Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
Because it will catch the eye. Note that: the eye. The thing is made for the eye.
For that sense which rests upon the surface of things. And thus it comes about that our attitude to sexuality is a superficial attitude and, again, a basically non-participative attitude. As I said, it’s an attitude that’s changed a bit in recent years.
We can talk about sex matters very freely. We don’t have the prudery of some of our ancestors. But just the same, although it’s all good clean fun, you know?
And although we can talk about it in terms of psychoanalysis, and we can admit that, yes, the sexual drive is a very necessary thing, and some outlet has to be provided for it—we’re not with it. It’s become a duty. Look, for example, at the McKinsey report.
This, in a way, it was a very remarkable job. But it’s a cataloging of sexual outlets. As if just the orgasm was a thing.
As if, in a way, we had to have this outlet in order to reduce tension—in other words, to get rid of the urge. But note that, in speaking of an instinct like sex or hunger as an urge, that we’ve set it away from ourselves. We’ve represented it, you see, as an instinct of the body which drives the mind.
And the mind is therefore moved to it. And it admits that it’s unfortunately necessary to be moved by it. But we say, for example, in teaching children about the birds the bees and the flowers, that nature or God has given us the sexual instinct in order to make the reproduction of the species attractive—on the assumption that, if it wasn’t attractive, we wouldn’t do it; on the further assumption that life itself is a rather boring thing which we have to be made to undergo by rewards and punishments, by the seductions of sex, or by the penalties of pain which ensue with disease and not living a healthy life.
But these rewards and punishments are regarded as extraneous, as things which drive us. And therefore, to the extent that we feel that the sexual urge, or the urge to eat—or any other so-called instinct—insofar as we feel that is an alien and animal thing that exercises a compelling power over us—and here the “us” is the cut-off, dissociated little ego inside the body that is driven around by all this—then, naturally, our fulfillment of these instincts is fundamentally lacking in zest. We say sex is necessary on the assumption, I suppose, that if it weren’t it oughtn’t to happen.
And that goes back, you see, to our psychology about play. Play is only justifiable to the degree that it’s necessary. And play is only necessary to the degree that it furthers work.
Alright, the same attitude with regard to sexuality: it’s only justifiable because it’s necessary—either to reproduce the species, or some new-fangled ideal such as rounding out a complete personality. No one seems to have the courage to admit that it is intrinsically a good thing, and that the basic biological urges are not mechanical drives, they are our own inmost will. And why don’t we get with it?
If we got with ourselves and really admitted that we are organisms, we might also get with each other. Here, again, I pointed out how little we actually get with each other; how, in this television world, everybody stays at home, and if you walk out on the streets in the evening the police stop you and wonder whether you’re crazy. And especially if you’re not going anywhere, because going for a walk—that’s deeply suspicious.
I mean, a person has to have a purpose, you see? He must be going somewhere. And so we don’t get with each other except for public expressions of getting rid of our hostility, like football or prize-fighting.
And even in the spectacles one sees on this television it’s perfectly proper to exhibit people slugging and slaying each other. But, oh dear, no! Not people loving each other—except in a rather restrained way.
One can only draw the conclusion that the assumption underlying this is that expressions of physical love are far more dangerous than expressions of physical hatred. And it seems to me that a culture that has that sort of assumption is basically crazy and devoted—unintentionally, indeed, but nevertheless in fact—devoted not to survival but to the actual destruction of life. In the year of our Lord Jesus Christ, 2000, the United States of America will no longer exist.
I am not given to prophecy, but I think that one is reasonably certain. Now, by the expression “the United States of America” one can mean two quite different things. In the first place, one can mean the physical territory of North America, now politically designated as “United States,” plus its biological and other geographical features: people, rivers, animals, plants, mountains, skies and flowers.
On the other hand, by “the United States of America” one can mean a political and sovereign state existing in competition with a number of other sovereign states distributed over the Earth. And if the United States continues to exist in that sense, and to be primarily identified with that meaning for much more than ten years, we shall create in this world a holocaust. There are so many ways of doing it: by the obvious one, with nuclear or biological warfare, by the less obvious ones of total degradation of the wildlife, pollution of the atmosphere, poisoning of the waters—so that we shall erode the natural resources upon which we depend.
