What if God is not the maker of the world, standing above it like a king, but the actor playing every part at once? In this talk, Alan Watts lays out three very different models of the universe, and quietly dismantles the one most of us inherited.
He begins with the Hindu picture: every person is a mask of a single Godhead, the one player behind all the games. This is where our own word gives the game away. Person comes from the Latin persona, the mask worn by actors in the open-air theatres of Greece and Rome, built with a megaphonic mouth to carry the voice. The word for the real you originally meant a mask. And the one wearing every mask can never be pinned down, Watts says, for the same reason you cannot bite your own teeth or look straight into your own eyes. It is the circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Then he turns to the Chinese model, where the world is not a machine but an organism, and an organism has no boss. There is no top organ, no ruler. Your heart is not a part bolted in like a component in an engine. A body grows all over at once, like a crystal forming in solution, in what Watts calls an orderly anarchy. This is the principle the Chinese call the Tao, the way of organic growth. As Lao Tzu said, the great Tao flows everywhere, loving and nourishing all things, yet it does not lord it over them, and claims no credit when its work is done.
And this, finally, is what nature really means: not a system run by a governor, but everything happening of itself. Your heart beats without your planning it. You breathe without thinking about it. The whole world, Watts suggests, is unfolding in exactly the same way, of itself, with no one in charge.
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âPerhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Alan Watts had the rare gift of âwriting beautifully the un-writableâ. Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit. A fascinating entry into the deepest ways of knowing.â â Los Angeles Times
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