Alan Watts - We As Organism

I wonder if it's ever struck you how curious a 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. And 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.

This, uh, way of looking at the world, in this sort of passive mood, as 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 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, uh, you regard yourself as an accident, a 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. Of course, 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 under authority. In other words, there's a big boss on top of all this who allowed you, at his pleasure, to dare to have the disgusting effrontery to exist, and uh, 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."

And uh, when you look at the world in that image, or in the other image that it's a stupid mechanism, either point of view you take, uh, you don't really belong; you are not really part of all this. And I could use a stronger word than "part," only we don't have it in English. We have to say something like, um, "connected with it," "essential to it," uh, or to put it in the strongest possible way, it is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external world, which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself is something that you got caught up with. It is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you yourself, because you see we have such a myopic view 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 focused 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."

Now we come here right at the start to an extremely important principle [Music], 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? Well, obviously they're all correct, but they're just different points of view. You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass, and where with 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 at once from this illustration that maybe you, when you take a myopic view of yourself as most of us do, but 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 overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the mi—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. And 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—as a situation of harmony? But 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, the interval created by birth at one end and death at the other, and then after somebody's death, then somebody else's birth, uh, 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. 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. But uh, 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 connected, you can understand, uh, at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of consciousness that occurs between two eternal darknesses, which is the popular common sense view which Western man has of his own life—that you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth there was no you, and in the eternal darkness that follows your death there is likewise no you.

I'm going to discuss these matters not by appealing to any special spooky knowledge, as if I had been traveling on the higher planes and knew all my previous incarnations and therefore could tell you authoritatively that uh you are much more than this individuality. I'm going to do it on the basis of complete common sense that everybody has access to the facts, and that just what you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense complexity. And what you call yourself as a living organism—say, "I am my whole body at the very least"—now what is that body? That body is recognizable, and I recognize my friends when I meet them again—good luck—and you recognize me, uh, although the last time any of you saw me I was absolutely something entirely different from what I am now. Just as the flame of a candle is never a constant—a flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas—only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant. Well, it is a recognizably constant pattern; the spear-shaped outline of the flame and its coloration is a constant pattern. But in exactly the same way, we are all constant patterns, and that's all we are. The only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being; it's the way we behave, the way we dance—only there's no "we" that dances; that's just the dancing. Just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas, just as a whirlpool in a river is a whirling of streaming water, there is no thing that whirlpools; there is the whirlpool. And in the same way, each one of us is a very, very delightfully complex undulation of the energy of the whole universe. Only by our process of miseducation we've been deprived of the knowledge of that fact, uh, not as if there was someone to blame for this, because it's always with our own tacit consent, because life is basically a game of hide-and-seek, because life is pulsation—on and off—here it is, and now it isn't. And by being this pulsation, we know it's there. See, you—you don't know what you mean by "on" unless you know what you mean by "off." That's why when we want to awaken someone, we knock at the door; it's not enough to slam the door once with your fist and make those big noises, but you keep up a pulsation, because that, by its on-and-off-ness, attracts attention. Uh, all life, you see, is this flickering in and out, only there are enormous rhythms in it; there are very fast flickering ins and outs, like uh the reaction of light upon our eyes, such that if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark and I spin it, you will see a circle of fire, because the reflection of that cigarette uh tip on your retina lasts, it endures, just in the same way as on a radar screen an image stays a little while until it's revivified by another round. So in that way, you see, you notice continuity. And in the same way, then you notice the continuity of a light, because although, like, say with an arc lamp—an arc lamp is actually a flickering light—and that's why they don't allow arc lights to be used in any shop where there's a circular saw moving, because sometimes the flickering speed of the arc light so synchronizes with the turning speed of the teeth on the blade that the teeth look as if they're not moving, and so anybody who might put his hand on the blade would have it chopped off thinking it was a still one. So in this way, very fast impulses are looked upon as constant, and we see whether our fast impulse is a solid thing. When you look at the blade of a propeller or an electric fan, the separated four or three blades become a solid disk, and you cannot throw an egg through it. Well, so in exactly the same way, you can't put your finger through a rock, because the rock is moving too fast for your finger to go through; that's the meaning of the—of the whole phenomenon of hardness. Hardness in nature is immense energy, but acting in a very concentrated space, restricted space, but going to beat hell; that's why you can't get through it.

