Alan Watts - We As Organism

i wonder if it's ever struck you how curious a thing it is that most of the things that we experience we regard as things that happen to us which we ourselves do not originate which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves and if you consider that you realize that what you mean by yourself is rather narrowly circumscribed even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of things that happen to us in the same way as things that go on in the world outside

our skins if there's a thunderstorm or an earthquake well it happens to you're not responsible for it but so in the same way when you have hiccups you didn't plan on it if you have belly rumbles you had no intention of doing it and as to the catastrophic act of getting born well you had nothing to do with that and you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in which you find yourself and this uh way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood as something

that happens to you goes right down to our general feeling about life it goes down to the way in which as westerners we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in the cosmos that on the whole is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence in other words if you're reared with a 20th century or shall we say an early 20th century common sense which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century with its rejection of christianity and judaism uh you regard yourself as an accident

a biological accident in a stupid universe which is mechanical but has no feelings no finer feelings a vast pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur of course if you don't have that point of view and you are more traditional you look upon yourself as a child of god and therefore under authority in other words there's a big boss on top of all this who allowed you at his pleasure to dane to have the disgusting effrontery to exist and uh you better watch your p's and q's because that almighty is

looking after you with the attitude of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you and uh 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 uh you don't really belong you are 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 um connected with it essential to it uh 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 oneself 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 [Music] 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 it 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 blood streams 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 it overly fascinated with our view of our own blood streams in the mi 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 and 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 as a situation of harmony but well it is claimed you see that some human beings have broken through to that vision that they slipped somehow or other into states of consciousness where they see the apparent

disintegration and disorganization of everyday life as the functioning of a totality which at its level is completely harmonious and you could say aha at last i see i got the point i've seen how all this makes sense but what this insight depended upon was your overcoming the illusion that space separates things that is to say the space the interval between your body and mind the interval created by birth at one end and death at the other and then after somebody's death then somebody else's birth uh these are events with intervals between them and normally we

regard these intervals in time and these intervals in space as having no importance no function we tend to see the universe itself as really consisting in all the stars and galaxies that's what it is that's what we notice but the space in which all this happens is sort of written off as something that isn't really there but uh what one has to realize is that the space is an essential function of the things in the space after all you can't have separate stars unless there is a space around them eliminate the space and you will

see you couldn't have this phenomenon at all and vice versa you couldn't have the space they wouldn't be there in any sense whatsoever if there weren't the bodies in it so the bodies in the space and the space are two aspects of a single continuum they're related together in exactly the same way as a back and a front and you just don't get one without the other so the moment you see that intervals that space is connected you can understand uh at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of

consciousness that occurs between two eternal darknesses which is the popular common sense view which western man has of his own life that you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth there was no you and in the eternal darkness that follows your death there is likewise no you and i'm going to discuss these matters not by appealing to any special spooky knowledge as if i had been traveling on the higher planes and knew all my previous incarnations and therefore could tell you authoritatively that uh you are much more than this individuality i'm going

to do it on the basis of complete common sense that everybody has access to the facts and that just what you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense complexity and what you call yourself as a living organism say i am my whole body at the very least now what is that body that body is recognizable and i recognize my friends when i meet them again good luck and you recognize me uh although the last time any of you saw me i was absolutely something entirely different from what i am now just

as the flame of a candle is never a constant a flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant well it is a recognizably constant pattern the spear-shaped outline of the flame and its coloration is a constant pattern but in exactly the same way we are all constant patterns and that's all we are the only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being it's the way we behave the way we dance only there's no we that

dances that's just the dancing just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas just as a whirlpool in a river is a whirling of streaming water there is no thing that whirlpools there is the whirlpool and in the same way each one of us is a very very delightfully complex undulation of the energy of the whole universe only by our process of miseducation we've been deprived of the knowledge of that fact uh not as if there was someone to blame for this because it's always with our own tacit consent because life is basically a

