Nothing More - Pyre
When you opened your eyes on the world for the first time as a child; how brilliant the colors were; what a jewel the sun was; what marvel the stars; how incredibly alive the trees were... And to love again and again, and have people to whom we are deeply attached go to sleep and never wake up... and the laughter echoes only in one's mind... but then the echo goes... the memory, the traces are all gone.
All your efforts, all your acheivements, all your attainments turning into dust, nothingness... what is the feeling? what happens to you?
The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe, it makes you feel that life is, after all, important, that there is someone who cares. It has meaning, it has sense, and you are valuable in the eyes of the father. But after a while it got embarrassing, the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded idea... why does anybody believe that?
So you become an atheist, and then you feel terrible after that because you got rid of God... but that means you got rid of yourself, you're just nothing but a machine... And your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too... (a machine in the system)...
So if you think that that's the way things are, you feel hostile to the world. You feel that the world is a neurological trap into which you somehow got caught... trapped... You run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it... that's it... So if you're a smart kid you commit suicide.
Now I want to propose another idea all together... The real you, is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real you, the real deep down you, is the whole universe. You cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. Your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it's a bridge. But just as a magnet polarizes its-self in north and south but its all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as "Self" and "Other", but it's all one.
What you call the "External world" is as much YOU as your own body. Most people think that when they open they're eyes and look around that what they are seeing is outside... it seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes. We haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center.
When you look for your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else, you wont be able to find it. The only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look hard enough, to find out that it isn't there. It isn't there at all, there isn't a separate you. There are, in physical reality, no such things as separate events.
People can't be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat. He'll go down to the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say, "Well let's go and find the edge".
- Alan Watts (excerpts from various lectures)
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