Now, from those very tiny fast rhythms which give us the impression of continuity, there are also in this universe immensely slow rhythms, and these are very difficult for us to keep track of, and they impress us and depress us as our own life and death, as our coming and going, which goes for what is up to us, such a slow pace that we can't possibly believe uh that it is really a rhythm. We think of it uh as our birth as something quite unique, that uh could never occur again, because we're so close to it, you see, and it's moving so slowly. And so with that point of view, uh, we are like, uh, Marshall McLuhan said—he borrowed a metaphor from me—which is that we are driving a car looking at the rear vision mirror. That means that the environment in which you believe yourself to exist is always a past one; it isn't the one you're actually in. The process of growth, the—the basic process of biology is one in which lower orders are always being superseded by higher orders, but the lower order can never figure out, or only very rarely figure out, what the higher order is that's taking over, and may see it as a terrible threat, as total disaster, as the very end. But therefore can never be aware that the principle of growth always has and always will continue, because that's what's going on, but you never know what the next step is going to be, because if you did know you wouldn't take it, because it would already be past. Do you understand this—that any certainly known future is an event of which we can say, "You've had it," and in that sense it's past? When we play games, and we say in chess or in bridge or whatever game you're playing, the outcome of the game becomes certain; we at that point cancel the game and begin a new one, because the whole zest of the thing—which takes me back to the idea that this whole thing is a hide-and-seek game—is that you don't know what the next order coming up is. But one thing you can be sure of: it will be an order, and it will comprehend you.

At the moment we stand at a time in history where we're beginning to think of the great countdown on the end of the human race—terrifying possibility that through atomic energy we may obliterate this planet and turn the whole globe into a star. Maybe that's the way all the stars started. Imagine, you know, this great thing coming up—the countdown on the end—seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, hmm [Music]—where have you heard that before? You sit on the seashore and you hear the waves going in and out, and you don't stop to think that's what you're doing; that's what the whole business is doing. And there are places where the wave mounts and mounts, and it gets too big for its boots or whatever, and it spills and breaks. We could do just that. But uh, very important to realize that that's what you're doing, because then you don't get panicky about it. And the person who's going to press that button is the person who's going to be in panic. So if you realize that that's what it is, and that it doesn't really matter if the whole human race blows itself up, then there's a chance that it won't do it; that's the only chance we have not to do this thing which attracts us like a kind of vertigo, like a person who looks over a precipice and is all set to throw himself over, or a person who jumps out of a plane when they're skydiving and forgets to pull the parachute ring because he gets fascinated with a target—it's called target fascination; he just goes straight at it, you see. So we can get absolutely fascinated with that—with disaster, with doom—or, you know, all the news in the newspapers is invariably bad news; there is no good news in the newspapers; people wouldn't buy a newspaper consisting of good news. Even the free press is full of terrible news, except the San Francisco Oracle. And the uh—the fascination, you see, for this doom uh might be neutralized if we would say, "Well, why bother about that? It's just another fluctuation in this huge marvelous endless chain of uh our own selves and our own energy going on."

