The following is an excerpt from The World As Self by essayist Alan Watts. [1] As you read it, be present with the feeling of vibration in your body.

Just as, you don't notice what your pineal gland is doing at the moment.

So in the same way you don't notice the connections which tie us all together. Not only Here and Now, but for ever and ever and ever.

The difficulty and the basic reason why we don't notice the self is because the self doesn't look at the self.

A knife doesn't need to cut itself. Fire doesn't need to burn iteslef. Water doesn't need to quench itself. A light doesn't need to shine on itself. This is the fundamental problem with having some sort of awareness of self.

Nevertheless it is the whole contention of Indian philosophy—especially what we call Vedanta—that it is possible, in a way, to become aware of oneself in this deepest sense. To know that you are the totality. And this experience is the real substance of Indian philosophy as a whole—both Hindu and Buddhist—it is called Moksha, which liberally means 'liberation'. Liberation from the hallucination that you are just “poor little me”. To wake up from that kind of hipnosis and discover that you are simply something—your organism, your phisical body, your concious attention (which is your ego)—that you are something being done by this vast indescribable self; which is out of time. Which has no beginning, no end. It neither continues, nor discontinues. It's beyond all categorization whatsoever. All we can say of it positively is the negative.

Anything therefore you can formulate, imagine, or picture will not be the self. So therefore when you are trying to get to know the self, you have to get rid of every idea in your head.

This was shared to me by John Zdanowski in August of 2018.

References

1. The World As Self, Alan Watts

2. https://youtu.be/GJteTl1VgY0?t=709

Tags

• #alan_watts