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Part two of Alan Watts’ “A Conversation With Myself” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ8WeLrtFnY

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When you see a flower in a field, it is really the whole field which is flowering.

The flower couldn’t exist in that particular place without the special surroundings of its field. You only find flowers in surroundings that will support them. So in the same way you only find human beings on a planet of this kind, with an atmosphere and temperature supplied by a convenient neighboring star.

Just as the flower is a flowering of the field, I feel myself as a peopling of the whole universe.  In other words, I seem like everything else.  To be a center – a sort of vortex – at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself and comes alive.  A sort of aperture through which the whole universe is conscious of itself.  In other words I go with it as a center to a circumference.

Five windows light the cavern'd Man; thro' one he breathes the air; Thro' one, hears music of the spheres; thro' one, the eternal vine Flourishes, that he may recieve the grapes; thro' one can look.

You know astrologers, in theory at least, may not be so far wrong.  In trying to draw a picture of a human mind or soul, they drew a very crude map of the whole universe, centered on the time and place of the birth of that particular person.  It’s not a bad idea, but I don’t think the astrologers know how to read their maps, because the maps are too crude. But the essential point is obvious – that each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed!  – exists in the way it does only because everything around it does.

In other words, there’s a relationship between the center and the circumference, which is rather like the relationship between the poles of a magnet – without the center no circumference, without the circumference no center.  And although we say of poles that they’re ‘poles apart’, there’s something between them, just as the north and south poles of a magnet are united by the magnet. So, the individual and the universe are inseparable.  But the curious thing is, why that’s rather easy to see in theory, very few people are aware of it in an important strong way like one is aware of blue in blue sky. Or the heat in fire.  Its more an idea than it is a realization.

"The unattainability of that becoming one, the inadequacy of his own I, is the perpetual source of man's dissatisfaction and pain." ~ Tarkovsky, 'Sculpting in Time', p. 37.

And so, it struck me more and more, that our failure to feel at home in this astonishing brain which we live, is the result of a basic initial mistake in our thinking about the world.  This is in turn the cause of what is beginning to look like the failure of our technology – of the fact that everything we’re doing to try and improve the world was a success in the short run, made amazing initial improvements, but in the long run we seem to be destroying the planet in our very efforts to control and improve it. And it struck me that this is because we are really too simple minded, to understand what we’re doing when we interfere with the natural world strongly and on a vast scale.

"The world's mega-cities are merging to form vast "mega-regions" which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people." ~ The Guardian, March 22 2010.

We don’t really interfere with it, because that would suggest we’re something different from it, something outside.  But, i think what we’re doing is we are understanding it.  We are understanding it in terms of languages, numbers…in terms of a logic which is too simple for the job, too crude for the job.

To begin with, we understand everything in terms of words and numbers.  They’re stretched out in rows and lines and our eyes have to scan those lines in order to understand them.  But when I scan this view, I dont do it line by line by line, I see the whole thing at once.  I take it in, as it were, as a wide-angle lens.  But when I try to understand the world through literature and mathematics, I have to scan lines.  That’s why it takes us so long to get educated in schools, because our minds have to scan and organise miles and miles of print.  But life happens, changes go on too rapidly for that.

You see, in the world everything is happening all together everywhere at once.  And meanwhile we with our myopic little minds are working it out step by step.  Of course we are greatly assisted by the rapidity of the computer, but even so the computer is still looking at things in rows, it’s still all going along in a single track.

We have lamentably one-track minds, in an infinitely many-track universe.

We may have to come to the alarming conclusion that the universe is smarter than we are.