This Will Give You Goosebumps – Alan Watts On The Ultimate Question

if you were told that you were going to be given half an hour's interview with God and you had the privilege of asking one question I wonder what you would ask you might be given some preparation too because when you think what is your ultimate question uh you'll probably do many things before you arrive at it and I know many people would discover that they had no question to ask the situation would be altogether too overwhelming but many people to whom I've put this problem say that the question that they would ask is who am I and that is something we know very little about because whatever it is that we call I is too close for inspection it's like trying to bite your own teeth or to touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger and although other people can tell you what they were who you are and do they only see you from the outside as you see them from the outside and you don't see from the inside and so the nature of what is a what it is that we call I is extremely puzzling because there is some confusion as to how much of us is I we talk in ordinary ways about my body my feet and when we go to the dentist to have our teeth fixed we regard him rather as a mechanic like you take your car to the garage so you take your body to the surgeon or the dentist or whatever it is to be fixed how the parts changed or something of that kind and they're really getting to work on that now and uh so the question is when somebody has a heart transplant uh that sounds very radical because we say in my heart of hearts but nowadays most of us seem to feel that whatever it is that I is is located in the head somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears is the center and the rest of us is an appendage of vehicle which carries the self around now popular speech also reflects the sensation that I am very different from what we call the other people other things anything that we can become aware of is sort of other there is an opposition apparently between the Noah and the known and so we talk about facing reality we talk about coming into this world as if somehow we didn't belong [Music] as if instead of being leaves growing out of a tree we were a lot of birds that had a lighted on bare branches and it has become common sense for most people living in the 20th century today to adopt the 19th century philosophy of science which interprets the physical universe outside human bodies [Music] as being a mechanical contraption which is essentially stupid unfeeling automatic composed of mainly geological elements rocks gases and so forth and therefore we feel rather alone and left out of this thing in contrast with the ideas of ptolemaic astronomy instead of being at the center of the universe we are on the outer limits of a minor Galaxy revolving around an unimportant star on a small minute ball of Rock and therefore that astronomical way of looking at things is simply overwhelming it makes us feel not only of no importance but also very much left out that is the common sense of most people living today we did of course have a religious view of our nature that we were the children of a loving God who is in charge of this whole operation but very few people actually believe that anymore a great many people think they ought to believe in would like to believe in it but they don't most ministers that I know don't believe it but they feel guilty about this because they feel they ought to but it became implausible there never was a serious argument against it it simply became Unthinkable in comparison with the dimensions of the universe as we now see it so having lost a way of looking at the world an image of the world which gave us some sense of meaning we now have an image of the world which gives us none at all and so we feel rather inclined to put up a fight against the whole show interestingly enough when in the 19th century we switched our common sense from supernaturalism to naturalism one would think that a naturalist would be a person who loved nature just as a materialist ought to be a person who loves material but certainly isn't with what is called the philosophy of scientific naturalism naturalism is used as an in a negative way uh it has nothing to do with being natural it has something to do with being not Supernatural merely natural and all sorts of phrases were coined in that Epoch which I would call put down phrases Freud spoke of the basic psychic energy as libido which means blind lust people like Ernst hakel spoke of the universe as being a manifestation of blind energy think of that put down word blind and therefore we also speak of unconscious mental mechanisms and the Very word unconscious as being the deeper aspect of our psyche is a negative word and a put down word so as to say what you are functioning as a rational ego with values and with a capacity to love is simply the Epi phenomenon of a purely mechanical process too bad so as a result of this so-called naturalism we began to put up the most whopping fight against nature that was ever engaged in and that fight is an expression of our Fury and of our feeling of being left out so that the technological experiment which became possible as a result of the mechanical Sciences has largely been conducted in a spirit of Rage and the results are evident all around us because we are in a position where we realize that we cannot help interfering with the world to be alive is to interfere you must interfere you cannot go back and say hands off nature let's leave it all alone because you're stuck with it especially once you've started to interfere in a major way we have so altered our environment that there is no hope for it but to go ahead but we can to some extent change direction but the only way that I can see of our effectively changing direction is through a transformation of the feeling that we have of our own existence and of what we mean by I foreign