game of hide and seek because life is pulsation on and off here it is and now it isn't and by being this pulsation we know it's there see you you don't know what you mean by on unless you know what you mean by off that's why when we want to awaken someone we knock at the door it's not enough to slam the door once with your fist and make those big noise but you keep up a pulsation because that by its on and off-ness attracts attention uh all life you see is this flickering in and

out only there are enormous rhythms in it there are very fast flickering ins and outs like uh the reaction of light upon our eyes such that if i take a lighted cigarette in the dark and i spin it you will see a circle of fire because the reflection of that cigarette uh tip on your retina lasts it endures just in the same way as on a radar screen an image stays a little while until it's revivified by another round so in that way you see you notice continuity and in the same way then you notice

the continuity of a light because although like say with an arc lamp an arc lamp is actually a flickering light and that's why they don't allow arc lights to be used in any shop where there's a circular saw moving because sometimes the flickering speed of the arc light so synchronizes with the turning speed of the teeth on the blade that the teeth look as if they're not moving and so anybody who might put his hand on the blade would have it chopped off thinking it was a still one so in this way very fast impulses

are looked upon us as constant and we see whether our fast impulse is a solid thing when you look at the blade of a propeller or an electric fan the separated four or three blades become a solid disk and you cannot throw an egg through it well so in exactly the same way you can't put your finger through a rock because the rock is moving too fast for your finger to go through that's the meaning of the of the whole phenomenon of hardness hardness in nature is immense energy but acting in a very concentrated space

restricted space but going to beat health that's why you can't get through it now from those very tiny fast rhythms which give us the impression of continuity there are also in this universe immensely slow rhythms and these are very difficult for us to keep track of and they impress us and depress us as our own life and death as our coming and going which goes for what is up to us such a slow pace that we can't possibly believe uh that it is really a rhythm we think of it uh as our birth as something

quite unique that uh could never occur again because we're so close to it you see and it's moving so slowly and so with that point of view uh we are like uh marshall mcluhan said he borrowed a metaphor from me which is that we are driving a car looking at the rear vision mirror that means that the environment in which you believe yourself to exist is always a past one it isn't the one you're actually in the process of growth the the basic process of biology is one in which lower orders are always being superseded

by higher orders but the lower order can never figure out or only very rarely figure out what the higher order is that's taking over and may see it as a terrible threat as total disaster as the very end but therefore can never be aware that the principle of growth always has and always will continue because that's what's going on but you never know what the next step is going to be because if you did know you wouldn't take it because it would already be passed do you understand this that any certainly known future is an

event of which we can say you've had it and in that sense it's past when we play a games and we say in chess or in a bridge or whatever game you're playing the outcome of the game becomes certain we at that point cancel the game and begin a new one because the whole zest of the thing which takes me back to the idea that this whole thing is a hide-and-seek game is that you don't know what the next order coming up is but one thing you can be sure of it will be an order

and it will comprehend you at the moment we stand at a time in history where we're beginning to think of the great countdown on the end of the human race terrifying possibility that through atomic energy we may obliterate this planet and turn the whole globe into a star maybe that's the way all the stars started imagine you know this great thing coming up the countdown on the end seven six five four three two one hmm [Music] where have you heard that before you sit on the sea shop and you hear the waves going in and

out and you don't stop to think that's what you're doing that's what the whole business is doing and there are places where the wave mounts and mounts and it gets too big for its boots or whatever and it spills and breaks we could do just that but uh very important to realize that that's what you're doing because then you don't get panicky about it and the person who's going to press that button is the person who's going to be in panic so if you realize that that's what it is and that it doesn't really matter

if the whole human race blows itself up then there's a chance that it won't do it that's the only chance we have not to do this thing which attracts us like a kind of vertigo like a person who looks over a precipice and is all set to throw himself over or a person who jumps out of a plane when they're skydiving and forgets to pull the parachute ring because he gets fascinated with a target it's called target fascination he just goes straight at it you see so we can get absolutely fascinated with that with disaster

with doom or you know all the news in the newspapers is invariably bad news there is no good news in the newspapers people wouldn't buy a newspaper consisting of good news even the free press is full of terrible news except the san francisco oracle and the uh the fascination you see for this doom uh might be neutralized if we would say well why bother about that it's just another fluctuation in this huge marvelous endless chain of uh our own selves and our own energy going on see here's the problem because of our myopia because of

