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THE TAO OF
PHILOSOPHY
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Now all of this depends on what kind of attitude you want to take to the world. If you want to put the world down, you might say, “Oh well, fundamentally it is only a lot of geology, sheer stupidity, and it just so happens that a kind of a freak comes up in it which we call consciousness.” Now, that is an attitude that you may take when you want to prove to people that you are a tough guy, that you are realistic, that you face facts, and that you do not indulge in wishful thinking. However, it is just a matter of role-playing, and you must be aware of these things; these are fashions in the intellectual world. On the other hand, if you feel warm-hearted towards the universe, you put it up, instead of putting it down, and you say about rocks, “They are really conscious, but it is a different form of consciousness.” After all, when I tap on this crystal, which is glass, it makes a noise. Now that resonance is an extremely primitive form of consciousness. Of course, consciousness is much more subtle than that, but when you hit a bell and it rings, or you touch a crystal and it responds, inside itself it has a very simple reaction. It goes “jangle” inside, whereas we go “jangle” with all sorts of colors and lights and intelligence, ideas, and thoughts, and it is more complicated. Yet both are equally conscious, but conscious in different ways. Now that is a perfectly acceptable idea. All I am saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness, whereas other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals. What they want to do is to say everything is kind of drab, whereas what I want to say is “Hooray! Life is a good show!”
Nevertheless, as we study man or any other living organism and try and describe him accurately and scientifically, we find that our normal sensation of ourselves as isolated egos inside a bag of skin is a hallucination. It really is absolutely nutty because when you describe human behavior, or the behavior of a mouse or a rat or a chicken (or any organism you want to describe), you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately you must also describe the behavior of its environment. Supposing I walk and you want to describe the action of walking. You cannot talk about my walking without also describing the floor, because if you do not describe the floor and the space in which I am moving all you will be describing is somebody swinging their legs in empty space. So as to describe my walking, you must describe the space in which you find me. You could not see me unless you could also see my background, that which stands behind me. If the boundaries of my skin were coterminus with your whole field of vision you would not see me at all. You would see the things that filled your field of vision, but you would not see me, because in order to see me you have to see not only what is inside the boundary of my skin, but you have to see what is outside it too.
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