It is a māyā, an illusion, that we all imagine ourselves to be living inside our skins separated from the rest of the cosmos. We’ve been taught to ignore this enormously significant relationship.
We’re all going around unconscious of this marvelous interdependence between what we call “ourselves” on the one hand and what we call “the universe” on the other, and therefore don’t notice that, as a matter of fact, our real self is the whole cosmos. We’ve forgotten that. That was rapidly expunged from our minds in very early infancy. And we’re all something the cosmos is doing, just like the water is waving and the wind is blowing. The whole wind is blowing, but it blows through this window and that window and the other window. It isn’t a separate wind that blows through each window. So, in the same way, we’re all something, we’re all wavings of the universe—only, we’ve forgotten it.
Here is a whirlpool swinging around. The actual water is constantly flowing through the whirlpool and there is no stuff permanently in the whirlpool. All that the whirlpool is is a pattern: it’s something the water is doing. And so, in exactly the same way, we are a constant current of electronical phenomena. At a more obvious level we are a current of beefsteak and potatoes and eggs and milk and water all flowing through us. And we know that the cells in the human body are completely changed within at least seven-year periods. So who are you?
He decided, you see—the second thing he said to himself was: “Get lost!” Because he was bored with being God. And he thought, “Everything is possible. There is no obstacle in any direction. Nothing is happening. So… let’s get lost. Let’s pretend we are not God.” And so he’s pretended that he’s all of us. And every one of us is the Lord in disguise making a big scene that you’re just “little me.”
Nothing exists by itself, but only in relation to other things.
The ability of the human being to have these sensory responses—to hear sounds, to see lights, and to know about galaxies and stars—the ability, the brain which makes that possible, is in itself a member of the external world. The brain is a member of the same world it’s looking at. It has something in common with the universe that surrounds it.
Nobody realizes that he’s in the external world. Everybody else is, but I’m in the internal world. Oh no, I’m not! I’m just as much in the external world as you. And my consciousness, my thoughts, my so on, can be regarded as something in the external world. So I go with it. The external world, as I pointed out in the beginning, does me. Therefore, there are correspondences, there are transactions, there are relations between what I call “me” and “everything else” in the external world. Only: I’m under the illusion that we don’t go together. I’ve forgotten that I create the galaxies in the same moment that I’ve forgotten that the galaxies create me. It’s mutual.
Do we really want the world to be serious, you see? Is God serious? Now, in Christianity it seems that God is serious because nobody ever imagines that the one who sits on the throne of grace is sort of laughing. He may be a very sad expression, a very kind expression, a very severe expression, but it wouldn’t be laughing. No. Because we feel, you see, that anything that’s in play and that isn’t serious is in some way trivial. But that’s not the case. You see, we have to get over that idea and realize that the Lord—or whatever It is that all this is about, that’s doing all this—is having a ball; is playing. Even though the play sometimes involves scaring itself out of its wits. The universe creeps up behind itself and says, “Boo!” And it jumps and all sorts of catastrophes happen, but ultimately they all change and disappear, and it all starts over again, see? This constant flowing in and out.
So I’ve got these two discrete events, and I’ve called them “cause” and “effect,” but I find they are really one. Okay, in exactly the same way, I’ve got the two discrete events: “you” and “I.” We could equally well, couldn’t we, just say that there may be some sense in which they are one. Or the organism and the environment: it’s becoming plainer and plainer that they are one.
We don’t see our radial relationship to the totality of the universe because it isn’t obvious. It’s obvious that a tree is an arm of the Earth reaching up and waving at the sky. And a mountain is another kind of radiation from the Earth. And so is a leg from a body, and hair, and things like that. But what makes human beings, as the highest of the mammals, so conscious of being independent is that they are topologically an enclosed surface, you see, which wanders around independently of the ground. What we don’t notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all.
Each one of us uses the universe to get around, and the universe uses us to play with, and to make games and patterns, and to do its stuff. So because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin, that is a very deceptive thing because the skin is not really the boundary of man.
Your mind is very largely outside your body. After all—it’s inside, too. It’s simultaneous. You see, I cannot think, I can’t have a mind, without seeing, feeling, and relating to other people without all the social institutions—not only language, but the laws, the customs, the gestures, the rituals—by which we relate to each other. All those things compose the mind, for the mind is a huge network of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity.
Responsibility is a thing like a nice face, which you either have or haven’t. Certain backgrounds, certain interests, certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings. And they live that way not because they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible. It’s because they’re intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all around. That’s all there is to it.
Our being is continuous with the being of the whole universe. As I explained: each one of us is something the whole universe is doing, just as every wave is something that the sea is doing. Well, we are waves of the universe, and it’s waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo, I’m here! And I’m called Alan Watts right now.” But it’s called so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so all around the room, but it’s all the same thing doing this jazz.
See, I tell you, the religious mentality—or not only the religious mentality, but it’s the kind of mentality you find around—what the real secret of it is: it loves to have something to condemn. One of the biggest kicks a person can have is to feel righteous indignation. And also, people who go to church love to be lectured and scolded. A real scoldy sermon from a Baptist preacher is a big, big bang! And they come out feeling so satisfactory. So supposing, then, we say: well, in the end all the sinners and the dreadful people who lived in the world will realize that they were manifestations of God like everybody else. Some people stop and think about that and say, “Oh dear! Very dangerous doctrine.” What they are really worrying about is that they are not going to have the satisfaction of seeing those people they don’t like writhing in torment forever and ever. Now who ought to be fried in hell? You know?
We think we can solve problems with violence. We think that killing people is an answer to a problem. It’s only temporary. Because if you knock out, say, a Hitler, another one comes up. Because you haven’t understood the problem of this sort of manifestation. Anything that’s destroyed with violence eventually recurs again.
The gamble that it isn’t really serious if you don’t, at the last moment, you see, as it were, call in the police; if you don’t scream for help—I’m using that as a metaphor—to accept: “Well, I’m going to die.” See? That’s it. There’s nothing to hold on to, you see? The moment you really stop holding on to anything, because you see there is nothing to hold on to, what happens? You become the ball. Have a ball! It has nowhere to bounce, you see? You become the ball. There’s nothing to hold on to. But you can only see that when you’re not holding on to anything anymore and you’ve given up. Resignation, or whatever it is. In other words, that urgency to succeed, to be something, to get there, to make it, to be right—when you see you can’t and you give up, you get reborn. Because that’s the death. The real meaning of going to heaven after death has nothing to do with literal death, it has to do with this death.