December 2011
“Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
—John Green (via atomos)
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We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. We have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary, and we feel in control of those. And then over against that, there is all those things that are involuntary. But the dividing line between these two is very inarbitrary. Because for example, when you move your hand, you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask yourself how do you decide? When you decide to open your hand, do you first decide to decide? You don’t, do you? You just decide, and how do you do that? And if you don’t know how to do it, is it voluntary or involuntary? Let’s consider breathing. You can feel that you breathe deliberately; you don’t control your breath. But when you don’t think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary or involuntary?
So, we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self. That much of my activity which I feel I do. And that then doesn’t include breathing most of the time; it doesn’t include the heartbeats; it doesn’t include the activity of the glands; it doesn’t include digestion; it doesn’t include how you shape your bones; circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now if you get with yourself and you find out you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find out that your body knows that you are one with the universe. In other words, the so-called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out it’s YOU who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that’s going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean. Your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos, and it’s all you. Only you’re playing the game that you’re only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there are in physical reality no such thing as separate events.
” —Alan Watts