There are so many threats from so many different points. When you consider just adding up nuclear warfare, biological warfare, overpopulation, bad conservation, racial strife, civil war—take your choice. Either one or any mixture of them, and we shan’t be here.
That is to say, we shan’t be here in the sense of a territory; a biological world. We may exist in some abstract sense, like: “See, I was right after all. Deader than dead.” Now, herein exactly lies the problem of the future.
When I make prophecies from a purely realistic and hard-boiled point of view, I tend towards the extremely gloomy side of things. I have never yet voted in an election where the candidate of my choice won the election. And I tend to feel the practical politics of the matter of [???]
that human beings are so stupid that they will always do what they can do. What can be done must be done. And that we will go like the gathering swines on the hill.
And if I were betting on it, and I had somewhere to place my bet, I would bet on it that way. But I don’t have anywhere to place my bet. And furthermore, I can look at it from the point of view where I’m not just an objective bystander, looking at this situation as something which I’m just going to predict about.
I’m involved in it. And as I’m involved in it, I’m damned if I’m going to let it happen that way! There is, then, the other alternative that, if the United States of America ceases to exist in our minds and in our hearts as an abstract political nation, and we focus our attention instead on the physical people and upon the physical environment and the love of it, then we have some chance of creating by the year 2000 a most extraordinary state of affairs.
But it is based upon the realization of that distinction, I repeat: between the territory, the people, and all the biological life that goeswith that situation on the on hand, and on the other, the United States as a nation with pride and honor. You know, quite recently the Congress passed an act against burning the flag with all sorts of patriotic speeches. And those same congressmen are responsible directly for burning that for which the flag stands—by absolute callousness as to the care of the physical nation: the water, the air, the crops, the forests.
So this is the great confusion of civilization. And if we don’t find some way of overcoming it, I’m afraid 2000 A.D. will see us as non-geographical expressions. The point, then, is this: that civilized man has developed the incredible technique of symbolization—of words (which represent things and events), of numbers (which represent patterns and arrangements of physical nature), of social institutions (laws, states, family patterns), and so on.
And in these terms he represents the physical world in the same way the menu represents the dinner. But he has been so fascinated by the power of this symbolic way of looking at things that he very easily confuses it with what it represents, and so has a tendency to eat the menu instead of the dinner. And this is precisely the disease from which those congressmen who were irate about burning the flag were suffering from.
But this disease assumes much more serious forms. And the one I want to talk about first as the major obstacle to the survival of the territory United States, in the year 2000, may be symbolized by the confusion of money with wealth. You remember, don’t you, the Great Depression, when suddenly the whole country was in a state of poverty for the reason that there was what they call a financial collapse.
There was no diminution of our natural resources, there was no diminution of our physical strength, of our intelligence. But suddenly, almost overnight, we had an economic depression, incredible poverty and suffering, because of a financial slump. As if you came to work one day and they said to you—you were going to build a house—and they said, “Sorry, baby, but you can’t build a house today.
We haven’t got any inches.” “What do you mean, ‘We haven’t got any inches’? Have we got wood? Have we got lumber?” “Oh no, we need inches of wood or inches of lumber.” “We got tape measures.” “Oh no, not tape measures.
Just inches. There are just no more inches to go around.” And that’s exactly what happened in the Depression—based on the fallacy that money is wealth, or that money is real. Because money is, in a sense, a reality, but a reality of exactly the same order as inches, hours, or lines of longitude.
It is a measurement of wealth. But it is confused with wealth. And this is the main thing which is blocking the proper expansion of our technological genius at this time.
There is no question that within a relatively short time we have the technical capacity to wipe poverty off the face of the Earth. It isn’t a question of the old socialist programs of robbing the rich to pay the poor. All that kind of thinking is entirely obsolete.
It is a question of realizing that we are now, in 1968, long, long beyond the age of scarcity in which we cannot provide adequate and more than adequate necessities and luxuries for every human being on the planet. It is technically possible. The amount we have spent upon warfare, collectively, since 1914 could have given every human being on Earth a comfortable and dependent income.