See, here's the problem: because of our myopia, because of our—the way we've, as it were, restricted consciousness to focus upon just that certain little area of experience that we call voluntary action—that's us—and everything else happens to us. Now that's obviously absurd. Let's suppose you take in your hand one of those toys—a gyroscopic top—and you suddenly notice the minute you get this in your hand that it has a kind of vitality to it; it seems to resist you; it starts pushing you in a certain way, see? And sometimes you're with it and following it, then sometimes you see it—it's just as if you held a living animal in your hand, you know; you pick up a uh hamster, you know, or a guinea pig, and you hold this little thing in your hand; it's always trying to escape. So the gyroscope always seems to be trying to escape your whole. Now, in exactly the same way, what you're experiencing all the time—all sorts of things are getting out of control and doing things you don't expect; it's trying to escape your hold. All right, then don't grab it so hard, and you discover that this living thing that you're feeling like the gyroscopic top—it's your own life. Because you can see very simply that you would not understand the experience that you call voluntary action and decision—being in control and being yourself—unless in opposition to that there was something else. You couldn't realize self and control and will unless there was something other—out of control—and instead of "will," "won't." It's the two together; only that produces the sensation that you call having a personal identity. Only there is a funny thing about human consciousness which has been worked out very carefully in Gestalt psychology, which is that our attention is captured by the figure rather than the background, by the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area, and by something moving rather than what is relatively still. And to all those phenomena that in this way attract our attention, we attribute a higher degree of reality than the ones we don't notice. That's only because, for the moment, those are more important to us. Consciousness, you see, is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble, just in the same way as a ship's radar is looking for rocks or other ships. And the radar, therefore, does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks, no other ships. So in the same way, our eyes, or rather the selective consciousness behind the eyes, only pays attention to what we think is important. I am at this moment aware of all of you in this room, of every single detail of your clothing, of your faces, and so on, but I'm not noticing it all, and therefore I will not be able to remember tomorrow exactly how each one of you looked and what you were wearing, because what I notice is restricted to things that I think are particularly important. If I noticed some particularly beautiful girl in the audience, then I might notice also what she's wearing, and uh that would be memorable. But by and large, you see, we scan things over, but we pay attention only to what our set of values tells us we ought to pay attention to. But quite obviously, you as a complete individual are much more than the scanning system you are in uh relationships with the external world that, on the whole, are incredibly harmonious. And so in this way we have this uh rather myopic way of looking at things, and we screen out from attention anything that is not immediately important to a scanning system based on sensing danger. But quite obviously, you as a complete individual are much more than the scanning system you are in relationships with the external world that, on the whole, are incredibly harmonious.

