I remember when I first heard this piece by Alan Watts, his talk recordings were a regular show on the radio and it was in 1976. I was living in an apartment in Conoga Park on Owensmouth and it was I believe a Sunday morning, my kind of church! I remember that the sun was just really starting to come up and I was still in bed on this particular sunday morning listening........ There was a young man who said Damn, For it certainly seems that I am A creature that moves In determinate grooves. Im not even a bus, Im a tram. ...... Below but before the stars are my words not Watts words: Whats refreshing as I read over this, and I will again a time or two, is how well his ideas have held up and how much Neuropsychology and Developmental Physiology now are revealing real patterns that support his mind patterns. The latest one for me is that we self-assemble in the womb, we are not blueprints at all but self assemble guided by a few genes and by what the cells that are neighbors share and how they effect one another. The various steps in our self-assembly reflects real Physics and Chemistry patterns that are stable not just in the womb but in eggs and even inorganic crystals and processes and patterns, a sort of self-similarity, fractal. Think about that, we who seem to exist as some sort of spirit are really the wave patterns in our brains which are built of cells that contain the same dna but are expressing different proteins or ratios of proteins and all together we cells, we individual cells, cooperate in such a fashion the the brain and nervous interactions generate waves in the brain and body that can sense the world around and move and act to consume other things that were once alive and remove or rearrange the material of these to extract stored energy that is then used to maintain the cells that cooperatively produce a pattern that actually thinks it is somehow independent of those cells producing the patter that thinks itself....... pull someones plug and watch the pattern go down the drain so to speak. Whats amazing is that I can look at you and know about what your feeling because we share the same body patterns and the same cultural patterns, patterns that by the way are a myth we each help invent so we can have empathy for one another. If we are luck, our empathy extends to others outside our culture or class and to other creatures that share much of these same patterns. The earth LIFES, and this life shares much in common..... ***************************************************************** Now to Alan Watts ---------- ............................ And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense. A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. Now, for example, a myth in a way is a metaphor. If you want to explain electricity to someone who doesnt know anything about electricity, you say, well, you talk about an electric current. Now, the word current is borrowed from rivers. Its borrowed from hydraulics, and so you explain electricity in terms of water. Now, electricity is not water, it behaves actually in a different way, but there are some ways in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricity, and so you explain it in terms of water. Or if youre an astronomer, and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved space, you say, well, its as if you have a black balloon, and there are white dots on the black balloon, and those dots represent galaxies, and as you blow the balloon up, uniformly all of them grow farther and farther apart. But youre using an analogy--the universe is not actually a black balloon with white dots on it. .................... So lets say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using apple as a verb. And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples. And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in. Just as spots on somebodys skin is symptomatic of chicken pox. Just as hair on a head is symptomatic of whats going on in the organism. But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths--the ceramic and the fully automatic--not to feel that we belong in the world. So our popular speech reflects it. We say I came into this world. You didnt. You came out of it. We say Face facts. We talk about encounters with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies. And the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists inside a bag of skin. The center of consciousness which looks out at this thing, and what the hells it going to do to me? You see? I recognize you, you kind of look like me, and Ive seen myself in a mirror, and you look like you might be people. So maybe youre intelligent and maybe you can love, too. Perhaps youre all right, some of you are, anyway. Youve got the right color of skin, or you have the right religion, or whatever it is, youre OK. But there are all those people over in Asia, and Africa, and they may not really be people. When you want to destroy someone, you always define them as unpeople. Not really human. Monkeys, maybe. Idiots, maybe. Machines, maybe, but not people. ....... erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_alan_article1.shtml
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 06:46:15 +0000
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