Читать книгу Tao of Philosophy - Alan Watts - Страница 12

Man in Nature

Chapter Two

Previously I was discussing the disparity between the way in which most human beings experience their own existence, and the way man’s being and nature is described in the sciences. I was pointing out that sciences such as ecology and biology, for example, describe and study the relationship between all organisms and their environments. However, the way they describe human, animal, and insect behavior is in flat contradiction with the way in which most of us experience our thinking, our action, and our existence. We have been brought up to experience ourselves as isolated centers of awareness and action, placed in a world that is not us, that is foreign, alien, and is something other which we confront. Whereas, in fact, the way an ecologist describes human behavior is as an action. What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call “here and now,” and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

Now, this is not what you might call a fatalistic or deterministic idea. You might be a fatalist if you think that you are a sort of puppet which life pushes around and that you are separate from life, but life dominates you. However, in the point of view I am expressing, the real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe, and it is doing your living organism and all of its behavior, and expressing it as a singer sings a song. We have been hoodwinked into the feeling that we exist only inside our skins, and I was showing you last night that that is a hallucination. It is just as nutty as anybody could be who thinks that he is Napoleon, or thinks he is a poached egg and goes around finding a piece of toast to sit on. It is just like that, a hallucination. I was discussing how we need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what is inside the skin but includes our whole total external environment. If we do not experience ourselves that way, we tend to mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission, and if we do that, then comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in and we do not treat it with love and gentleness and respect. We cut down millions of acres of forests to turn it into newspaper, of all things. Lovely trees are turned into information about nothing, and we do not replace them properly. We kick the world around in revenge for our feeling that really we are puppets which the world kicks around.