As we study man, or any other living organism, and try and describe him accurately and scientifically,
 we find that our normal sensation of ourselves as isolated egos inside a bag of skin is a
 hallucination. It really is, it's absolutely nutty. Because when you describe human behavior,
 or the behavior of a mouse or a rat or a chicken or anything you want to describe, you find
 that as you try to describe its behavior accurately, you must also describe the behavior of its
 environment. Supposing I walk, and you want to describe the action of walking. You can't
 talk about my walking without also describing the floor. Because if you don't describe
 the floor and the space in which I am moving, all you will be describing is somebody swinging
 his legs in empty space. So as to describe my walking, you must describe the space in
 which you find me. You know, you couldn't see me unless you could also see my background,
 what stands behind me. See, if I myself, if the boundaries of my skin were coterminous
 with your whole field of vision, you wouldn't see me at all. You would see my bright red
 vest instead. That's why I put it on this evening, to demonstrate this point. And that
 would be the thing that filled your field of vision, that was the thing standing there.
 You wouldn't see me, because in order to see me, you have to see not only what is inside
 the boundary of my skin, but you have to see what is outside it too. Now that's terribly
 important. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery, the only thing you need to know to
 understand the deepest metaphysical secrets, is this, that for every outside there is an
 inside and for every inside there is an outside. And although they are different, they go together.
 There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and
 the conspiracy is this, to look as different as possible and yet underneath to be identical,
 because you don't find one without the other. Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have
 a battle. Note that, agreed. So there is a secret. What is esoteric, what is profound,
 and what is deep, is what we will call the implicit. What is obvious and on the open
 is what we will call the explicit. And I and my environment, you and your environment,
 are explicitly as different as different could be. But implicitly, you go together. And this
 is discovered by the scientist when he tries, as the whole art of science is to describe
 what happens exactly, and when he describes exactly what you do, he finds out that you,
 your behavior is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around
 you. He realizes then that you are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when
 the sea has waves on it, all right, the sea, the ocean is waving. And so each one of us
 is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is. And with each one of
 us it's waving and saying, "Yoo-hoo! Here I am!" Only it does it differently each time,
 because variety is the spice of life.
 But you see, the funny thing is, we haven't been brought up to feel that way. Instead
 of feeling that we, each one of us, are something that the whole realm of being is doing, we
 feel that we are something that has come into the whole realm of being as a stranger, when
 we were born we don't really know where we came from, because we don't remember. And
 we think when we die, that's just going to be that. Some people console themselves with
 the idea that they're going to heaven, or that they're going to be reincarnated, or
 they're going to summer land, or something, you know. People don't really believe that.
 For most people it's plausible, the real thing that haunts them is that when they die, they're
 going to sleep and never going to wake up. They're going to be locked up in the safe
 deposit box of darkness forever. But that all depends, you see, upon a false notion
 of what is oneself.
 Now the reason why we have this false notion of ourselves is, as far as I can understand
 it, that we have specialized in one particular kind of consciousness. Being very general
 and rough, we have two kinds of consciousness. One I will call the spotlight, and the other
 the floodlight. The spotlight is what we call conscious attention, and that is trained into
 us from childhood as the most valuable form of consciousness. When the teacher in class
 says "Pay attention!" everybody stares. It looks fast at the teacher like that. That's
 spotlight consciousness. Fixing your mind on one thing at a time. Concentrate. And even
 though you may not be able to have a very long attention span, nevertheless you concentrate.
 You use your spotlight one thing after another, one thing after another, flip, flip, flip,
 flip, flip, flip, flip, like that. But we also have another kind of consciousness which
 I'll call the floodlight. For example, you can drive your car for several miles with
 a friend sitting next to you, and your spotlight consciousness will be completely absorbed
 in talking to your friend. Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving
 of the car, will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on, and
 you'll get there safely, without even thinking about it. But our culture has taught us to
 specialize in spotlight consciousness, and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness
 alone. I am my spotlight consciousness. My conscious attention, that is my ego, that
 is me. And very largely we ignore the floodlight. Now the floodlight consciousness is working
 all the time. Every nerve end that we have is its instrument. You know you can go out
 to luncheon or something and you sit next to Mrs. So-and-so, and you go home and your
 wife says to you, "Was Mrs. So-and-so there?" "Yes, I sat next to her." "Well, what was
 she wearing?" "I haven't the faintest idea." You saw, but you didn't notice.
 Now, because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness,
 and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued, we have the sensation of ourselves as being
 just the spotlight, just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other.
