We have not realized, therefore, that our environment is not something other than ourselves. In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.
It should be obvious that the human being “goeswith” the rest of the universe, even though we say in popular speech, “I came into this world.” Now, it is not true that you came into this world, you came out of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree apples, the solar system in which we live—and therefore the galaxy in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live—that system peoples. And therefore, people are an expression of its energy and of its nature.
If people are intelligent (and I suppose we have to grant that “if”), then the energy which people express must also be intelligent. Because one does not gather figs from thistles and grapes from thorns. But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature; that all these things “gowith” us and are as important to us (albeit outside our skins) as our internal organs—heart, stomach, brain, and so forth.
If the head goes with the body and the body goes with the environment, the body is as much an integral part of the environment as the head is part of the body. It is deceptive, of course, because the human being is not rooted to the ground like a tree. A human being moves about, and therefore can shift from one environment to another. But these shifts are superficial. The basic environment of the planet remains a constant. And if the human being leaves the planet, he has to take with him a canned version of the planetary environment.
Human intelligence has a very serious limitation. That limitation is that it is a scanning system of conscious attention which is linear. That is to say, it examines the world in lines, rather as you would pass the beam of a flashlight across a room—or a spotlight. That’s why our education takes so long. It takes so long because we have to scan miles of lines of print. And we regard that, you see, as basic information. Now, the universe does not come at us in lines. It comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once. And it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or of other information, however fast they may be scanned. And that is our limitation so far as the intellectual life and the scientific life is concerned. The computer will greatly speed up linear scanning, but it’s still linear scanning. And so long as we are stuck with that form of wisdom we cannot deal with more than a few variables at once.
Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth. You cannot quench anybody’s thirst with the word “water” just as you cannot eat a dollar bill and derive nutrition from it. But using symbols and using conscious intelligence—scanning—has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as we have. But at the same time it has proved too much of a good thing. At the same time, we’ve become so fascinated with it that we confuse the world as it is with the world as it is thought about, talked about, and figured about—that is to say, with the world as it is described. And the difference between these two is vast. And when we are not aware of ourselves except in a symbolic way, we’re not related to ourselves at all. We are like people eating menus instead of dinners.
What you do is also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its behavior as much as its behavior is your behavior. It’s mutual.
What we feel instead is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves—or I would rather say: with our image of ourselves—and that’s the person or the ego. You play a role, you identify with that role. I play a role—it’s called Alan Watts—and I know very well that that’s a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts, if necessary, but I find this one is better for making a living. But I assure you: it’s a mask and I don’t take it seriously. You know, the idea of my being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the world just breaks me up. Because I know me! So, you know, it’s very difficult to be holy in the ordinary sense.
Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your nervous system. It contains no information about your blood chemistry. It contains almost no information about the subtle influences of society upon your behavior. It does not include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all taken for granted and unconscious, and you can’t find them out unless you study other cultures to see how their basic assumptions differ. It includes all kinds of illusions that you’re completely unaware of—as, for example, that time is real, and that there is such a thing as a past, which is pure hokum. But nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us, and they are not included in our image of ourselves—nor, of course, included in our image of ourselves is there any information about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe.
If a person really sits down to figure out—write a long essay, twenty pages—on your idea of heaven, it’ll be a sorry production. You can see it already in Medieval art, where there are depictions of heaven and hell: hell is always much better than heaven. Although it’s uncomfortable, it’s a sadomasochistic orgy. Wowee! You know? Hell is really rip-roaring! Whereas all the saints in heaven are sitting, you know, very, very smug and demure like they were in church.
In the average church all you get is talk. There’s no meditation, no spiritual discipline. They tell God what to do interminably, as if he didn’t know. And then they tell the people what to do, as if they could or even wanted to. And then they sing religious nursery rhymes. And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church—which did at least have an unintelligible service; which was, you know, it was real mysterious and suggested vast magic going on—they went and put the thing into bad English. And they took away incense, and they took away—they became a bunch of Protestants, and the thing was just terrible! So now all these Catholics are at loose ends. As Clare Boothe Luce put it—not to be a pun—but she said, you know, “It’s no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass.” Because you’re being advised, exhorted, edified all the time, and it becomes a bore. Think of God listening to all those prayers! I mean, talking about grieving the Holy Spirit! It’s just awful. People have no consideration for God at all!
The biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego. And the joke of it all is: your ego doesn’t exist! There’s nothing to get rid of. It’s an illusion.
You can’t control your thoughts, you can’t control your feelings, because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings, and they’re running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go. You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Still growing your hair. Still seeing and hearing. Are you doing that? I mean, is breathing something that you do? Do you see? I mean, do you organize the operations of your eyes and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It’s a happening. It happens. So you can feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening, your thinking is happening, your feeling is happening, your hearing, your seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The sun is happening shining. There it is, all this happening. And may I introduce you: this is yourself. This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that’s the way you function. You function by happening—that is to say: by spontaneous occurrence.