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| ~ ∞ ~ The Essence of Zen - Awaken the Living Awareness Within ~ ∞ ~ |
We As Organism - Alan Watts Lecture. And when you look at the world in that image—or in the other image that it’s a stupid mechanism—either point of view you take, you don’t really belong. You’re not really part of all this. And I could use a stronger word than ‘part,’ only we don’t have it in English. We have to say something like ‘connected with it,’ ‘essential to it.’ Or, to put it in the strongest possible way, it is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external world—which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself is something that you got caught up with—it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you, yourself. Because you see, we have such a myopic view of what one’s self is. It’s as if, in other words, we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as “me,” as if you focused your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole panorama of things that you experience and say “I will take sides with that much of it.”
Now, we come here—right at the start—to an extremely important principle, which is the different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification. That is to say, you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way, you can look at it with a naked eye and see it in a certain way, you look at it with a telescope and you see it in another way. Now, which level of magnification is the correct one? Well, obviously, they’re all correct, but they’re just different points of view. You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass and where, with the naked eye, you will see a human face, with a magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots rather meaninglessly scattered. But as you stand away from that collection of dots, which all seem to be separate and apart from each other, they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern. And you see that these individual dots add up to some kind of sense.
Now you’ll see at once, from this illustration, that maybe you—when you take a myopic view of yourself, as most of us do—but you may add up to some kind of sense that is not apparent to you in your ordinary consciousness. When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope we see there’s one hell of a fight going on. All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the microscope we should start taking sides, which would be fatal. Because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle. What is, in other words, conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level. Now could it possibly be, therefore, that we—with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures and everything that goes on in human life—are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony?
