Me, Alan Watts, and the Universe
First post in awhile. Haven’t had really that much to say, but now I do!
Been listening to a lot of Alan Watts lately. I’ve just been really identifying with some of the things Watts has been saying. A few nights a week, after smoking, I’ve simply laid down on my hardwood bedroom floor and listened to him speak, seeing if I could keep focus on the message he was trying to convey. This was one that really hit close to home and I felt like sharing it. A cool video I found on Youtube is right below the quote:
So you have this process, which is quite spontaneous, going on. We call it Life. It’s controlling itself. It’s aware of itself. It’s aware of itself through you. You are an aperture from which the Universe looks at itself. And because it’s the Universe looking through you, there’s always an aspect of itself that it can’t see. So it’s just like that snake, you see, that is pursuing it’s tale, ’cause it can see it’s head, like you can. We always find as we investigate the universe, make the microscope bigger and bigger and we will find ever more minute things. Make the telescope bigger and bigger and bigger, and the universe expands because it’s running away from itself. It won’t do that if you don’t chase it.
So, it’s a game of hide and seek. Really, when you ask who is doing the chasing, you are still working under the assumption that every verb has to have a subject. That when there is action, there has to be a doer. Well, that’s what I will call a grammatical convention, leading to what Whitehead called “The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”