What follows is one of my favorite (and what I consider to be most profound) ideas from Alan Watts. It suggests, to me, the truth of our life in the simulation, and the recursive loop of existence which we find ourselves in.
----------------------------------------------------------
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death, (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself - not as a stranger in the world - not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived by fluke - but you can begin to feel you own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea, in the sense of converting you to it. I want you to play with it. I want you to think of it's possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream for 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would naturally, as you begin on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you can concieve. And after several nights of seventy five years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream that’s not under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be. And you would do that and would come out of that and you would say "Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it"? Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further-in and further-out gambles to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living a life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally
the ultimate reality, not God in a political kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic, whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending that you are not.
Comments