And the amount we are spending daily on the war in Vietnam could abolish the problems of almost all underdeveloped nations in the world. But the confusion is: when we suggest the very idea that money doesn’t matter, people feel deeply insecure. And if we should go further than that and suggest such outrageous ideas as that, in the year 2000 A.D., there will no longer be taxation, that all utilities will be free, and that every citizen—instead of having to pay his taxes—will receive from the government a guaranteed basic income, people say, “Where’s the money going to come from?” As if money were something that came from somewhere in the same way as iron, or hydroelectric power, or lumber, or just plain energy.
Money doesn’t come from anywhere and never did! Money is an invention in the same way that inches and hours and clocks and rulers are inventions. That is: money is a measure of wealth.
Now, if we define wealth as consisting of a sum of three things—wealth is firstly energy. Secondly, technical intelligence. And thirdly, raw materials.
Those three things. When, for example, people think that gold is wealth, and use gold for money, gold being used for money becomes immediately useless for anything else. It is locked up in just plain ingots, doing nothing in banks and fortresses, and is of no material value whatsoever.
But the trouble is that we, who pride ourselves on being a materialistically-minded people, and are sometimes even ashamed of ourselves for being that, are not materialists in any sense whatsoever. We are high abstractionists. We are concerned with money, with status, with what we are called, what people say about us, with this whole mess of verbiage, and are very badly related indeed to any kind of physical natural reality.
And therefore, we have simply to get over—you see, I’m a philosopher. I’m not a very highly informed fact man about matters of economics and political. But I go down to basic principles, and therefore come with a certain naïveté and innocence like the child who noticed (in Hans Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes) that the emperor was naked.
And I see in astonishment, in this kind of childish way, that people really think that money is necessary; that they don’t understand the following simple principle: if you create a technology, and the purpose of that technology is to increase our supply of goods and services, and to make it unnecessary for anybody to perform drudgery, then, of course, you’re getting rid of work. So we have the amazing idiocy to penalize getting rid of work as something called “unemployment:” to be on the lower social status in which you crawl into a labor office and regretfully receive a dole. Because, you see, money was a convenience to get rid of barter so that you wouldn’t have to go down to the market with a basket of eggs in order to exchange it for vegetables or meat.
But if you have nothing to barter with because the machines are doing it instead of you, then the people obviously have to credit themselves for the work done on their behalf by the machines. If they do not do so, the manufacturer will not be able to sell their product. Then what must he do?
He invents, instead, wars and all sorts of disturbances so that the people will be persuaded to fork out taxes, and the government will be persuaded to overextend the national debt (which is merely a method of issuing credit) in order that they may go on. It is not necessary to invent wars. It is only necessary to invent money.
But the difficulty with our present psychology of money is that, the moment there would be a guaranteed national income, and everybody would be given $10,000 a year as a mere startup for whatever else they may want to acquire by various enterprises, prices would go sky high to so-called “catch” the new money in circulation. And the result of that would be that you would be a pauper on $10,000 a year. Because people do not realize that when you put up prices in order to catch an extra flow of money, that the money you are getting by this method is increasingly less valuable.
And therefore, you are doing nothing at all. You are simply going around in a vicious circle. So we have the situation that when profits go up, the unions say: “More wages, please.” Okay, more wages.
Then what happens? The prices go up. And then the manufacturer thinks it’s gaining something.
It isn’t gaining anything at all, because it costs him more for everything he has. So, you see, the obsession of making money is a thing from which we will—if we’re going to survive at all—is a thing from which we must be delivered! Because if you substitute for the idea of money the sensuous experience of real material wealth, you will very quickly realize that you cannot drive three cars at once, nor live in six houses at once, nor eat five breakfasts simultaneously.
That there is simply the physical limit to your consumption of the most luxurious wealth imaginable. But the point is that everybody is going to have this without limit, because it is technically possible. And therefore, a very curious thing is occurring: that it is becoming an entire reversal of the Protestant ethic—which was, of course, that human energies cannot be trusted unless most of them are absorbed in hard work bringing out products.
If we aren’t dead tired when we get home from doing that, then the devil finds work for idle hands to do! And there will be pleasure-seeking, and orgies, and all the perversions that flow therefrom, until finally we become weak and sickly and a prey to our enemies and fall apart. There’s a certain truth in that.
So therefore, we have to define that, in this year 2000 (which is not very far off), that we’re going to realize it’s our sacred and solemn duty to learn how to enjoy total luxury. Very serious! Because, as I pointed out right at the beginning, talking about utopia today is no longer a sort of wishful fantasy, it’s a grim necessity.
