Tao of Philosophy. Alan Watts
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and they are going to have people crawling over them. It is only a matter of time, just in the same way the acorn is eventually going to turn into the oak because it has the potentiality of that within it. Watch out, because rocks are not dead.
Now all of this depends on what kind of attitude you want to take to the world. If you want to put the world down, you might say, “Oh well, fundamentally it is only a lot of geology, sheer stupidity, and it just so happens that a kind of a freak comes up in it which we call consciousness.” Now, that is an attitude that you may take when you want to prove to people that you are a tough guy, that you are realistic, that you face facts, and that you do not indulge in wishful thinking. However, it is just a matter of role-playing, and you must be aware of these things; these are fashions in the intellectual world. On the other hand, if you feel warm-hearted towards the universe, you put it up, instead of putting it down, and you say about rocks, “They are really conscious, but it is a different form of consciousness.” After all, when I tap on this crystal, which is glass, it makes a noise. Now that resonance is an extremely primitive form of consciousness. Of course, consciousness is much more subtle than that, but when you hit a bell and it rings, or you touch a crystal and it responds, inside itself it has a very simple reaction. It goes “jangle” inside, whereas we go “jangle” with all sorts of colors and lights and intelligence, ideas, and thoughts, and it is more complicated. Yet both are equally conscious, but conscious in different ways. Now that is a perfectly acceptable idea. All I am saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness, whereas other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals. What they want to do is to say everything is kind of drab, whereas what I want to say is “Hooray! Life is a good show!”
Nevertheless, as we study man or any other living organism and try and describe him accurately and scientifically, we find that our normal sensation of ourselves as isolated egos inside a bag of skin is a hallucination. It really is absolutely nutty because when you describe human behavior, or the behavior of a mouse or a rat or a chicken (or any organism you want to describe), you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately you must also describe the behavior of its environment. Supposing I walk and you want to describe the action of walking. You cannot talk about my walking without also describing the floor, because if you do not describe the floor and the space in which I am moving all you will be describing is somebody swinging their legs in empty space. So as to describe my walking, you must describe the space in which you find me. You could not see me unless you could also see my background, that which stands behind me. If the boundaries of my skin were coterminus with your whole field of vision you would not see me at all. You would see the things that filled your field of vision, but you would not see me, because in order to see me you have to see not only what is inside the boundary of my skin, but you have to see what is outside it too.
Now, that is terribly important. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery—the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets—is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is to look as different as possible, and yet underneath to be identical. You do not find one without the other. Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle. So there is a secret: what is esoteric, what is profound, and what is deep is what we will call the “implicit.” What is obvious and in the open is what we will call the “explicit.” So, I in my environment and you in your environment are explicitly as different as different could be, but implicitly we go together. This is quickly discovered by the scientist when he tries to describe exactly what you do, and since the whole art of science is to describe your behavior, it is not something that can be separated from the world around you. The scientist realizes then that you are something that the whole world is doing, just as when the sea has waves on it the ocean is waving. So each one of us is a “waving” of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is, and with each one of us it is waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo! Here I am!” yet it does it differently each time because variety is the spice of life.
However, the funny thing is we have not been brought up to feel that way. Instead of feeling that we, each one of us, are something that the whole realm of being is doing, we feel that we are something that has come into the whole realm of being as a stranger. When we are born we do not really know where we came from because we do not remember, and so we think when we die that is just going to be that. Some people console themselves with the idea that they are going to Heaven, or that they are going to be reincarnated, or something, but people do not really believe that. For most people it is implausible, and the real thing that haunts them is that when they die they will go to sleep and are never going to wake up. They are going to be locked up in the safe deposit box of darkness forever and ever. However, all of this depends upon a false notion of what is one’s self. Now, the reason why we have this false notion of ourselves, as far as I can understand it, is that we have specialized in one particular kind of consciousness. Generally speaking, we have two kinds of consciousness. One I will call the “spotlight,” and the other the “floodlight.” The spotlight is what we call conscious attention, and we are trained from childhood that it is the most valuable form of perception. When the teacher in class says, “Pay attention!” everybody stares, and looks right at the teacher. That is spotlight consciousness; fixing your mind on one thing at a time. You concentrate, and even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span, nevertheless you use your spotlight: one thing after another, one thing after another . . . flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. However, we also have floodlight consciousness. For example, you can drive your car for several miles with a friend sitting next to you, and your spotlight consciousness may be completely absorbed in talking to your friend. Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving of the car, will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on, and you will get there safely without even thinking about it.
However, our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight consciousness, and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness alone. “I am my spotlight consciousness, my conscious attention; that is my ego; that is me.” Although we very largely ignore it, the floodlight consciousness is working all the time, and every nerve ending that we have is its instrument. You can go out to a luncheon and sit next to Mrs. So-and-So, and you go home and your wife asks you, “Was Mrs. So-and-So there?”
“Yes, I sat next to her.”
“Well, what was she wearing?”
“Well, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
You saw, but you did not notice. Now, because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness, and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued, we have the sensation of ourselves as being just the spotlight, just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other. So we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our being. People, who by various methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called “a mystical experience,” or what the Buddhists call bodhi, an awakening. The Hindus call it moksha, or liberation, because they discover that the real deep, deep self, that which you really are fundamentally and forever, is the whole of being—all that there is, the works, that is you. Only that universal self that is you has a capacity to focus itself at ever so many different here-and-nows. So, as William James said, “The word ‘I’ is really a word of position like ‘this,’ or ‘here.’” Just as a sun or star has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself in you and you and you in all the different variations. It plays games: it plays the John Doe game, the Mary Smith game. It plays the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the pigeon game, the fish game, the star game. These are games that differ from each other just like backgammon, bridge, poker, or pinochle; or like the waltz, mazurka, minuet, and tango. It dances with infinite variety, but every single dance that it does—that is to say, you—is what the whole thing is doing. However, we forget and we do not know who we are. We are brought up in a special way so that we are unaware of the connection, and unaware that each one of us is the works, playing it this way for awhile. So we have been taught to dread death as if it were the end of the show because it will not happen any more. Therefore we are conditioned to be afraid of all the things that might bring about death: pain, sickness, suffering.