Going back to this illustration of every living body is something like the flame of a candle—the energies of life in the form of temperature, light, air, and food, and so on, are streaming through you all at this moment in the most magnificently harmonious way—and your—all of you—far more beautiful than any candle flame, just sitting in these chairs, just going, you know. Only we are so used to it, we say about that, "So what? Show me something interesting; show me something new," because it's a characteristic of consciousness that it ignores stimuli that are constant. When anything is constant, it says, "Okay, that's safe; it's in the bag; I don't pay attention to that anymore." And therefore we eliminate systematically from our awareness all the gorgeous things that are going on all the time, and instead only become focused on the things—the troublesome things—that might happen to upset it, which is all right, but we make too much of it, and become—we make so much of it that we identify our very selves—"I," ego—with the radar, with the troubleshooter, and that's only a tiny fragment of one's total being. So that if you do become aware that you are not simply that scanning mechanism, but you are your complete organism, then very swiftly, in turn, as a consequence of that, you become aware that your organism is not the way you think about it when you look at it from the standpoint of conscious attention, from the standpoint of the ego, from the standpoint of the ego—your organism is uh your kind of vehicle, your automobile in which you go around. But from a physical point of view, your organism is again like the candle flame or the whirlpool; it is something which is a continuous patterning or activity of the whole cosmos. The key—the key idea here is pattern. Let's suppose uh I'm going to borrow a metaphor from Buckminster Fuller—suppose we have a rope, and one section of this rope is made of uh manila hemp, the next section is cotton, the next section is silk, the next section is nylon, and so on. Now we tie a knot in this rope—just an ordinary overhand knot—you find by putting your finger in the knot you can move it all the way down the rope. Now as this knot travels, it's first of all made of manila hemp; it's then made of cotton; it's then made of silk; it's then made of nylon, and so on, but the knot keeps going on; that's the integrity of pattern—the continuing pattern which is what you are. Because you might—you know—be for several years you might be a vegetarian, and you might be a meat eater, and uh so on, and you know your constitution changes all the time, but people—your friends—still recognize you, because you're still putting on the same show; it's the same pattern that is the recognizable individual. But we are trained in our language—the very structure of the language we talk deceives us into misunderstanding this—because when we see a pattern, we ask what's it made of. Like you see a table—is it made of wood, or is it made of aluminum? But then when you inquire into what is wood, and how does wood differ from aluminum, the only thing a scientist can tell you is the different patterns—that is to say, the different molecular structure of the two things—and a molecular structure is not a description of what something is made of; it is a description of what dance it is performing, what motions, what kind of a symphony this is. Because basically all phenomena of life are musical, and uh gold differs from lead in exactly the same way that a waltz differs from a Miserere; it's a different dance; there isn't anything that's dancing; that is a deception we get into because we have two parts of speech in our grammar—we have nouns and verbs—and verbs are supposed to describe the activities of nouns, and this is simply a convention of speech. You could have a language with only verbs in it; you don't need any nouns, or you could also have a language without nouns only and no verbs, and uh it would perfectly adequately describe what's going on in the world. So if you were used to speaking—the part—with a language that had one part of speech, uh you could say just as much as we can with two and be a lot clearer—only at first it would sound awkward, but you'd soon get used to it, and then when you got used to it, it would be a matter of common sense that the patterning of the world is not some kind of stuff that's patterning—you don't have to seek for a substance—underlying the whole thing is just patterning, and we're all that. And wherever you see patterning, you will see the principle that big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them, little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on to infinity. And then you reverse the process, see? Little fleas—infinitely little fleas—are always on the back of bigger fleas, and the bigger fleas are on the back of still bigger ones, and those bigger fleas on the back are still more roughing fleas—you see it goes the other way too. And so in this way, uh, there is—to a person who really wakes up—you very soon realize that your existence is not something that is just the uh hopeless little creature that's suddenly confronted with a great big external world that goes at him, you know, and eats him up. The tiniest little thing that comes into being—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 its 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 a—an arrangement of pattern in which every event is essential to the whole thing. Now we screen that idea out of our consciousness in exactly the same way that we screen out the perception of space as an important reality, 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. What do you mean the environment lasts a long time? What does the environment consist of? Just a lot of little things. And yet there is the environment, just as the same way as there is the face in the newspaper photograph behind all those little dots—when you get far enough away from it, you see the face. When you get far enough away from all the organisms and the little bits of things, you see the environment in another scale of magnification. But actually the whole thing is arranged in a—a polar system where the enormous depends on the tiny, and the tiny depends on the enormous, and you get a relationship between these extremes which can be called a transaction—that is to say, a transaction—known—there's buying and selling; it's impossible to have buying without selling, and selling without buying; they always go together. But of course the person, you see, who's interested in buying thinks more about buying than he thinks about the other fellow selling, and if he does that he's going to get a bad buy, because he doesn't really think about the mechanisms the other fellow's using to sell. And if I want to sell something and think too much about selling, I don't enter sufficiently into the psychology of the buyer, so then I'm not a good—not a good business shark. So in this way we are always, as it were, overemphasizing a certain aspect of our experience, and we say, "Now what is important about people?" This is the great cradle of the West—is there unique individuality? And we have been given an immense psychic investment in our own individuality by our upbringing—"What are you going to amount to? What are you going to contribute to human life? What's your particular destiny going to be?" Fine idea, but the thing we don't understand is that it won't work—this great idea—without being balanced with its opposite. Just as you can't have the back without the front, so you cannot have the values of a unique personality unless at the same time everybody recognizes that there is another level at which we are not unique at all, but that I am you and you are I—that, in other words, the so-called "I" that we all have—you see, every one of you feels that you're the center of the universe, and that everything else is happening around you in a circle. You can turn around, and you can see sort of equally far in all directions, especially if you're in a ship in the middle of the ocean. So you're in the middle, and it's true—from the standpoint