There is no alternative except utopia to the direction which we are on presently, the direction of destruction. We’ve got to have the nerve. You know, the damn cheek to stand up and say: yes, we’re going to enjoy ourselves as much as possible.
Now, let me point out that that is a high art. It isn’t easy. In case any of you want to be a little bit masochistic—many people do, because they don’t feel that they’ve contributed to society unless they’ve suffered during the day.
I now want to propose an entirely new, adventurous form of suffering, which is the art of enjoying yourself as much as possible and accepting, full-heartedly, the real physical possibility of immense prosperity. Now, the problem of this is what we call fatigue in [???]. That consciousness is a peculiar neurological phenomenon which gets bored rather easily.
So that when a certain stimulus is given to consciousness for a period of time, it ceases to notice it. And then, for lack of anything to do, it seeks out another one. And therefore, the people who are permanently comfortable, they cease to notice that they’re comfortable.
You know very well when you were worried financially, and were constantly preoccupied that you didn’t have enough money, and then suddenly you got enough money. And you were very happy for a few days, and then you started worrying about your health. You know, nature abhors a vacuum.
So therefore, all high pleasure must go hand in hand with a certain degree of asceticism. So very skillful cooks and gourmets are different from gourmands. The French distinction between gourmet and gourmand is extremely important.
A gourmand is a person who just shoves it down; a trencherman. A gourmet takes it subtly. He doesn’t ever over-drink.
He doesn’t ever over-eat. He’s fussy, particular, and disciplined. Because he attends to the art of cooking as a very rare dinner, so that he mustn’t ever fatigue himself with it.
And that’s one of the major tasks in front of us. And that goes hand in hand with the other thing that must occur as a form of change of spirit in technology if we are to bring about this kind of prosperity. Hitherto, the spirit motivating technology has been unfriendly to the physical environment.
We have spoken of the technological enterprise as man’s conquest of nature, as if man were an alien in the universe who was something that came into this world from outside (that is to say, from the abstract world), and landed in the concrete world incarnate in a human body, and therefore has an abstract spirit at odds with this physical prison. It was his duty on this Earth to order, by violence, his physical prison and make it submit to his will. And as a result of that we have a type of technology which, with few exceptions, is purely exploitive and destructive—its symbol chiefly being the bulldozer: that great metal maw which will shove down mountains in a ghastly fulfillment of the prophecy in the Bible that “every valley shall be exalted, and mountains made low, and the rough places made plain.” So the progressive Los-Angelization of the world—I knew I could get away with that in San Francisco!—is going ahead.
Because what is fundamentally important for all this change, if this is going to happen at all, and could indeed happen, is a change in the individual human being’s consciousness [???] vis-à-vis, face-to-face, with nature. We have been brought up to experience ourselves as separate souls or egos occupying bodies and confronted with a world of nature that (since the disappearance of God at the end of the 19th century) is a profoundly stupid environment consisting of animals who are not very bright, rocks which are quite clearly stupid, and other electronic forces which have only rationality insofar as our physicists can impose upon them.
And therefore, we feel quite alien from the outside world, and we feel we are mere occurrences. We arrive in this world for a short time and then disappear forever. So make the best of it while you can.
We have absolutely no idea of experiencing our relationship to the physical universe as both ecologists and physicists know it to be. The ecologist knows that a human being (or any other organism) is not something that comes into this world from somewhere else, but is an expression of it; grows out of it like fruit from the tree. And it’s absolutely imperative that we realize this.
Because only on the basis of that new kind of conception of the human being, or feeling of human existence, can we have the motivation for developing a technology which will cooperate with the environment instead of merely destroying it. If you are a great winebibber and you love to drink, you must realize that with that goes a lot of grapes. You can’t just tear grapes off the hill and mulch them into wine, you’ve got to love them in such a way that those grapes will be happy to return to your hills year after year.
That’s real technology. No matter what instruments, no matter what chemicals you use. You must love the grapes on the hills and they will come back often enough that you can have plenty of wine.
We can do all of this if we’ll get into contact with what creatures and politicians call brute facts and hard realities instead of abstractions. But if we don’t, and if nuclear energy in the end turns this planet into a star. That may be the way how other stars were made.
