QOTD Alan Watts

What do you mean by you? If you are the universe, in the greater context that question is irrelevant. You never were born and you never will die, because what there is, is you. That should be absolutely obvious, but from an egoistic perspective it is not obvious at all. It should be the simplest thing in the world to understand that you, the ‘I’, is what has always been going on and always will go on, coming and going forever and ever.

We have been bamboozled, however, by religionists, by politicians, by our fathers and mothers, by all sorts of people who tell us, ‘You’re not it.’ And we believed it.

So, to put it in a negative way, you can’t do anything to change yourselves, to become better, to become happier, to become more serene, to become more mystical. But if I say you can’t do a damn thing, you can understand this negative statement in a positive way. What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all. ~Alan Watts.

*Image Credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“The Transcendence of the Ego” by Derrick Tyson
“man-eat-man meanwhile some egos watch the scene” by Tommaso Meli
“a story of lifes and lines (the life thread)” by Tommaso Meli
“an anamorphic polymorphic ego feeding an anamorphic polymorphic ego in an anamorphic polymorphic world” by Tommaso Meli

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