Tao of Philosophy. Alan Watts
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influenced by our cultural environment, ask questions. “Mommy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?” The child gets the idea from our culture that the father and mother gave him a body into which he was popped at some moment; whether it was conception or parturition is a little bit vague, but there is in our whole way of thinking the idea that we are a soul, a spiritual essence of some kind, imprisoned inside a body. We look out upon a world that is foreign to us and, in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, perceive “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” Therefore we speak of confronting reality, facing the facts. We speak of coming into this world, and there is a sensation we are brought up with of being an island of consciousness locked up in a bag of skin. Outside us we face a world that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside “me” is not me, and this sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves and the so-called external world. Therefore we go on to talk about the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and view ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the whole world outside us. I shall have much more to say about that in the second chapter, but in the first I want to examine the strange feeling of being an isolated self.
Now actually it is absolutely absurd to say that we came into this world. We did not: we came out of it! What do you think you are? Suppose this world is a tree. Are you leaves on its branches or are you a bunch of birds from somewhere else that settled on a dead old tree? Surely everything that we know about living organisms—from the standpoint of the sciences—shows us that we grow out of this world, that each one of us is what you might call a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole. However, that is not part of our common sense.
Western man has, for many centuries, been under the influence of two great myths. When I use the word “myth” I do not necessarily mean a falsehood. The word myth signifies a great idea in terms of which man tries to make sense with the world; it may be an idea, or it may be an image. Now the first of two images which have most profoundly influenced Western man is the image of the world as an artifact, much like a jar made by a potter. Indeed, in the Book of Genesis there comes the idea that man was originally a clay figurine made out of the earth by the Lord God who then breathed into this clay figurine and gave it life. The whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through by the idea that all things—all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all grasshoppers, all worms—are artifacts; they have been made. It is therefore natural for a Western child to say to its mother, “How was I made?” On the other hand, that would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do not think of nature as something that was made. Instead, they look upon it as something that grows, and the two processes are quite different. When you make something you put it together: you assemble parts, or you carve an image out of wood or stone, working from the outside to the inside. However, when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way. It does not assemble its parts. It expands from within and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming or a seed turning into a plant.
Yet behind our whole thought process in the West is the idea that the world is an artifact and that it is put together by a celestial architect, carpenter, and artist, who therefore knows how it was done. When I was a little boy I asked many questions which my mother could not answer. She used to resort in desperation to saying, “My dear, there are some things that we are not meant to know,” and I would say, “Well, will we ever find out?” And she would answer, “Yes, when we die and we go to Heaven it will all be made clear.” So I used to think that on wet afternoons in Heaven we would all sit around the throne of grace and say to the Lord God, “Now, just why did you do it this way, and how did you manage at that?” and He would explain it and make it all very clear. All questions would be answered because, as we have in popular theology understood the Lord God, He is the mastermind who knows everything. If you ask the Lord God exactly how high is Mount Whitney to the nearest millimeter, He would know exactly, just like that, and would tell you. You could ask any question of God, because He is the cosmic Encyclopedia Britannica. However, this particular image, or myth, became too much for Western man because it is oppressive to feel that you are known through and through, and watched all the time by an infinitely just judge.
I have a friend who is a very enlightened Catholic convert, and in her bathroom she has an old-fashioned toilet, and on the pipe that connects the tank with the toilet seat there is a little framed picture of an eye. Underneath it, in Gothic letters, is written “Thou God seest me.” Everywhere is this eye—watching, watching, watching—watching and judging you, so that you always feel you are never really by yourself. The old gentleman is observing you and writing notes in his black book, and the idea of this became too much for the West. We had to get rid of it, and so instead we developed another myth, the myth of the purely mechanical universe. This myth was invented at the end of the eighteenth century, and became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, so that today it is common sense. Very few people today really believe in God in the old sense. They say they do, but although they really hope there is a God, they do not really have faith in God. They fervently wish that there was one, and feel that they ought to believe that there is, but the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman is no longer plausible. It is not that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow does not go with our knowledge of the vast infinitude of galaxies and of the immense light-year distances between them, and so on.
Instead, it has become fashionable, and it is nothing more than a fashion, to believe that the universe is dumb and stupid, and that intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis, and beyond that it is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces. For example, courtesy of Dr. Freud, we have the idea that biological life is based on something called “libido,” which was a very loaded word. This blind, ruthless, uncomprehending lust is seen as the foundation of the human unconscious, and to thinkers of the nineteenth century like Hegel, Darwin, and T.H. Huxley, there was similarly the notion that at the root of being is an energy, and this energy is blind. This energy is just energy, and it is utterly and totally stupid, and our intelligence is an unfortunate accident. By some weird freak of evolution we came to be these feeling and rational beings, at least more or less rational, but all this is a ghastly mistake because we are here in a universe that has nothing in common with us. It does not share our feelings, has no real interest in us, and we are just a sort of cosmic fluke. Therefore, the only hope for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission, to conquer it and master it. Of course all this is perfectly idiotic. If you think that the idea of the universe has been the creation of a benevolent old gentleman, you soon realize He is not so benevolent after all, and He takes an attitude of “this is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you.” You can have that idea on the one hand, and if that becomes uncomfortable you can exchange it for its opposite idea that the ultimate reality does not have any intelligence at all, and at least that would get rid of the old bogey in the sky in exchange for a picture of the world that is completely stupid.
Of course, these ideas do not really make any sense because you cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an unintelligent universe. You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. Here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples; and we call it an apple tree because the tree “apples”—that is what it does. Here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that, at least on the planet earth, it “peoples” in just the same way that an apple tree “apples.” Now, maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, “Just a bunch of rocks,” and they went away. Later on, two million years later, they came around again and they looked at it and they said, “Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks but it is peopling, and it is alive after all; it has done something intelligent.” We grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree, and if evolution means anything, it means that. But curiously, we twist it. We say, “Well, first of all in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock. Then intelligence happened to arise in it like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.” However, we are thinking in a way that disconnects the intelligence