Think of that one! But, you see, you won’t disappear. The important thing to realize, you see, is that if this goes on long [???]
process, then wherever new beings of whatever kind—insects, mammals, fish, people—wherever they come into being, each one is “I.” It feels it is “I” just as you do now. You don’t remember having existed before. Neither will you then.
But it will always be “I,” always going on. So cheer up! Because if you understand that and lose your anxieties, then you will be less likely to authorize someone to push the red button.
One of the first things which everybody should understand is that every creature in the universe that is in any way sensitive, and in any manner of speaking conscious, regards itself as a human being. That is to say: it knows and is aware of a hierarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it. If you take such a tiny creature as a fruit fly which lives only a few days, it is aware of all sorts of weird little animals and objects and spores floating in the atmosphere which we don’t even notice unless we’ve got a microscope around (and very few people have).
And it criticizes them as being inferior animals and all that sort of thing, whereas human beings are things that it doesn’t comprehend. They’re as much outside its intellect as a quasar is outside ours. And we see these far off objects floating in the heavens and we have only the vaguest idea of what they may be.
Actually, we may all be some kind of atoms within the hair on somebody’s nose in another dimension, and all these galaxies being the constituent elements. Who knows! But there is, I think, a fundamental principle that everybody must understand in order to know what is the meaning of the Tao, or the Chinese sense of the course of nature, and that is the principle of relativity.
It’s absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Taoist philosophy: relativity. That is to say that, wherever you are and whoever you are and whatever you are, you’re in the middle. You know: pig in the middle—that’s the game.
And just in the same way as when you stand, say, on the deck of a ship and you can see a horizon all around you to exactly the same distance: you’re in the center of a circle because your senses extend a certain direction in all directions, and therefore give you the impression of being in the middle. Everything in the world feels like that. And also, it has its own kind which look natural to it.
You see, spiders and hydras and sea urchins and so on don’t look very natural to us. We say, “Well, I wouldn’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!” You see, if your dog watches you when you’re typewriting, it cocks its head at you and says, “These human beings…!” Especially cats.
Dogs have tried to catch on to human beings in a sort of a funny way, but cats look at you and think you are out of your mind. You’re absolutely crazy! What do you sit there all day for, feverishly pecking away at a typewriter, say, or doing something busy like that, when you could sit and curl up and and purr.
You just—from the cat’s point of view—you don’t understand what life’s about all. But all cats and cat company—cats in cat company—they feel that they are people. Because the definition of a person is where you look from.
And of course that is the meaning of the very interesting Buddhist idea: you can only become a Buddha—that is to say, you can only become enlightened, liberated, aware of your unity with the universe—from the human position. And Buddhism calls itself the Middle Way because it is the way for someone in the middle, and that’s everyone. So there is, believe it or not, a form of yoga (ways of liberation) for worms, for fruit flies, for snails, for spiders, for birds, for everything.
And they, you see, in their situation, feel just as cultured as we can possibly feel. And they have their distinctions and their snobberies just in the same way that we do. Because, you see, they dig all sorts of things that we don’t even notice.
We think a person is cultured because they play the piano or the violin, or they read poetry and they have a big library, and they have paintings all around, and they have a fancy house, and so on. And we say: “Well, there’s a person of culture.” And we can see at once that this is really some rather elegant human being. But when you get down into the world of fishes, they have exactly the same thing—only, instead of depending on collecting a lot of books and things like that, it is the precise way, the very subtle wiggles of a tail, the little tremors of vibration, that makes one fish a very superior fish as compared with other fish.
And all the other fish look at that one and say, “Oh my! To be like that. What a genius!
To be able to do just that little extra thing!” See? Because they’re very sensitive. Even airplanes in formation can’t begin to do what birds and fish can do in their communal swirling dances that they do.
Now, let me just interject something here that is rather important. Biological existence is such that you have to kill to live. And vegetarians have no way out because plants also are forms of life—to the degree that they are aware (and they are aware to a certain degree) they think they’re human.
And when you chew up plants, you are making a very painful experience for cabbages and carrots and things like that, and you can’t get out of it. And the only possible solution of the dilemma that we are in ethically—that we have to eat in order to to live; that being is killing—the only possible solution to this dilemma is to reverence food, and to cook it as well as possible, and enjoy it to the full. There is no other ethical response that is in any way possible to this situation.
