All Comments By

I love Alan Watts and feel sorry for myself for not being able to come on this Wednesday meditation, and miss exchange of reflections on the passage. Alan Watts called himself a “spiritual entertainer” and by virtue of this role uses ‘tricks’ in order not to ‘scare’ people away from real deep issues by using trivial statements. In this excerpt I think such statement is “anyone who thinks at all must be a philosopher”. It sounds as invitation to think without being concerned with rules and definitions. It is like inviting for dance someone, who ‘cannot’ dance, by saying- “Common, if you can move you can dance”. You hope to put him/her at ease by implying that there are really no rules in dancing (or thinking). And only rules that seem to exist are rules laid by people who are ‘afraid’ to think (or dance) genuinely, but comfort themselves by introducing control and judgment. Pointers to important issues that Watts put in this writing I reckon are: --human beings reflect; they think about thinking and know that they know. -- self-awareness makes human experience resonant -- nothing interests people more than people, -- nothing so eludes conscious inspection as consciousness itself. -- the root of consciousness has been called, paradoxically, the unconscious. And here is my reflection on the subject I deem Watts pointed to: Imagine a mirror that thinks that it owns the image of object it reflects; if you succeed in picturing that, you’ll get a glimpse of origin of “I” that appears out of false separation of object from its reflection. This is similar to “human think about thinking” when one assigns “I” to that what thinks about thinking. It doesn’t stop here- multiple reflections are possible as a way of creating of multiple “I”. That could create a “resonant” causing complete ‘blindness’ to reality, since multiple “I” think they are the reality. Nothing interests these multiple “I” more than their own reflections they call reality. They couldn’t even ‘think’ of anything else to exist. At risk of overuse the mirror allegory I introduce a metaphor of consciousness as light, which actually makes the reflections possible in the picture above. If the object decides to leave the room with mirrors, and turns the light off, the ‘crazy’ mirrors go unconscious, and… at this moment became what they really are - pieces of glass. The multiple “I” disappear or return (if it’s more comforting) to the object. The object became what it really is without reflections- nothing we can talk about –absolute nothingness :) Hide full comment