Showerpress

This series is just a transcript from Alan Watts’ “A Conversation With Myself”.  Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aufuwMiKmE

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It’s astonishing – all this is only 20 or 30 minutes from the heart of San Francisco:

Light strikes through the trees in Muir Woods

Not a human habitation in sight. I’ve been living out here for some months, to write and to absorb an atmosphere that is different from the city.  To try and find out: “what is the essential difference between the world of nature and the world of man?”

There’s an obvious difference, like the difference of artistic styles.  No one would confuse a painting by Leonardo with a painting by Picasso, or music by Bach with music by Shostakovitch!  In the same way there seems to be a complete difference of style between the things that human beings do and the things that nature does, even though human beings are themselves part of nature.  Nature is wiggly!  Everything wiggles – the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracks of streams – it all wiggles.

For some reason or other we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track of.  And you know we say to people: “keep still so I can see you!” “Keep still for the camera”.  And we say, “well let’s get things straightened out”, “let’s get this ironed out”, “lets get it all squared away”.  Somehow we think we understand things when we have translated them into terms of straight lines and squares.  Maybe that’s why we call rather rigid people square ^_^.  But it doesn’t fit nature.

Prickles & Goo; Classicism & Romanticism; Thinking & Feeling

You know, wherever human beings have been around and done their thing you find rectangles.  We live in boxes. Our streets – especially across states like Kansas and Nebraska – are laid out in a grid pattern.  Why, they even dropped a grid pattern on top of San Fransisco!  With all those hills, so that cars run away….

It seems that the human being really has a very simple kind of mind, and all this wiggliness is too complicated.

I don’t think it really is complicated, because after all it’s very simple to move – say to raise something or open and close your hand – is perfectly easy, because we don’t have to think about it.  Things become complicated only when we think about them.  And that’s because we translate them into a form of life which is very much simpler and cruder than the forms of life we’re talking about.  A triangle is very much simpler and cruder than a mountain – even though you may represent a mountain with a triangle.  Human beings are just as wiggly as nature, and our brains are an incredible mess of wiggles!  And that’s the part of ourselves that we understand least of all.

Natural human geometry.

I’m afraid the problem is partly due to Mr. Euclid who invented geometry, because he didn’t really measure the earth.  He measured and gave us ideas about the very simple forms in his own mind.  Perhaps we should come to the conclusion that he really had a rather weak intellect. Because sometimes, when I’m in the middle of all this, I feel as if I were in the middle of an amazing brain. The brain is a network of interconnected neurons – and each one of those neurons is a fairly simple affair, because it either fires or it doesn’t fire.  But, what we call things – the plants, birds and trees – are far more complicated than a neuron, and there are billions of them all living together in a network.  For example, as there is an interdependence between flowers and bees they must really be one organism.  And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else; everything is interconnected. The many, many patterns of interconnections are locked in all together to form a unity.

However, this unity is very difficult for us to think about except in crude ways. But I am part of all this.  I am, as it were, one of the cells in this tremendous brain which I cannot understand, because the part cannot comprehend the whole.

Yet at the same time I don’t feel – like so many people seem to feel – like I’m a foreigner or a stranger in this world.  Its aesthetic forms somehow appeal to me more than most of the aesthetic forms which men produce.

"What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day? ... And yet this dome does not exist. In a balloon, I myself have risen higher than where the Greek gods were supposed to live without getting to this point, which of course disappears at the same rate in which we approach it"