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Saturday, July 18, 2015

Become What You Are

"But so, in just the same way, we say 'There are really different people. There are really different events.' But actually there aren't. I'm not saying that if we were to see the world in its truth, all of you different people would disappear, that your outlines would suddenly become vague, and you would turn into a solid lump of gelatinous goo. A lot of people think that's the way mystics see things. That's not at all what would happen. The thing I'm saying is this: we are all different, but we are as interrelated and indispensable to each other as the different organs in our body. Stomach, heart, glands, bones, etc. Now you can argue that the stomach is fundamental--eating is the big thing. And therefore we grew brains as extensions of the stomach to get it more food. So that you say 'The brain is the servant of the stomach.' But you can argue equally that the brain is primary, and it has all these thinking games to play, and it needs a stomach as an appendage to supply it with energy. Or you can argue that the sex organs are primary and they need the brain and the stomach to keep that ecstasy going. But the brain and the stomach can equally argue that they wouldn't find it worthwhile going on unless they had the sex organ appendage to give them solace. 
 
The truth of the matter is that nobody comes first. No one pushes the other around. You don't find brains without stomachs and sex organs. They all go together. And this is the fallacy of Freud, in saying that the sexual apparatus are primary. It just goes along with the others.

So you don't have a universe in which a series or a collection of separate events or things are banging each other around like an enormous mass of billiard balls. You have a situation which is quite different from that, where what have hitherto been called 'causally related events.' To say that certain events are causally related is a very clumsy way of saying that these certain specific events which you have isolated as being causally related, were in fact really all parts of the same event." 


Source: Become What You Are ~Alan W. Watts

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