our the way we've as it were restricted consciousness to focus upon just that certain little area of experience that we call voluntary action that's us and everything else happens to us now that's obviously absurd let's suppose you take in your hand one of those toys a gyroscopic top and you suddenly notice the minute you get this in your hand that it has a kind of vitality to it it seems to resist you it starts pushing you in a certain way see and sometimes you're with it and following it then sometimes you see it it's just

as if you held a living animal in your hand you know you pick up a uh hamster you know or a guinea pig and you hold this little thing in your hand it's always trying to escape so the gyroscope always seems to be trying to escape your whole now in exactly the same way what you're experiencing all the time all sorts of things are getting out of control and doing things you don't expect it's trying to escape your hold all right then don't grab it so hard and you discover that this living thing that you're

feeling like the gyroscope top it's your own life because you can see very simply that you would not understand the experience that you call voluntary action and decision being in control and being yourself unless in opposition to that there was something else you couldn't realize self and control and will unless there was something other out of control and instead of will won't it's the two together only that produces the sensation that you call having a personal identity only there is a funny thing about human consciousness which has been worked out very carefully in gestalt psychology

which is that our attention is captured by the figure rather than the background by the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area and by something moving rather than what is relatively still and to all those phenomena that in this way attract our attention we attribute a higher degree of reality than the ones we don't notice that's only because for the moment those are more important to us consciousness you see is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble just in the same way as a ship's radar is looking for rocks

or other ships and the radar therefore does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks no other ships so in the same way our eyes or rather the selective consciousness behind the eyes only pays attention to what we think is important i am at this moment aware of all of you in this room of every single detail of your clothing of your faces and so on but i'm not noticing it all and therefore i will not be able to remember tomorrow exactly how each one of you looked and what you were

wearing because what i notice is restricted to things that i think are particularly important if i noticed some particularly beautiful girl in the audience then i might notice also what she's wearing and uh that would be memorable but by and large you see we scan things over but we pay attention only to what our set of values tells us we ought to pay attention to but quite obviously you as a complete individual are much more than the scanning system you are in uh relationships with the external world that on the whole are incredibly harmonious and

so in this way we have this uh rather myopic way of looking at things and we screen out from attention anything that is not immediately important to a scanning system based on sensing danger but quite obviously you as a complete individual are much more than the scanning system you are in relationships with the external world that on the whole are incredibly harmonious going back to this illustration of every living body is something like the flame of a candle the energies of life in the form of temperature light air and food and so on are streaming

through you all at this moment in the most magnificently harmonious way and your all of you far more beautiful than any candle flame just sitting in these chairs just going you know only we are so used to it we say about that so what show me something interesting show me something new because it's a characteristic of consciousness that it ignores stimuli that are constant when anything is constant it says okay that's safe it's in the bag i didn't pay attention to that anymore and therefore we eliminate systematically from our awareness all the gorgeous things that

are going on all the time and instead only become focused on the things the troublesome things that might happen to upset it which is all right but we make too much of it and become we make so much of it that we identify our very selves i ego with the radar with the troubleshooter and that's only a tiny fragment of one's total being so that if you do become aware that you are not simply that scanning mechanism but you are your complete organism then very swiftly in turn as a consequence of that you become aware

that your organism is not the way you think about it when you look at it from the standpoint of conscious attention from the standpoint of the ego from the standpoint of the ego your organism is uh your kind of vehicle your automobile in which you go around but from a physical point of view your organism is again like the candle flame or the whirlpool it is something which is a continuous patterning or activity of the whole cosmos the key the key idea here is pattern let's suppose uh i'm going to borrow a metaphor from buckminster

fuller suppose we have a rope and one section of this rope is made of uh manila hemp the next section is cotton the next section is silk the next section is nylon and so on now we tie a knot in this rope just an ordinary one over knot you find by putting your finger in the knot you can move it all the way down the rope now as this knot travels it's first of all made of manila hemp it's then made of cotton it's then made of silk it's then made of nylon and so on

