by Alan Watts
Who is asking the question? It always gets back to you, where it all begins — and what is that? Of course we might think we know who we are — we have been told who we are, and we bought the story we were told.
So you can’t really blame anybody else for what you think of yourself. You can’t go way back, in a sort of psychoanalytical way, and find the causation for what you are now. The answer is not in the behavior of your parents, or in your peer group, or whatever your situation was when you were a child, because the universe doesn’t work that way. Instead it works the other way: It goes backward into the past from you, because you started it. And so when you blame somebody else for putting you into your current situation, it merely means that you have defined yourself incorrectly. Perhaps you have defined yourself as being limited to your conscious attention, and limited to your voluntary musculature. But is that all there is? Is that the real you?
What does consciousness rest upon? Have you ever asked yourself that question?
WHO ARE YOU?
Consciousness does not illumine the lamp from which it shines, just as a flashlight doesn’t shine on the battery that powers it. When you make a decision, does that come from somewhere other than you? No, it comes from the depths of you, of which you are not really aware. You encompass far more than anything you know about in a conscious way.
But we are so used to thinking of “I” as simply the center of our consciousness, and the center of our will, that we ignore (or are ignorant of) most of ourselves. When you think of a particular person, what do you think of? Suppose I say, “Think of your uncle,” or “Think of your mother.” What instantly comes to mind is their face, because we are most accustomed to seeing photographs and images of faces. When we see images of the president, most often it is the president’s face, the head and shoulders, and only occasionally is the whole body seen.
What do you think of when you think of a flower? In the same way, you think mostly of the blossom, sometimes of the stalk, and occasionally of the whole plant. But very rarely when we think of a flower do we think of the flower out in a field. We would say, “That’s more than the flower. The flower is not the field.” But is that so? Where would the flower be without the field?
I can say in words, “The flower grows in the field.” In words I can chop the field off and say, “The flower grows,” and the phrase will still make sense. However, it will not make sense in nature. If I take the field away from the flower, the flower cannot grow. The flower is connected with the field in a very deep way, and so in the same way a person is not just their head. The head has to go with the body, and the body has to go with a social and natural environment — but we never think of in that way. We know it is all there, but it doesn’t come to mind automatically.
So who are you? And who decides on the limits of an organism? Who are you that gives spiritual authority to somebody else, and then pretends, “Of course it does not come from me. I bow down because I know that person really knows.”?
Now the Buddhists have a very funny trick when it comes to bowing, because Buddhists do not have the idea of a supernatural authority that watches over them. So why, then, do they bow when they pay respect to a Buddha? Why do they bow when they meet you, and greet you so reverently? Bowing is paradoxically the act of a king, because it confers authority. The one who bows sets the revered image on its pedestal, and if there were no one to bow, there would be no image on the pedestal.
You put it there, but again you would ask, “How could it be so that what puts the authority up there is just poor little me, who is neurotic, or sinful, and doesn’t really even understand what’s going on?” But fundamentally the you that does this is the greater you, which is not just the activity of consciousness but the whole activity that expresses itself as you sit here and read this page. And what is it that expresses itself as you read? And what am I that is called Alan Watts and is offering these ideas?
I stated in the beginning that I am doing all this for entertainment, and I meant it. But who is it that is doing this for entertainment? If I say, “Alan Watts is a big act,” who is it that puts on this act?
To try to trace the answer down, we might go to an astrologer and ask, “Who puts on the act?” “Well,” he would say, “Where were you born, and at what time?” And he would go and look up the positions of the stars and the planets, and then he would draw a picture of my character, which just happens to be a very crude picture of the universe.
“There you are,” he would say. “But I see you’ve drawn a picture of the universe,” I would reply. That may be a surprise to him, because he probably thinks of the influences of the stars and of the planets as something that affects me, and that implies a certain separation between the bodies that cast the influences and the puppet that is influenced. But does the root of a flower influence the flower as something fundamentally different from it? No, surely the root and the flower are one process, and like your head and your feet it all goes together. In that sense then, the universe, and what you or I do, all goes together, and so that picture of the universe is really a picture of you.
We may not recognize ourselves because we think of ourselves as a chopped-off piece surrounded by our skin, and therefore we see ourselves in a rather impoverished way. And this form of perception is almost automatic. We think of ourselves as separate beings who stand alone and move through all sorts of different places but are cut off from the environment.
As a result we have an underlying feeling of alienation, of not really belonging in this universe, and we feel that we are being confronted by something that does not give a damn about us. It was here long before us, and will be here long after we are gone. We come into this world for a brief span as a little flash of consciousness between two eternal darknesses. Of course during our lives all sorts of other things go on, but nevertheless the feeling that haunts almost everybody is that this “I” is an orphan, here on a visit, and we don’t feel that we really belong here.
In the same way, what do you feel when you look out at those galaxies? If you go out into a desert or up in the mountains where the sky is clear, you see this colossal affair that you are involved in. It makes a lot of people feel very small, but it shouldn’t. It should make you feel as big as it is, because it is all inseparably connected with what you call you.
