Now, maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer
 and had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders
 and said, "Just a bunch of rocks," and they went away.
 Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again, and
 they said, "Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling, and it's
 alive.
 After all, it has done something intelligent."
 Welcome to the Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.
 As one of the century's most eloquent philosophers, Alan Watts introduced a generation in the
 West to the fascinating ideas of the Far East, the wisdoms of the Orient.
 In the 1960s and early '70s, he lectured throughout the English-speaking world and was recorded
 in a variety of settings, from seminars aboard his ferry boat, the Vallejo, in Sausalito,
 California, to keynote addresses at major universities.
 The author of books on Christian theology, psychology, ecology, and Eastern religion,
 including his classic, The Way of Zen, Watts' scholarship is deep and timeless.
 However, it is also his wit and playful approach to life that endears him to us today.
 This program was recorded in 1965 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
 In this talk, Alan Watts tackles the fundamental philosophical question, "Who am I?"
 Is the human being an island of consciousness, locked up in a bag of skin, isolated from
 an alien world?
 Are there really insides and outsides?
 As he unwinds these questions, Watts examines the two fundamental Western myths, that human
 beings are either made by a celestial creator or are the result of random collisions, flukes
 in a world without meaning.
 Who am I?
 Here's Alan Watts.
 I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, that the most fascinating problem in the world
 is "Who am I?"
 What do you mean?
 What do you feel when you say the word "I"?
 I myself.
 I don't think there can be any more fascinating preoccupation than that, because it's so
 mysterious, it's so elusive.
 Because what you are in your inmost being escapes your examination in rather the same
 way that you can't look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror, you can't
 bite your own teeth, you can't taste your own tongue, and you can't touch the tip of
 this finger with the tip of this finger.
 And that's why there's always an element of profound mystery in the problem of who we
 are.
 This problem has fascinated me for many years, and I've made many inquiries.
 What do you mean by the word "I"?
 And there is a certain consensus about this, a certain agreement, especially among people
 who live in Western civilization.
 Most of us feel "I," ego, myself, my source of consciousness, to be a center of awareness
 and of a source of action that resides in the middle of a bag of skin.
 And so we have what I have called the conception of ourselves as a skin-encapsulated ego.
 Now it's very funny how we use the word "I."
 If we just refer to common speech, we are not accustomed to say, "I am a body."
 We rather say, "I have a body."
 We don't say, "I beat my heart," in the same way as we say, "I walk, I think, I talk."
 We feel that our heart beats itself, and that has nothing very much to do with "I."
 In other words, we don't regard "I" myself as identical with our whole physical organism.
 We regard it as something inside it.
 And most Western people locate their ego inside their heads.
 You are somewhere between your eyes and between your ears, and the rest of you dangles from
 that point of reference.
 It is not so in other cultures.
 When a Chinese or Japanese person wants to locate the center of himself, he points here,
 not here, here to what Japanese call the kokoro, or the Chinese call shin, the heart-mind.
 Some people also locate themselves in the solar plexus.
 But by and large, we locate ourselves behind the eyes and somewhere between the ears, as
 if within the dome of the skull there were some sort of arrangement, such as there is
 at the SAC headquarters in Denver, where there are men in great rooms surrounded with radar
 screens and all sorts of things, and earphones on, watching all the movements of planes all
 over the world.
 So in the same way, we have really the idea of ourselves as a little man inside our heads,
 who has earphones on, which bring messages from the ears, and who has a television set
 in front of him, which brings messages from the eyes, and all sorts of electrode things
 are all over his body, giving him signals from the hands and so on, and he has a panel
 in front of him of buttons and dials and things, and so he more or less controls the body.
 But he isn't the same as the body, because I am in charge of what are called the voluntary
 actions, and what are called involuntary actions of the body, they happen to me.
 I am pushed around by them, but to some extent also I can push my body around.
 This I have concluded is the ordinary, average conception of what is oneself.
 And look at the way children, influenced by our cultural environment, ask questions.
 "Mommy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?"
 You see, the child gets the idea from our culture that the father and mother gave him
 a body into which he was popped at some moment, whether it was conception or whether it was
 parturition is a little bit vague.