of astronomy—we live in a curved space-time continuum—that is to say, in a universe at which every point may be regarded as the center. Consider a sphere—here's a ball—what point on this ball is the center of its surface? You can see at once that any point can be the center of its surface. So legitimately all points in the universe are the center; that's Saint Bonaventure's description of God—"that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." So everybody's in that situation, and at that depth of your existence we are all like um the nerve ends on your own skin, see? At every point on your skin there's a little nerve end going "peek" and getting information from the outside world—another and another and another all over—and they all constitute your total sensitivity. Well, so in the same way, and all these people sitting around here with their little eyes and little ears and things, they're going "peek," and they're all really one common center called "I," which is looking at itself from ever so many different points of view. Only we are so close to it, and we are so absorbed in the different ways each one of them is doing that we neglect the community underneath—just like when you uh never seen Chinese people before and you go into a bunch of Chinese people and you can't tell the difference between them—you think, "Well, all Chinese look the same." Well, the Chinese, when they first saw us, they thought we all looked the same—we all had red hair and long noses—and uh then when you get to know—when I, you know, I live in Japan for a week, two weeks, three weeks, then suddenly all the Japanese start turning into people, and they—they—they look like—they don't look Japanese anymore; they're just like—like people; they're all different, see? As you get to a certain level, then all the individuality comes out. Uh, so if, in other words, someone from an entirely different form of biology came to this planet and looked at us, he wouldn't know the difference between Negroes, Greeks, Armenians, and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants; they would all look to him exactly the same, and he would see us as—in other words, he'd look at a group like this here and he would call it a thing, you know—just—you see a set of false teeth, and they all are pretty much alike, and you say, "Well, that's a set of false teeth." So you see a set of people sitting around and uh say, "Well, that's—that's the thing." It's like a caterpillar with so many legs on it, you know; it breaks up and reforms and so on—rather interesting—like hydras, you know; you can take hydras—and put them in an asterizer—having taught—no worms—excuse me—you take flatworms, and you can teach them certain tricks, and then you put them in an asterizer and uh pulverize them, then they reform themselves, and they know the tricks you taught them. And you can mix up those who do and those who don't, and those who do learn the tricks that can convey it to the new ones uh that didn't know them, see? So that maybe one day we can um get some DNA from genius people and feed it to people who don't know anything, and immediately they learn these tricks. Think of that! But the meaning of all that—talking about DNA and asterized flatworms—is that what is transmitted all the time is the repetition of pattern, the repetition of certain rhythms, and that this whole uh rhythmic system may be looked at in this way. Let's just take any pattern—we—we can form a pattern, say, of um—like this, see? I make a kind of a loop and a loop-ended cross in the air. Now let's consider what is the problem involved in analyzing that pattern into smaller parts—shall I say each one of these loops is a part, and there are four parts, therefore, to the pattern? But where does a loop begin and end? Just—excuse me—let's look at it another way. I could say that not this was a part, but this was the part of the pattern; there were four of those. Uh, you should all study, incidentally, the drawings of a great Dutch artist by the name of Escher, whose work appeared a little while ago in the Scientific American. But he has a book of the most fantastic patterns where you will see, for example, an arrangement of devils, and when you look at the background it's an arrangement of angels—that everything goes with its counterpoint. So that when you look at one of Escher's pictures, you don't know which is the foreground and which is the background; you just flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, and you can have it either way. Well, everything's like that, only because, as I said, we are fascinated with what we have at the moment selected as the foreground. We say, "Foreground—it comes before; it's important; that's what's there. Background—oh, that's just background," you see? Supposing you suddenly do a flip on that—you realize the foreground—yeah, it's kind of close—but as we say of people, "You could only see the trees; you can't see the forest." It's like businessmen who say they're very practical, but they're very short-sighted and don't know what's good for them and put themselves out of their business regularly, so they have to start wars in order to carry on business, and uh you know that's stupid. So you—you always—wherever you are looking at the general panorama of sensory experience—try switching—try shifting your attention to all the things you thought were unimportant—to the constants, to the background—and begin looking at the spaces between people. Uh, all painters have to learn this, because especially if you're working in oils you actually have to paint in the background. Weavers know this, because when they're making patterns in weaving they've got to weave the background as well. Or if you do needlepoint with embroidery, think of the hours you spend putting in the background over the canvas in wool, and you become aware of it—same way the people who made the great Oriental carpets—they're much more aware of the background as constituting an essential part of the total experience. So as you uh become aware of this, you will see the same thing that you notice in music, namely that it is only as a result of hearing the interval between tones that you hear any melody. If you don't hear the interval, you're tone-deaf, and all notes are the same noise; all you hear is rhythm; you don't hear any melody; you've got to hear the interval. So then watch the intervals between people—the things that aren't said, the things that are tacit, the things that are implicit rather than explicit—in all life, and then you begin to get um connected. Now it's very important to have a connection in life, and um it'd be in the know, and uh this is the way it—it fundamentally comes out of seeing the thing you forgot. You know, you can always bug people in a beautiful way, in a very helpful way, by just saying to them, "What did you forget?" I said, "Well, I don't know—was I supposed to remember?" "Oh, I'm—I'm really not trying to put you on; I mean it's not difficult; this is something completely obvious that you forgot; you'd easily remember it because it's so obvious." Well, that's the hardest thing in the world to think of—what's the most obvious thing I forgot? What's that? Well, who do you think you are? Well, how do you answer that question—"Who are you?" Well, you give a name; you say, "I'm Joe Doakes; I'm Alan Watts." That's not true; that's what people told you you were; they put that name on you, and they taught you to identify with it and to behave as it was expected to behave, but that's not who you are. You know very well—go back in your memory—go back into your infancy before they started telling you all this stuff—"Who are you?" And if you get with that, you know very well who you are—the jolly old Ancient of Days. Only there's a conspiracy that you mustn't let on about that, because everybody is. And uh if one person realizes it, the other is a little bit offended, and they say, "Well, uh, how come you're so great?" We worked it in Christianity by a very clever thing of allowing just one individual to be recognized as the God incarnate, and uh nobody else therefore