but the knot keeps going on that's the integrity of pattern the continuing pattern which is what you are because you might you know be for several years you might be a vegetarian and you might be a meat eater and uh so on and you know your constitution changes all the time but people's your friends still recognize you because you're still putting on the same show it's the same pattern that is the recognizable individual but we are trained in our language the very structure of the language we talk deceives us into misunderstanding this because when we

see a pattern we ask what's it made of like you see a table is it made of wood or is it made of aluminum but then when you inquire into what is wood and how does wood differ from aluminum the only thing a scientist can tell you is the different patterns that is to say the different molecular structure of the two things and a molecular structure is not a description of what something is made of it is a description of what dance it is performing what motions what kind of a symphony this is because basically

all phenomena of life are musical and uh gold differs from lead in exactly the same way that a waltz differs from a miserica it's a different dance there isn't anything that's dancing that is a deception we get into because we have two spots of speech in our grammar we have nouns and verbs and verbs are supposed to describe the activities of nouns and this is simply a convention of speech you could have a language with only verbs in it you don't need any nouns or you could also have a language without nouns only and no

verbs and uh it would perfectly adequately describe what's going on in the world so if you were used to speaking the part with a language that had one part of speech uh you could say just as much as we can with two and be a lot clearer only at first it would sound awkward but you'd soon get used to it and then when you got used to it it would be a matter of common sense that the patterning of the world is not some kind of stuff that's patterning you don't have to seek for a

substance underlying the whole thing is just patterning and we're all that and wherever you see patterning you will see the principle that big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them little fleas have lesser fleas and sweat infinity and then you reverse the process see little fleas in infinite infinitely little fleas are always on the back of bigger fleas and the bigger fleas are on the back of still bigger ones and those bigger fleas on the back are still more roughing fleas you see it goes the other way too and so in this

way uh there is to a person who really wakes up you very soon realize that your existence is not something that is just the uh hopeless little creature that's suddenly confronted with a great big external world that goes at him you know and eats him up tiniest little thing that comes into being every minute little fruit fly or gnat or bacterium i will go so far as to say is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends this thing goes both ways it's not only that every little organism which exists depends on its total environment

the reverse is also true that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms so that you could say this universe consists of a an arrangement of pattern in which every event is essential to the whole thing now we screen that idea out of our consciousness in exactly the same way that we screen out the perception of space as an important reality just as we pay attention to the figure and ignore the background so we see one way of looking at things mainly that the organism is very frail against the environment

it lasts a long time the environment but the organism only lasts a short time what do you mean the environment lasts a long time what does the environment consist of just a lot of little things and yet there is the environment just as the same way as there is the face in the newspaper photograph behind all those little dots when you get far enough away from it you see the face when you get far enough away from all the organisms and the little bits of things you see the environment in another scale of magnification but

actually the whole thing is arranged in a a polar system where the enormous depends on the tiny and the tiny depends on the enormous and you get a relationship between these extremes which can be called a transaction that is to say a transaction known there's buying and selling it's impossible to have buying without selling and selling without buying they always go together but of course the person you see who's interested in buying thinks more about buying than he thinks about the other fellow selling and if he does that he's going to get a bad buy

because he doesn't really think about the mechanisms the other fellows using to sell and if i want to sell something and think too much about selling i don't enter sufficiently into the psychology of the buyer so then i'm not a good not a good business shark so in this way we are always as it were over emphasizing a certain aspect of our experience and we say now what is important about people this is the great cradle of the west is there unique individuality and we have been given an immense psychic investment in our own individuality

by our upbringing what are you going to amount to what are you going to contribute to human life what's your particular destiny going to be fine idea but the thing we don't understand is that it won't work this great idea without being balanced with its opposite just as you can't have the back without the front so you cannot have the values of a unique personality unless at the same time everybody recognizes that there is another level at which we are not unique at all but that i am you and you or i that in other

