Here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples. We call it an apple tree, Alan Watts says, because the tree apples. That is what it does. And here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that on the planet Earth, the thing peoples, in just the same way that an apple tree apples.
It is a strange sentence, and the strangeness is the point. We are used to thinking of ourselves as having arrived in the world, as though we came from somewhere else into a place that has nothing much to do with us. Watts is describing something different. People are not visitors here. People are something this planet is doing, an expression of it rather than an accident within it.
The reasoning behind it is simple enough to sit with. You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. As the old line has it, figs do not grow on thistles, nor grapes on thorns, and the same holds for a world and what grows out of it. If intelligence, feeling and value are here in us, they did not arrive from outside the system. They are part of what this universe is capable of, which means the world you belong to is far less indifferent than you may have been led to believe.
Excerpt taken from Myth of Myself.
Listen to the full lecture, and the rest of Alan Watts’s original recordings, in the Essential Lectures Collection from the Alan Watts Organization.
Essential Lectures Collection : Remastered
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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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