WHEN YOU'RE READY TO WAKE UP - ALAN WATTS
- Alan Watts
- Mar 21, 2016
- 2 min read
“The essential point is obvious. That each one of us, not only human beings, but every leaf and every weed exist the way it does only because of everything else around us. In other words, there is a relationship between the center and the circumference, which is rather like the relationship between the poles and a magnet. Without the center, no circumference; without the circumference, no center. And although we say of poles, that they are poles apart – that is to say that they are extremely different; there is something between them - just as the north and south poles of a magnet. So (too) the individual and the universe are inseparable. But the curious thing is that while that is really easy to see in theory, very few people are aware of it in an important strong way. Like one is aware of blue in a blue sky, or of the heat in a fire. It is more of an idea than it is a realization. And so, it strikes me more and more, that our failure to feel at home in this astonishing brain in which we live is the result of a basic initial mistake in our thinking about the world, and is, in turn, the cause of what is beginning to look like the failure of our technology. The fact that everything we are doing to try to improve the world is a success in the short run, made amazing initial improvements, but in the long run we seem to be destroying the planet by our very efforts to control and improve it. And it strikes me that is because we are really to simple minded. We are understanding it in terms of languages, numbers; in terms of a logic which is too simple for the job. Too crude for the job to begin with. We understand everything in terms of words and numbers, and they are stretched out in rows and numbers. But when I scan this view (of nature), I don’t do it line, by line, by line – I do it taking in everything at once. I take it in as if it were a wide-angle lens.”
Video is Kensho from Aaron Paradox
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