 But there is, in our whole way of thinking, the idea that we are a soul, a spiritual essence
 of some kind, imprisoned inside a body, and that we look out upon a world that is foreign
 to us.
 In the words of the poet Haussmann, "I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made."
 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.
 And therefore we go on to talk about the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and view
 ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the world outside us.
 I shall have much more to say about that in the second lecture, but in the first now I
 want to examine the strange feeling of being an isolated self.
 Now actually it is absolutely absurd to say that we came into this world.
 We didn't.
 We came out of it.
 What do you think you are?
 Living this world as a tree.
 Are you leaves on its branches, or are you a bunch of birds that settled on a dead old
 tree from somewhere else?
 Surely everything that we know about living organisms from the standpoint of the sciences
 shows us that we grow out of this world, that we, each one of us, are what you might call
 symptoms of the state of the universe as a whole.
 But you see, that is not part of our common sense.
 Western man has for many centuries been under the influence of two great myths.
 When I use the word "myth," I don't necessarily mean falsehood.
 To me the word "myth" signifies a great idea in terms of which man tries to make sense
 of the world.
 It may be an idea, it may be an image.
 Now the two images which have most profoundly influenced Western man are, number one, the
 image of the world as an artifact, like a carpenter's table or a jar made by a potter.
 Indeed in the book of Genesis there comes the idea that man was originally a clay figurine
 made out of the earth by the Lord God, who then breathed into this clay figurine and
 gave it life.
 And the whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through and through
 by the idea that all things, all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers,
 all grasshoppers, all worms, everything, are artifacts.
 They have been made.
 And it is therefore natural for a Western child to say to its mother, "How was I made?"
 That would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do
 not think of nature as something made.
 They look upon it as something that grows, and the two processes are quite different.
 When you make something, you put it together, you assemble parts, or you carve an image
 out of wood or stone, working from the outside to the inside.
 But when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way.
 It doesn't assemble parts.
 It expands from within and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming,
 like a seed turning into a plant.
 But behind our whole thought in the West is the idea that the world is an artifact, that
 it is put together by a celestial architect, carpenter, and artist, who therefore knows
 how it was done.
 When I was a little boy and I asked many questions which my mother couldn't answer, she used
 to resort in desperation to saying, "My dear, there are some things that we are not meant
 to know."
 And I said, "Well, will we ever find out?"
 And she said, "Yes, when we die and we go to heaven, it will all be made clear."
 And I used to think that on wet afternoons in heaven, we would all sit around the throne
 of grace and say to the Lord God, "Now just why did you do it this way, and how did you
 manage it that?"
 And he would explain it and make it all very clear.
 All questions would be answered.
 Because as we have popularly, in popular theology, understood the Lord God, he is the master
 mind who knows everything.
 And if you asked the Lord God exactly how high is Mount Whitney to the nearest millimeter,
 he would know exactly like that, and would tell you.
 Any question, the cosmic Encyclopedia Britannica.
 Unfortunately, this particular image or myth became too much for Western man, because it
 was oppressive to feel that you are known through and through and watched all the time
 by an infinitely just judge.
 I have a friend, a very enlightened woman, she's a Catholic convert, but a very enlightened
 Catholic.
 And in her bathroom, she has on the pipe that connects the tank with the toilet seat, a
 little framed picture of an eye.
 And underneath, in Gothic letters, is written, "Thou God seest me."
 Everywhere is this eye watching, watching, watching, watching, watching, and judging
 you, so that you always feel you're never really by yourself.
 But the old gentleman is observing you and writing notes in his black book.
 And this became too much for the West.
 It became oppressive.
 They had to get rid of it.
 And so instead, we got another myth, the myth of the purely mechanical universe.
 This was invented at the end of the 18th century.
 Became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the 19th century, and well into
 the 20th century, so that it is today's common sense.
 Very few people today really believe in God, in the old sense.
 They say they do, but they really hope there is a God.
 They don't really have faith in God.
 They fervently wish that there was one, and feel that they ought to believe that there
 is.
 But the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman is no longer
 plausible.
 It isn't that anybody's disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude
 of galaxies and the immense light-year distances between them and so on.