words the so-called eye that we all have you see every one of you feels that you're the center of the universe and that everything else is happening around you in a circle you can turn around and you can see sort of equally far in all directions especially if you're in a ship in the middle of the ocean so you're in the middle and it's true from the standpoint of astronomy we live in a curved space-time continuum that is to say in a universe at which every point may be regarded as the center consider a sphere

here's a ball what point on this ball is the center of its surface you can see it once that any point can be the center of its surface so legitimately all points in the universe are the center that's saint bonaventure's description of god that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere so everybody's in that situation and at that depth of your existence we are all like um the nerve ends on your own skin see at every point on your skin there's a little nerve end going peek and getting information from the outside

world another and another and another all over and they all constitute your total sensitivity well so in the same way and all these people sitting around here with their little eyes and little ears and things they're going peek and they're all really one common center called i which is looking at itself from ever so many different points of view only we are so close to it and we are so absorbed in the different ways each one of them is doing that we neglect the community underneath just like when you uh never seen chinese people before

and you go into a bunch of chinese people and you can't tell the difference between them you think well all chinese look the same well the chinese when they first saw us they thought we all look the same we all had red hair and long noses and uh then when you get to know when i you know i live in japan for a week two weeks three weeks then suddenly all the japanese start turning into people and they they they look like they don't look japanese anymore they're just like like people they're all different see

as you get to a certain level then all the individuality comes out uh so if in other words someone from an entirely different form of biology came to this planet and looked at us he wouldn't know the difference between negroes greeks armenians and white anglo-saxon protestants they would all look to him exactly the same and he would see us as in other words he'd look at a group like this here and he would call it a thing you know just you see a set of false teeth and they all are pretty much alike and you

say well that's a set of false teeth so you see a set of people sitting around and uh say well that's that's the thing it's like a caterpillar with so many legs on it you know it breaks up and reforms and so on rather interesting like hydras you know you can take hydras and put them in an asteriser having taught no worms excuse me you take flat worms and you can teach them certain tricks and then you put them in an asterizer and uh pulverize them then they reform themselves and they know the tricks you

taught them and you can mix up those who do and those who don't and those who do learn the tricks that can convey it to the new ones uh that didn't know them see so that maybe one day we can um get some dna from genius people and feed it to people who don't know anything and immediately they learn these tricks think of that but the meaning of all that talking about dna and osterized flatworms is that what is transmitted all the time is the repetition of pattern the repetition of certain rhythms and that this

whole uh rhythmic system may be looked at in this way let's just take any pattern uh we we can form a pattern say of um like this see i make a kind of a loop and a loop-ended cross in the air now let's consider what is the problem involved in analyzing that pattern into smaller parts uh shall i say each one of these loops is a part and there are four parts therefore to the pattern but where does a loop begin and end just excuse me let's look at it another way i could say that

not this was a part but this was the part of the pattern there were four of those uh you should all study incidentally the drawings of a great dutch artist by the name of escher whose work appeared a little while ago in the scientific american but he has a book of the most fantastic patterns where you will see for example an arrangement of devils and when you look at the background it's an arrangement of angels that everything goes with its counterpoint so that when you look at one of esh's pictures you don't know which is

the foreground and which is the background you just flip flip flip flip flip and you can have it either way well everything's like that only because as i said we are fascinated with what we have at the moment selected as the foreground we say for foreground it comes before it's important that's what's there the background oh that's just background you see supposing you suddenly do a flip on that you realize the foreground yeah it's kind of close but as we say of people you could only see the trees who can't see the forest it's like

businessmen who say they're very practical but they're very short-sighted and don't know what's good for them and put themselves out of their business regularly so they have to start wars in order to carry on business and uh you know that's stupid so you you always wherever you are looking at the general panorama of sensory experience try switching try shifting your attention to all the things you thought were unimportant to the constants to the background and begin looking at the spaces between people uh all painters have to learn this because especially if you're working in oils

you actually have to paint in the background weavers know this because when they're making patterns in weaving they've got to weave the background as well or if you do needlepoint with embroidery think of the hours you spend putting in the background over the canvas in wool and you become aware of it same way the people who made the great oriental carpets they're much more aware of the background as constituting an essential part of the total experience so as you uh become aware of this you will see the same thing that you notice in music namely

