ALAN WATTS:
One of the first things
which everybody should
understand is that every
creature in the universe that is
in any way sensitive and in any
manner of speaking conscious
regards itself as a human being.
It knows and is aware of a
hierarchy of beings above it and
a hierarchy of beings below it.
That is to say, that wherever
you are and whoever you are and
whatever you are,
you're in the middle.
That's the game.
Your senses extend a
certain direction, in
all directions and,
therefore, give you the
impression of being in
the middle.
Because the definition of a
person is where you look from.
Now, everything in the
world feels like that.
And also it has it's own
kind. You see spiders
and hydras and sea
urchins and so on
don't look very natural to us.
We say, "Well, I won't
want to look like that."
But they say when they
see us, "Well, what kind
of an awful thing is that?
And what a lot of
nonsense it does."
Now, we come here right
at the start to an
extremely important principal,
which is
the different points of view
you get when you change
your level of magnification.
That is to say, you can look at
something with a microscope
and see it a certain way;
you can look at it
with a naked eye
and see it in a certain way;
and you can look at it
with a telescope
and you see it another way.
Now, which level of
magnification is the
correct one?
Well, obviously, they're
all correct.
They're just different
points of view.
When we examine our
bloodstreams under a microscope
we see there's one hell of a
fight going on.
All sorts of microorganisms are
chewing each other up.
And if we got it overly
fascinated with our view
of our bloodstreams in
the microscope,
we should start taking sides
which would be fatal
because the health
of our organism depends
on the continuance of
this battle.
What is in other words
conflict at one level of
magnification is harmony
at a higher level.
Now, could it possibly
be, therefore, that we
with all our problems,
conflicts, neuroses,
sicknesses, political
outrages, wars, tortures,
and everything
that goes on in human life
are a state of
conflict which can be
seen in a larger perspective
as a situation of harmony.
Every minute little
fruit fly or gnat
or bacterium
I will go so far as to say is an
event upon which this
whole cosmos depends.
This thing goes both ways.
It's not only that every little
organism which exists
depends on it's total
environment.
The reverse is also
true, that the total
environment depends on
each and every one of
those little organisms
so that you could say
this universe consists
of an arrangement
of pattern
in which every event
is essential to the whole thing.
Now, we screen that idea out
of our consciousness
just as we pay attention
to the figure and ignore
the background.
So we see one way of
looking at things.
Mainly, that the
organism is very frail
against the environment.
It lasts a long time,
the environment,
but the organism only
lasts a short time.
But actually the whole
thing is arranged in a
polar system where the
enormous depends on the
tiny, and the tiny
depends on the enormous.
When you came into this world,
there gradually arose into being
the sensation of I.
And it stays there awhile, it
goes through a development,
and then it drops off.
But all the time everywhere
there are other I's starting up.
See?
Whether they be human, animal
anything you like,
they could be in other
galaxies, et cetera,
always they're starting up.
Now,
you would say there is no
connection between them.
No.
In the same way there is
no connection between the
molecules in your hand.
And yet you say it is a hand.
But if you look at it under a
powerful enough microscope,
the molecules in your hand
are miles apart.
What's the connection between
this galaxy and other galaxies?
Well, we can't see any
connection, and yet
there are gravitational
swings whereby they
respond to each other
and move in a certain
collective order.
See, what we're doing in this
is not setting down a doctrine,
but it is doing an exercise in
perception.
You can see it either way. You
can see yourself, in other words
as existing only now.
That's the only you there is.
The alternative to that,
logically, is to see yourself
as everything.
So in all this, you see,
when you get a game going
of this kind,
there comes the point of
what you might call
"emotional investment,"
when you feel that the
outcome of this
particular feature in
the game is urgent.
See, this matters.
And it's up to you what you
think matters.
We teach our children
what matters,
what's important for
them to learn.
And we teach them basically
that it's important to live.
And in a way every being
in this world is torn
between going on and
goofing off.
We feel that's the basis
of our distinction
between work and play.
Play is everybody needs
some time to goof off.
But they must go back to
work because you've got
to farm and fish and
manufacture and produce
so that you could go on.
But when you see you have this
terrifying urgency to go on
and feel you must, this is
important, this matters,
we screen out of our
consciousness the fact
that this is our own
volition and our own game.
And the difficulty is
that as we become
disturbed and anxious
about this,
it's more difficult to keep the
game going.
In proportion, as we are
frightfully concerned to
survive, we start
fighting other people.
We start clobbering our
neighbors and whatever
it is, all the old
fights start.
And it is these fights which
more than anything else,
at the moment you
see, are endangering the
entire human project
but all based fundamentally
on the illusion that
it's utterly important that we
survive.
But you see in all this
what underlies
is
the illusion
that I am going on.
That I constitute
a real continuity
from this moment
to the next moment,
to the next moment,
to the next moment.
What are you afraid of
losing when you die?
Yes, everything that you
have acquired as an
individual and stored in
your brain is dissolved
and distributed.
But at the same time it
is equally obvious
that when you die, there are
won't be following the
moment of death
everlasting nothingness.
So
you can become aware
of this tremendous
interconnectedness
of everything.
Just as fronts go with
backs and tops with
bottoms, insides with outsides,
solids with spaces,
so everything that there is
goes together.
It makes no
difference whether it
lasts a long time or
whether it lasts a short time.
A galaxy goes together
with all the universe
just as much as a mosquito.
You can get
a certain vision of life
where everything is seen
to be a complex pattern
of rhythm,
dances.
The human dance,
the flower dance,
the bee dance,
the giraffe dance.
And that's what this all is.
It's jazz.
You see?
This is a big
jazz, this world.
And what it's trying to do is
to see how jazzed up it can get.
How far out
this play of rhythm can go.