This tremendous whirling of energy is exactly one and the same energy that is looking out of your eyes, that is running along inside your brain, that is breathing, and that makes noises when you talk. The whole energy of the universe is coming at you and through you, and you are that energy.
THE NATURE OF ENERGY
“Well,” we say, “but surely we die, and we disappear, we turn into dust, and this will go on long after I am gone.” The whole nature of energy, however, is that it is a vibration, and a vibration is a wave, and a wave has a crest and a trough. It is like a pulse, it goes on and it goes off, and everything goes on and off.
Things like light go on and off so quickly that you can’t see the off, because by definition on is always a little bit more noticeable than off. It is positive, whereas off is negative.
The outside of things is vibration, but because it goes very fast we don’t quite sense it, and therefore it seems constant or solid, like the blades of an electric fan. This is true of light and also true of sound, but when you hear a very deep sound it vibrates noticeably. You can hear the texture in it; you can hear the vibrations going on and off. When you hear a great pipe organ, the whole building shudders with these vibrations. We barely notice most of the pulses, however, including the slower pulses created by the turning of the earth, the cycles of the tides, or the coming and going of the equinoxes. These are very slow vibrations, but they always go on, and then off.
We are aware of these changes only because of the contrast within them. Of course you would not know something was on if it did not occasionally go off, and you would not know it was off if it did not sometimes go on. So I have often asked the question “How would you kn
ow you are alive unless you had once been dead?”
WHERE WOULD YOU BE WITHOUT NOTHING?
Where were you before you were born?
Where will you be when you die?
We may think we will become nothing, but what we don’t realize is that nothing, in its own way, is as important as something. Where would you be without nothing? What is the background to being if it is not nonbeing?
You have to have nothing to have something. It is so simple, but nobody sees it because it is fundamental to Western philosophy that out of nothing comes nothing. But how can that be? According to our logic, in order for something, or someone, to come out of nothing, there must be some kind of hidden structure inside nothing. It must contain some sort of inner workings out of which something comes. But this is not the case at all. The whole point is that there is no concealed structure, and it is just because it is honest-to-goodness plain nothing that something comes out of it. That is elementary logic, but no one sees it because everybody is afraid of nothing.
People think, “Well, if it’s nothing, it will never be something again, because that’s going to be the end.” The theologians get this mixed up too, and even someone like Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that out of nothing comes nothing, and then he said, “God created the world out of nothing.” He made a mistake because he tried to identify God exclusively with being — and of course you cannot have being without nonbeing.
The Hindus understand this, as well as the Buddhists, who inherited their philosophy and mythology. They say God is neither being nor nonbeing; it is what they have in common. Yet nobody can say what that is, and still you know perfectly well that being and nonbeing go together, like an inside and an outside, a front and a back, a top and a bottom. Being and nonbeing are polarities, like the North and South Poles. What is in between?
Nobody really knows, because you can only know what you can compare with something else. You can know something only because you can compare it with nothing, and vice versa, but nobody knows what to compare with that which is common to both something and nothing.
It is for that same sort of reason that you cannot see for yourself the color of consciousness. What’s the color of eyesight? We know all of the colors because they are different from each other. We see different colors in a mirror, but what is the color of the mirror?
We may say, “Silver” — but it isn’t really. Although a mirror will reflect a silver spoon as something different from something else, the mirror is a noncolor. We can’t compare it with any other color, and so it is transparent to our consciousness. And like your consciousness, and like space, it is a big nothing.
Most people treat space and consciousness as if they were not there, yet suppose there wasn’t any space, only solid. There would be no outside the solid, and no one would know if it was round or square because there would be nothing to compare it to, and it would be all there would be.
It would appear rather dense, but of course most of what we call something is largely nothing when you get down to atoms. Whatever it is they are really made of is vast distances apart, and when we get to the inner structure of atoms, we find precious little there. It is a lot of nothing — and this nothing turns out to be very powerful stuff.
EVERYTHING GOES AROUND
In order to have room to move around, you have to have a void to move around in, and moving around is energy, which is definitely something. So that is the sort of thing we are in, and that is the sort of thing we are. We are not just in it, we are it, and it vibrates, it oscillates, and it goes around.
The cycles are not just simply wave motions or undulations, they are also cycles of a circular kind. Everything goes around, just as when we dance we go around — and it is tremendously important to get hold of this principle of going around. We are in a phase of the life of mankind when we seem to have forgotten that cyclic quality; instead of going around we all think we are going somewhere, and that implies there is somewhere else to go. But as I wander along, I can’t help but wonder where that other place would be.
HIGHER ORDERS OF BEING
In the same way, when we think of evolution, we think of a scale and of a hierarchy of different sorts of beings. We might think, for example, that above us there are angels, and then gods, and then Buddhas with attending bodhisattvas going up to we know not what heights of amazing human development. And then we think that below us are the other mammals, perhaps demons, insects, bacteria, plants, rocks, down, down to we know not what depths.