Admit that you're responsible for the way your own heart beats. You say, "Oh, that's not my doing; I have no control over my heart." Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will? You say, "I intend to take my hand down from my face and put it on my leg. I can do that, but I don't know how the hell it's done." So that's what we mean by the capacity of voluntary control in the ordinary sense of the word, isn't it? We don't understand it at all.

So you might say, in a funny backwards way, that the only kind of control you really understand is that way you're not using your will because you just do it so easy. Like you open and close your hand. You know how to do it. Sure, you know how to do it, but you can't put it into words and explain to someone how to do it. Say, "Well, come on, aren't you human? Don't you know how to open and close your hand? Let's do it, silly!" But we don't realize, you see, that just as we know how to do this, we know equally well how to turn the sun into light, how to blue the sky, how to blow the wind, how to wave the ocean, how to um, digest food, and um, I might add, to be digested by bacteria and transformed as we transform our stakes. We will, in turn, be transformed, but the pattern keeps going, and it's always you.

Only you see you have this marvelous capacity to transform yourself without knowing that you're doing it. Therefore, you keep surprising yourself, and therefore you keep on doing it. Because if you didn't surprise yourself, you wouldn't you wouldn't go on doing it. It's just the very fact, you see, that you seem to be the victims of the thing you don't understand, and that you seem to conclude your life every time in a wipeout called death, where all your control goes. It's just exactly that opposite condition to what you call being alive that allows you to be alive. Only every time it happens, it's like it's new. It's like every time you're born, it seems like it was the only time. But of course, if it wasn't like that, you wouldn't do it.