that it is only as a result of hearing the interval between tones that you hear any melody if you don't hear the interval you're tone deaf and all notes are the same noise all you hear is rhythm you don't hear any melody you've got to hear the interval so then watch the intervals between people the things that aren't said the things that are tacit the things that are implicit rather than explicit in all life and then you begin to get um connected now it's very important to have a connection in life and um it'd be

in the know and uh this is the way it it fundamentally comes out of seeing the thing you forgot you know you can always bug people in a beautiful way in a very helpful way by just saying to them what did you forget i said well i don't know uh was i supposed to remember oh i'm i'm really not trying to put you on i mean it's not difficult this is something completely obvious that you forgot you'd easily remember it because it's so obvious well that's the hardest thing in the world to think of what's

the most obvious thing i forgot her what's that well who do you think you are well how do you answer that question who are you well you give a name you say i'm joe doakes i'm alan watts that's not true that's what people told you you were they put that name on you and they taught you to identify with it and to behave as it was expected to behave but that's not who you are you know very well go back in your memory go back into your infancy before they started telling you all this stuff

who are you and if you get with that you know very well who you are the jolly old ancient of days only there's a conspiracy that you mustn't let on about that because everybody is and uh if one person realizes it the other is a little bit offended and they say well uh how come you're so great we worked it in christianity by a very clever thing of allowing just one individual to be recognized as the god incarnate and uh nobody else therefore could be and since he had been safely crucified and whisked up to

heaven he wouldn't bother us anymore so everybody therefore who gets an intimation of who they really are and ever comes out with it in christian civilization people say who the hell do you think you are you jesus christ well you can say jesus christ said he was jesus christ and everybody put him down for it and that's what you're doing to me oh they say forget that one because uh it's like somebody comes out and composes some perfectly terrible music and the critics say this man is a cacophonist he is completely incompetent he said did

you read the reviews of beethoven's first symphony when it was performed at vienna now the thing is we allowed one person you see one human individual to be the incarnate god because we have all been living in a theory of the universe in which the individual is simply involved in something that happens to him and we feel that this thing that happens to us is reality it is facts that we have to face and accept and cope with see it's always something other than you you don't recognize it as an integral part of your own

being without which you cannot know what you mean by the word i but in the truth of the matter is though that if uh you will face it out every single one of us knows that that isn't true there is a and as it were a recess of the soul of the psyche where everybody knows perfectly well that you are not just this irresponsible little mouse that's been chucked down into this world but that you are really doing this work you're running it only you can't admit it just in the same way as you can't

admit that you're responsible for the way your own heart beats you say oh that's not my doing i have no control over my heart do you have any control over being conscious do you know how you will and you say i intend to take my hand down from my face and put it on my leg i can do that but i don't know how the hell it's done so that what we mean by the capacity of voluntary control in the ordinary sense of the word is isn't it we don't understand it at all so you

might say in in a funny backwards way that the only kind of control you really understand is that way you're not using your will because you just do it so easy like you open and close your hand you know how to do it sure you know how to do it but you can't put it into words and explain to someone how to do it say well come on aren't you human don't you know how to open and close your hand let's do it silly but we don't realize you see that just as we know how

to do this we know equally well how to turn the sun into light how to blue the sky how to blow the wind how to wave the ocean how to um digest food and um i might add to be digested by bacteria and transformed as we transform our stakes we will in turn be transformed but the pattern keeps going and it's always you only you see you have this marvelous capacity to transform yourself without knowing that you're doing it therefore you keep surprising yourself and therefore you keep on doing it because if you didn't surprise

yourself you wouldn't you wouldn't go on doing it it's just the very fact you see that you seem to be the victims of the thing you don't understand and that you seem to conclude your life every time in a wipeout call death where all your control goes it's just exactly that opposite condition to what you call being alive that allows you to be alive only every time it happens it's like it's new it's like every time you're born it seems like it was the only time but of course if it wasn't like that you wouldn't

do it you