So we congratulate ourselves and say, “How great it is to be human and not to be a cat, not to be a rose, and not to be a fish.” And we think how much better it will be when we can get to be angels. We human beings are very conceited, and we think we can get up there and be gods or Buddhas.
But how do you know that you are a higher order of being than a potato? What do you really know about potatoes anyway? You probably have never studied potatoes beyond knowing how to cook and eat them. That’s probably about it. But have you ever thought about how a potato feels?
“Well,” you say, “it doesn’t feel, it’s only a potato, it has nothing to feel with.” But wait a minute. When you put a lie detector on a potato — some kind of skin response machine — it certainly registers, and its readings change when you do certain things. If you prick the potato, or shout at it, it will flinch. As a matter of fact, if you learn how to turn on your alpha waves and you sit beside a plant, you will find that it will pick up those alpha waves. So maybe plants are not so stupid after all.
“Well,” we might say, “how can it be? It has no civilization. It has no house. It has no automobiles. It has no pianos, no art galleries, and no religion.”
But the potato might say, “I don’t need them. It’s you poor uncivilized human beings who have to have all this crap around you to tell you who you are and what it’s all about. You are messy and inefficient, and you are cluttering up the planet with your culture. But I, the potato, have it all built into me.”
“Well,” we might say, “that’s impossible, because you are stuck in one place all the time. How can you know anything about the world?”
But the potato doesn’t need to go running around because its sensitivity extends all over the place. And so it might say, “I want to introduce you to a few things. There is my neighbor over here, the thistle. Have you ever seen how my thistle neighbor gets around? It has tiny seeds with down sticking out all over them, and when the wind comes these seeds float off into the air. And my neighbor the maple tree has little helicopters it sends off, and they spin in the air and fly away. And then I have a friend the apple tree, and it has fruit that is so delicious that the birds like it. They eat the apple and swallow the seeds, then they fly away and when they drop the seed it is sown.”
These are incredible devices. Others have burrs that stick in the hides of deer, and they carry these seeds around. “This is one of the ways we get around and we spread our people so that we aren’t all crowded together and don’t strangle ourselves.”
The potato would go on to explain, “But this is only the beginning of the extraordinary things that we do. We have vibrations going on inside our fibers that are quite as good as anything invented by your Bach and Mozart. We enjoy this, and although you may think we are not doing anything because we just sit here all the time, we are vibrating, and we are in ecstasy. We are humming to the great hum that is going on everywhere.”
Your plants may be in such an advanced state of consciousness that, unknown to you, angels are growing in a flowerpot at your door. Unbeknownst to you they may have a great deal to do with the way you think.
Consider also that the humble fly may be extremely intelligent too. With all those eyes he sees a complex relationship of perspectives, and with the ability to walk upside down on the ceiling he may have a certain perspective that is far beyond ours. Whatever do flies do when they buzz? What is it all about? We don’t know, because we don’t even how know to begin to study them.
/> It took many years to find out that bees communicate with each other by dancing, and that was such a shock that one entomologist at UCLA said, “I have the most passionate reluctance to accept this evidence.”
It is a shock to find out that dolphins, for example, may be more intelligent than people, and that so-called killer whales are a very intelligent kind of dolphin. Look at those creatures. They are mammals, and it is said — although we are not sure if this is true — that they once lived on the land. Apparently they decided that being on the land is a pretty stupid way for a mammal to live, and they said, “Let’s go skin diving.”
They said, “You really don’t have to do much for a living, and you can dance and play.” And so dolphins spend most of their time simply fooling around — and they fool around in very complicated ways. If we were dolphins, we would call this art.
When we practice any art, we are in a way just fooling around. We mix a lot of paint and make beautiful patterns on flat surfaces or on textured surfaces. We put together all kinds of boxes with pluckable wires, little tubes that we can blow our breath through, and enormous tubes that we blow breath through mechanically. We stretch great taut skins that we bang with our fists or with sticks, and do all kinds of other things.
When a symphony orchestra gets up on a stage, it is essentially just a lot of baboons blowing through holes, and yet this is something very important. There is a hush, the concertmaster comes in, and everybody applauds and sits down. The concertmaster then summons the orchestra into being, and people in their tiaras and pearls and ties sit back because this is culture and this is very serious. The whole atmosphere of the concert hall is very proper, like a church.
It is a little different when a rock band takes over, and there is a light show and everything is just blowing. This is authentic music, and it is very important music. Perhaps this is the continuation of the great Western tradition. The concert hall is good for classical music, but as the new artists take over with their rather sophisticated new music, musicians like the Beatles and the Grateful Dead continue the tradition, but it is done in a different spirit. That music is a celebration, and there is nothing sedate about it. It’s music to groove with, to be right there with, because you are not pretending that you are doing something important in a solemn sense. You are doing something important because you are right in the belly of things, and you’re moving with it.