Alan Watts For When You're Ready To Blow Your Mind

[Music] I wonder if it's ever struck you how curious the thing it is that most of the things that we experience we regard as things that happen to us which we ourselves do not originate which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves and if you consider that you realize that what you mean by yourself is rather narrowly circumscribed even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of things that happen to us in the same way as things that go on in the world

outside our skins if there's a thunderstorm or an earthquake well it happens to you you're not responsible for it but so in the same way when you have hiccups you didn't plan on it if you have belly rumbles you had no intention of doing it as to the catastrophic Act of getting born well you had nothing to do with that and you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in which you find yourself [Music] of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood now something that happens

to you goes right down to our general feeling about life it goes down to the way in which as westerners we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in the cosmos that on the whole is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence in other words if you're reared with a 20th century or a shall we say an early 20th century common sense which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century with its rejection of Christianity and Judaism you regard yourself as an accident biological accident

in a stupid universe which is mechanical but has no feelings no finer feelings a vast pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur because if you don't have that point of view and you are more traditional you look upon yourself as a child of God and therefore [Music] under Authority in other words there's a big boss on top of all this who allowed you at his pleasure to deign to have the disgusting infantry to exist and you better watch your p's and q's because that Almighty is looking after you with

the attitude of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you when you look at the world in that image or in the other image that it's a stupid mechanism he is a point of view you take you don't really belong you are not really part of all this [Music] it is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external World which is defined as something that happens to you it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you yourself because you see we have such a myopic

View [Music] of what oneself is it's as if in other words we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as me as if you cussed your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole Panorama of things that you experience and say I will take sides with that much of it foreign now we come here to an extremely important principle 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 you look at it with a telescope and you see it in another way now which level of magnification is the correct one [Music] but obviously they're all correct they're just different points of view you can for example look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass and where was the naked eye you will see a human face with a magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots rather meaninglessly scattered but as you stand away from that collection of dots which

all seem to be separate and apart from each other they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern and you see that these individual dots add up to some kind of sense now you'll see it once from this illustration that maybe you may add up to some kind of sense that is not apparent to you in your ordinary consciousness 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 Own

bloodstreams in the mind 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 [Music] 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 well it is claimed you see that some

human beings have broken through to that vision that they slipped somehow or other into states of consciousness where they see the apparent disintegration and disorganization of everyday life as the functioning of a totality which at its level is completely harmonious and you could say aha At Last I See I got the point I've seen how all this makes sense but what this Insight depended upon was your overcoming the illusion that space separates things that is to say the space the interval between your body and mind [Music] the interval created by birth at one end and

death at the other [Music] and then after somebody's death then somebody else's birth these are events with intervals between them and normally we regard these intervals in time and these intervals in space as having no importance no function [Music] we tend to see the universe itself as really consisting in all the stars and galaxies that's what it is that's what we notice but the space in which all this happens is sort of written off as something that isn't really there what one has to realize is that the space is an essential function of the things

in the space after all you can't have separate Stars unless there is a space around them eliminate the space and you will see you couldn't have this phenomenon at all and vice versa you couldn't have the space they wouldn't be there in any sense whatsoever if there weren't the bodies in it so the bodies in the space and the space are two aspects of a single Continuum they're related together in exactly the same way as a back and a front and you just don't get one without the other so the moment you see that intervals

that space is connective you can understand at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of Consciousness that occurs between two eternal darknesses and that just what you have to realize is that life is a pattern of the immense complexity of the energy of the whole universe