Ask what existence actually is, and you run into a strange difficulty: if you could answer it, you would not know what terms to put the answer in. Every answer comes back as structure, form, pattern. Ask what the forms themselves are made of, and there is nowhere left to stand.
So the physicists gave up the search for stuff, and handed us a universe made entirely of pattern. You can watch it happen yourself simply by looking closer. A carpet seems to be some kind of stuff until you put it under a microscope and find crystalline structure. Closer still and there are molecules, closer again and there are wavicles, and the substance you were chasing has quietly vanished. What we call stuff turns out to be pattern seen slightly out of focus.
Then the part that unsettles common sense. Bang a table and it seems solid, surely this is stuff. But the only reason your hand will not pass through it is that the table is moving too fast, like trying to push a finger through an electric fan. And if you ask what is moving that fast, you have walked into a trick of grammar, the assumption that every verb needs a noun behind it. Alan Watts cannot find the difference between a thing and an event. Here is a fist, a perfectly good noun. Open the hand and it has gone.
Which leaves the world as process, with nobody behind it doing the doing. More like music than machinery, and nobody asks Bach what the music is about. So: giraffes are giraffing, trees are treeing, stars are starring, clouds are clouding, rain is raining. If you don’t understand, look at it again. And people are peopling.
Listen to the full lecture, and the rest of Alan Watts’s original recordings, in the Essential Lectures Collection from the Alan Watts Organization.
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ⶠWho is Alan Watts? | https://alanwatts.org/life-of-alan-watts/
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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