ALAN WATTS SPEECH-BASED ESSAY Everything. Can the Universe be described asa sum of infinite, litte and (apparently) insignificant things and events going through something we call time? What is the connection that those tiny components establish tobuild up and keep a ‘big machine, a whole, going on? What role does perspective play in the contemplation of existence, and how can our vision of things change when we are watching them from a galaxy’s scale, to a planets, to a human's, to abug’s toa tissue’s, to accel’, and so on ‘til we get to atomic levels? Certainly, connections and interactions between things and the cosmes itself, would turn to chaos or harmony depending of the observers position, but the essence of what is presented does not change. “The purpose of this essay is to try to develop these issues in a deeper level, adding up a human look-up. All this is based on the ideas of the late great philosopher Alan Watts presented to us in a series of speeches that were recorded during his years as a professor. PERSPECTIVE, Something that, as a matter of fact, everyone should understands that every existing creature in the universe that isin any way sensitive and somchow conscious) regards itself asa human being does: it knows and is aware of ahicrarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it. In other words, wherever you are, whoever you are and whatever you are, you're in the middle, ‘That's the game. Your senses extend a certain direction, in all directions and, therefore, give you the impression of being in the middle, Because the definition of a person is where you look from. Now, everything in the world feels like that. And also it has it's own kind. You see that spiders, hydras, sea urchins and so on, don't look very natural to us. We say: ‘well, I won't want to look like that? But they say when they see us: ‘well, what kind of an awful thing is that? And what a lot of nonsense it does.” Now, we come to an extremely important principle, which is the different points of v you get when you change your level of magnification, Perspective. That is to say, you can look atsomething with a microscope and see it a certain way; you can look at it with a naked eyeand see it in a certain way; and you can look at itwith a telescope and you see it another way. Now, which level of magnification is the correct one? Well, obviously, they're all correct. They're just different points of view. When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope we see there's one hell of afight going on. All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got it overly fascinated with our view of our bloodstreams in the microscope, we should start taking sides which would be fatal because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle. What is in other words conflict at one level of magnification is harmony ata higher level Now, could it possiblybe, therefore, that we with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures, and everything that goes on in human life are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony. Every minute litte fruit ly or gnator bacterium, I will go so far as to say is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends. This thing goes both ways. It's not only that every little organism which exists depends on it's totalenvironment. The reverse is also true, that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms so that you could say this universe consists of an arrangement of pattern in which every eventis essential to the whole thing. Now, we screen that idea out of our consciousness just as we pay attention to the figure and ignore the background. So we see one way of looking at things. Mainly, that the organism is very frail against the environment. It lasts a long time, the environment, but the organism onlylasts a short time, But actually the whole thing is arranged in a polar system where the enormous depends on the tiny, and the tiny depends on the enormous. HUMANITY So in all this, you see, when you get a game going ofthis kind, there comes the point of what you might call “emotional investment," when you feel that the outcome of this particular feature in the game is urgent. See, this matters, And it's up to you what you think matters. We teach our children what matters, what's important for them to learn, And we teach them basically that i's important to live. And in a way every being in this world is torn between going. on and goofing off.‘We feel that's the basis of our distinetion between work and play. Play is everybody needs some time to goof off. But they must go back to work because you've got to farm and fish and terrifying urgency to go on and feel you must, this is important, this matters, we sereen out of our manufacture and produce so that you could go on, But when you see you have thi consciousness the fact that this is our own volition and our own game, And the difficulty is that as we become disturbed and anxious about this, it's more difficult to keep the game going. In proportion, as we are rightfully concerned to survive, we start fighting other people. We start clobbering our neighbors and whateverit is, all the old fights start, And itis these fights which more than anything else, at the moment you see, are endangering the entire human project but all based fundamentally on the illusion thatit's utterly important that we survive. But you see in allthis, what underlies isthe illusion that I am going on. That I constitute a real continuity from this momentto the next moment, to the next moment, to the next moment. ‘What are you aftaid of losing when you die? Yes, everything that you have acquired as an individual and stored in your brain is dissolved and distributed. But at the same time itis equally obvious that when you die, there won't be following the moment of death everlasting nothingness. JAZZ So, you can become aware of this tremendousinterconnectedness of everything, Just as fronts go ‘with backs and tops with bottoms, insides with outsides, solids with spaces, so everything that there is goes together. It makes no difference whether it lasts a long time or whether it lasts a short time. A galaxy goes together with all the universe just as much as a mosquito. You can gota certain vision of life where everything is seen to be a complex pattern of rhythm, dances. The human dance, the flower dance, the bee dance, the giraffe dance. And that's what this all is. Tes jazz. You sce? This is a big jazz, this world. And what it's trying to do is to see how jazzed up it can get. How far out this play of rhythm can go.