 And so we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our being. People who by various
 methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness have what is called a mystical
 experience or a cosmic consciousness, or what the Buddhists call bodhi, awakening, and the
 Hindus call moksha, liberation, because they discover that the real deep, deep self, that
 which you really are fundamentally and forever, is the whole of being. All that there is,
 the works, that's you. Only, that universal self that is you has the capacity to focus
 itself at ever so many different here and nows. So when you use the word "I," this,
 as William James said, is really a word of position, like this, or here. Just as a sun
 or star has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself in you, in you, in you, in
 you, in you, with all the different variations. It plays games. It plays the John Doe game,
 the Mary Smith game. It plays the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the pigeon
 game, the fish game, the star game. Just like these are games that differ from each other,
 just like backgammon, whist, bridge, poker, pinnacle, or like waltz, mazurka, minuet,
 and so on. It dances with infinite variety. But every single dance that it does, that
 is to say, you is what the whole thing is doing. But you see, we forget it. We don't
 know. We've been brought up in a special way, so that we are unaware of the connection,
 unaware that each one of us is the works, playing it this way for a while. And so we
 have been taught to dread death, as if that were the end of the show. It won't happen
 any more. And therefore, to be afraid of all the things that might bring about death, pain,
 sickness, suffering. And if you don't know, you see, if you're not really vividly aware
 of the fact that you are basically the works, you have no real joy in life. You're just
 a bundle of anxiety, mixed up with guilt. Because you see, when we bring children into
 the world, we play awful games with them. Instead of saying, "How do you do? Welcome
 to the human race. Now my dear, we are playing some very complicated games, and these are
 the rules of the game we play. I want you to understand them, and then you'll learn
 them, and then when you get a little bit older, you may be able to think up some better rules."
 Instead of being quite direct with our children, instead we say, "You're here on probation,
 you understand that. And maybe, when you grow up a bit, you'll be acceptable. But until
 then, you should be seen and not heard. You're a mess, and you've got to be educated and
 schooled and whipped until you're human." So that these attitudes which are inculcated
 into us in infancy, go on into old age. The way you start out is liable to be the way
 you finish. So people going around, fundamentally feeling that they don't belong. Because their
 parents said to them in the first place, "Look, you don't really belong here. You're here
 on sufferance. You're on probation. You're not a human being yet." And people feel this
 right on into old age. And so they figure that the universe is presided over by this
 awful kind of God-the-father-parent, who yes, has our best interest at heart, is loving,
 but who spares the rod spoils the child. Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth. So everybody's
 sort of, "When's it going to hit next?" So don't feel that they belong. So we get this
 ghastly, what I call Christian ego—it's a little bit Jewish too—who really feels
 that he doesn't—he's homeless, he does—he's an orphan. Even the Christians say we are
 sons of God by adoption and grace. Not real sons, but by adoption and grace and sufferance.
 And so comes this sensation, you see. So characteristic of Western man and indeed of all highly civilized
 people, of being a stranger in the earth, a momentary flash of consciousness between
 two eternal blacknesses. And so therefore we speak of confronting reality, facing the
 facts. We speak of coming into this world. And this whole sensation that we are brought
 up to have of being an island of consciousness, locked up in a bag of skin, facing outside
 us a world that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside me is not
 me. This sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves
 and the so-called external world. So my main point last night was then that we need a new
 kind of consciousness in which every individual becomes aware that his real self is not just
 his conscious ego. You know, let's take a headlight of a car. The headlight shines on
 the road in front. The headlight does not shine on the wire which connects it with its
 own battery. So in a way the headlight is unaware of how it shines. And in the same
 way we are unaware of the sources of our consciousness. We don't know how we know. There was a young
 man who said, "Though it seems that I know that I know, what I would like to see is the
 eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know." And so we are ignorant of,
 we ignore, it doesn't come within the scope of our attention, how it is that we manage
 to be conscious. How it is that we manage to grow our hair, to shape our bones, to beat
 our heart, and to secrete all the necessary fluids that we need from our glands. We do
 it, but we don't know how we do it. Because you see, underneath the superficial self,
 which pays attention to this and that, there is another self, more really us than I. And
 if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more
 you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is. That you
 are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that furthermore this
 galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. And that vast thing that you see far off,
 far off, far off with telescopes, and you look and look and look, one day you're going
 to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in knowing that, know, you see, that you never
 die. That you are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones,
 now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown, so it goes forever and ever and ever.
 [Music]
 You've been listening to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts. For a cassette copy of this
 program call 1-800-969-2887, which is 1-800-WO-WATTS. Or send $10, with your name and address, to
 the Electronic University, PO Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979. When you write,
 please include the name of your local station. Ask for tape number 1, "Myth of Myself." You'll
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 write us at the same address, the Electronic University, PO Box 2309, San Anselmo, California,
 94979. The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by the Electronic University.
 Our theme music is by Acoustic Alchemy. I'm Neil Harvey. Thank you for listening.
 [Music]
 Most of us are brought up to feel that what we see out in front of us is something that
 is, that lies beyond our eyes out here. That the colors and the shapes that you see in
 this room are out there. Now, in fact, that is not so. In fact, all that you see is a
 state of affairs inside your head. All these colors, all these lights, are conditions of
 the optical nervous system. There are, outside the eyes, quanta, electronic phenomena, vibrations,
 but these things are not light. They are not color until they are translated into states
 of the human nervous system. So if you want to know how the inside of your head feels,
 open your eyes and look. That is how the inside of your head feels. But we are normally unaware
 of that and project it out.
 [Music]


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