, consider breathing; am I doing it or is it happening to me? I am growing my hair; am I doing it or is it happening to me? You can look at it either way. I am being sick, or I am being destroyed in an accident – if I define myself as the whole field of events, the organism-environment field which is the real me, then all the things that happen to me may be called my doing. And that is the real sense of karma.[/i]
I’ll keep looking and when I find the video about the babies and bark of the dog/tree, I’ll post it here.
Alan is pretty sharp. If you don’t know who he is, check him out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts