Alan Watts - What Is It To See?

Alan Watts was an English philosopher, writer and speaker. He wrote more than 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness.

In his books he relates his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy.

Please visit his website www.alanwatts.com

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Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe,

wherein God is a brilliant light,

only somehow veiled,

hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around you.

So far so good.

But the truth is funnier than that.

It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now

that the experience you are having

which you call ordinary everyday consciousness

- pretending you're not it -

that experience is exactly the same thing as "it".

There's no difference at all.

And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly.

laugh

That's the great discovery.

In other words, when you really start to see things,

and you look at an old paper cup,

and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is,

or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that

that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos.

Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter.

Only they're hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny

when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out.

But it is actually see, the source of all light is in the eye.

If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light.

YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you,

by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood.

Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin.

It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air.

You, by being this organism,

call into being the whole universe of light and colour and hardness and heaviness and everything. You see?

Well, now here's the problem: if this is the state of affairs which is so,

and if the consciousness state you're in this moment is the same thing as

what we might call the Divine State.

If you do anything to make it different, it shows you don't understand that it's so.

So the moment you start practicing yoga, or praying or meditating,

or indulging in some sort of spiritual cultivation, you are getting in your own way.

If you think you have a problem, and you're an ego and you're in difficulty,

the answer the Zen master makes to you is

"Show me your ego. I want to see this thing that has a problem."

See? Because when you look for your own mind, that is to say,

your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else,

you won't be able to find it.

But the only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look for it hard enough,

to find out that it isn't there.

And so everybody says "All right, know yourself, look within, find out who you are."

Because the harder you look, you won't be able to find it,

and then you'll realize it isn't there at all.

There isn't a separate you.

Your mind is what there is.

Everything.