 So instead, it has become fashionable, and it is nothing more than a fashion, to believe
 that the universe is dumb, stupid, that intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only
 within the bag of the human epidermis, and that outside that, the thing is simply a kind
 of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces.
 Courtesy of Dr. Freud, for example, biological life is based on something called libido,
 which was a very, very loaded word.
 Blind, ruthless, uncomprehending lust.
 That's the foundation of the human unconscious.
 And similarly, to thinkers like of the 19th century, like Ernst Haeckel, even Darwin,
 T.H.
 Huxley, and so on, there was this notion that at the root of being is an energy, and this
 energy is blind.
 This energy is just energy, and it's utterly and totally stupid.
 And our intelligence is an unfortunate accident.
 By some weird freak of evolution, we came to be these feeling and rational beings, more
 or less rational.
 And this is a ghastly mistake, because here we are in a universe that has nothing in common
 with us, doesn't share our feelings, has no real interest in us, we're just a sort of
 cosmic fluke.
 And therefore, the only hope for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission
 and conquer it and master it.
 Now all this is perfectly idiotic.
 If you would think that the idea of the universe as being the creation of a benevolent old
 gentleman, although he's not so benevolent, he takes a sort of "this hurts me more than
 it's going to hurt you" sort of attitude to things.
 You can have that on the one hand, and if that becomes uncomfortable, you can exchange
 it for its opposite, the idea that the ultimate reality doesn't have any intelligence at all.
 At least that gets rid of the old bogey in the sky, in exchange for a picture of the
 world that is completely stupid.
 Now these ideas don't make any sense, especially the last one, because you cannot get an intelligent
 organism such as a human being out of an unintelligent universe.
 The saying in the New Testament that "figs do not grow on thistles, nor grapes on thorns"
 applies equally to the world.
 You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment.
 Look, here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples, and we call it
 an apple tree, because the tree apples.
 That's what it does.
 All right, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of
 this solar system is that at least on the planet Earth the thing peoples, in just the
 same way that an apple tree apples.
 Now maybe two million years ago somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and
 had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders
 and said, "Just a bunch of rocks," and they went away.
 Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again and
 they said, "Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling."
 And it's alive, after all, it has done something intelligent.
 Because you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow
 on the apple tree.
 If evolution means anything, it means that.
 But you see, we curiously twist it.
 We say, "Well, first of all, in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock, and then
 intelligence happened to arise in it, you know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the
 top of the whole thing."
 But we're thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.
 Where there are rocks, watch out.
 Watch out, because the rocks are going eventually to come alive, and they're going to have people
 crawling over them.
 It's only a matter of time.
 Just in the same way as the seed, the acorn, is eventually going to turn into the oak,
 because it has the potentiality of that within it.
 Rocks are not dead.
 You see, it depends on what kind of attitude you want to take to the world.
 If you want to put the world down, you say, "Oh well, fundamentally it's only just a lot
 of geology.
 It's a stupidity.
 And it so happens that there's a kind of a freak comes up in it which we call consciousness."
 That's an attitude that you take when you want to prove to people that you're a tough
 guy, that you're realistic, that you face facts, and that you don't indulge in wishful
 thinking.
 It's just a matter of role-playing.
 And you must be aware of these things.
 They are fashions in the intellectual world.
 On the other hand, if you feel warm-hearted towards the universe, you put it up instead
 of putting it down, and you say about rocks, "They're really conscious, but a very primitive
 form of consciousness.
 Because after all, when I take even this crystal here, which is glass, and go, 'tk, tk, tk,
 tk,' well, it makes a noise.
 And that response, that resonance, is an extremely primitive form of consciousness.
 Our consciousness is much more subtle than that.
 But when you hit a bell and it rings, you touch a crystal and it responds, inside itself,
 I mean, it has a very simple reaction.
 It goes jangle inside, whereas we go jangle with all sorts of colors and lights and intelligence
 ideas and thoughts.
 It's more complicated.
 But both are equally conscious, but conscious in different degrees.
 That is a perfectly acceptable idea.
 It's just the opposite of the idea—see, all I'm saying is that minerals are a rudimentary
 form of consciousness, whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated
 form of minerals.
 You see?
 What they want to do is to say everything is kind of bleh, whereas what I want to say
 is hooray, you know, life is a good show.
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