Tao of Philosophy. Alan Watts

do you do? Welcome to the human race. Now my dear, we are playing some very complicated games, and these are the rules of the game we are playing. I want you to understand them, and when you learn them when you get a little bit older you might be able to think up some better rules, but for now I want you to play by our rules.” Instead of being quite direct with our children, we say, “You are here on probation, and you must understand that. Maybe when you grow up a bit you will be acceptable, but until then you should be seen and not heard. You are a mess, and you have to be educated and schooled until you are human.” These attitudes which are inculcated into us from infancy go on into old age because the way you start out is liable to be the way you finish. So people are going around feeling fundamentally that they do not belong because their parents said to them in the first place, “Look, you are here on sufferance. You are on probation. You are not a human being yet.” So people feel this right on into old age and figure that the universe is presided over by this kind of awful God-the-Father parent who has our best interest at heart, and is loving, but “Who spares the rod, spoils the child. Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.” So, where is it going to hit next? You do not feel that you belong, and so we get this ghastly sense of what I call the “Christian ego,” and it is a little bit Jewish, too, who really feels that he does not belong and is a homeless orphan. The Christians say we are sons of God by adoption; not real sons but only by adoption, grace, and sufferance. So there comes a sensation so characteristic of Western man and, indeed, of all highly civilized people, of being a stranger on the earth, a momentary flash of consciousness between two eternal blacknesses.

      Therefore, we find ourselves in constant contentiousness with everything around us, not only with other people but with the earth, with the waters, and the symbol of it all in our culture is the bulldozer. Where I live aboard a ferryboat there are opposite us across the water some lovely hills. They are going to put houses there, but they are going to try and put the sort of houses you would find in a suburban tract lot on a hill. A good architect can make a house fit the hill and he does not have to destroy a hill to put a house on it. If you want to live on a hill, obviously you want to live on a hill, and you do not want to destroy the hill by virtue of living on it. Yet that is what they do, especially in California. In California where we have lots of hills, they always scrape the tops off them until they are perfectly flat. They put the houses on, and then scrape the hill off in terraces all the way down. Of course, by doing this they upset the ecology of the hill and eventually all houses fall down, but the builder says, “So what?” By that time the payments have been made and obviously the builder does not feel that the external world is his own body, but of course it is. The external world is your own body extended, and an intelligent architect always goes up to the hill and says, “Good afternoon. I very much want to build a house here, and I would want to know what kind of house you would like built on you.” Instead of that, he has a prejudice about what kind of a house is a house, and he has to make the hill submit to this prejudice, and so he has to ruin the hill and get rid of it pretty much to put a house on it. He is absolutely out of his mind because he does not realize that the external world is his body, and when he realizes that he will get his mind back.

      Man in Nature

      Chapter Two

      Previously I was discussing the disparity between the way in which most human beings experience their own existence, and the way man’s being and nature is described in the sciences. I was pointing out that sciences such as ecology and biology, for example, describe and study the relationship between all organisms and their environments. However, the way they describe human, animal, and insect behavior is in flat contradiction with the way in which most of us experience our thinking, our action, and our existence. We have been brought up to experience ourselves as isolated centers of awareness and action, placed in a world that is not us, that is foreign, alien, and is something other which we confront. Whereas, in fact, the way an ecologist describes human behavior is as an action. What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call “here and now,” and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

      Now, this is not what you might call a fatalistic or deterministic idea. You might be a fatalist if you think that you are a sort of puppet which life pushes around and that you are separate from life, but life dominates you. However, in the point of view I am expressing, the real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe, and it is doing your living organism and all of its behavior, and expressing it as a singer sings a song. We have been hoodwinked into the feeling that we exist only inside our skins, and I was showing you last night that that is a hallucination. It is just as nutty as anybody could be who thinks that he is Napoleon, or thinks he is a poached egg and goes around finding a piece of toast to sit on. It is just like that, a hallucination. I was discussing how we need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what is inside the skin but includes our whole total external environment. If we do not experience ourselves that way, we tend to mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission, and if we do that, then comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in and we do not treat it with love and gentleness and respect. We cut down millions of acres of forests to turn it into newspaper, of all things. Lovely trees are turned into information about nothing, and we do not replace them properly. We kick the world around in revenge for our feeling that really we are puppets which the world kicks around.