And also: you must, as a human being, remember that you aren’t the only pebble on the beach. That you belong—just as much as the fish and the cows and the apples—you belong to a mutual eating society, and something (in the end) is going to eat you. Now, human beings are not, as a rule, eaten by large creatures.
We’ve got rid of them. Things like lions and tigers that chew up on human beings. There are not many of them around.
We are eaten instead by tiny creatures. And the morticians are a very vicious group of people, because they are trying to deprive all those microorganisms of the proper human food when they bury them in formaldehyde and encase them in concrete things with complicated bronze caskets where—instead of giving the worms a ball—they just do nothing; they just rot there, you know, and become, slowly, more and more sort of attenuated and parchment-like, instead of continuing into the flow of the course of life—which is the proper thing to do: to make an act of respect to the Earth from which you have gained all this life, and give yourself back to it when you die. After all, it’s only courteous, and this keeps the thing running.
So we should start a campaign at once to abolish the whole mortician business and put it in entirely new lines where dead human beings are buried in a great fields about three feet underground, which are left for a long time until all stinks and everything have vanished, and this is the most beautiful soil for growing corn and lettuce and artichokes and vines and everything beautiful. So you go back into the cycle. But now, here is a very strange thing.
That every creature, therefore, which feels that it is human, and which knows that it’s there in the same way as you know you’re here, experiences being here as constituting a sort of blockage. Now, practically, there are very few human beings that don’t feel this, and I’m sure there are very few creatures that don’t feel it in some way, too. The sensation of a certain tension which constitutes the feeling of I-ness, of there-ness: of being here.
Because, after all, every creature is a particular form. Everything is individual. Not only you, as a total organism standing here, but all the components cells of your body.
Each one of them has some sort of a feeling of its own. And it is individual. You can look at a microscope at the right level of magnification and you can see that thing there with its own little life.
And if you examine the stream of your blood you’ll find it full of all kinds of organisms that are having all sorts of conspiracies and games and plots and eating each other and doing these things like we do. Only, we realize that we wouldn’t be healthy as a total organism unless there were all these wars and fights and plots and politics going on between the various cells in our blood. But from their point of view, you see, they feel a little bit put out because they’re being organized.
And we’re in the same situation because, very slowly, the human beings on the surface of the planet are realizing themselves into a total planetary organism with an electronic nervous system. You see, in science fiction which was published round about the 1920s it was always expected that future human beings would have enormous heads, because they would have very big brains and they would be very wise. It didn’t work that way.
What happens is that the human race is building a brain outside its body. That is to say: an interlocking electronic network of telephonic, television, radionic communications, which is rapidly being interlocked with computers. So that you will, within a few years, be able to plug your own brain into a computer.
You will have a little gadget here, behind the ear, that is slightly like a hearing aid, and that will be integrated with your brain in such a way that you can plug in right here. That will only be an intermediate stage. Because just in the same way as when we thought that all communications by electricity had to go through wire, and then we got rid of the wires and got radio and television, so in exactly the same way we’ll eventually get rid of telephones and radio and television, and we’ll communicate by some entirely new method that is at present called ESP.
But that will mean that absolutely nobody has a private life anymore. Everybody will read, automatically, everybody else’s thoughts. You won’t be able to defend—you’ll have no defenses: everybody else will see right through you.
And some people will protest and say, “Well, this is terrible! There’s no privacy anymore. That means there’s no me!” Well, that’s what’s happened to your own cells and your own neurons.
And they objected at some time in the course of the evolution: “We’re getting our private life taken away. We’re being organized into a body.” And we’re doing the same thing. Only, we have got to try and see if we can be clever about it, and that is to say to do two things at once: to have this tremendous openness to each other whereby I don’t care if you read my thoughts and you don’t care if I read yours, but at the same time, nevertheless, each one of us retains a peculiar individuality.
Almost in the same way as: nothing could be more unlike a stomach than a heart, and nothing could be more unlike a kidney than pituitary gland, and nothing could be more unlike intestines than a rib cage. You see, there’s a lot of differentiation inside the body despite the fact that it is, completely, an organism functioning all together. So then, the problem, though, as I said, is that for each individual which is outlined, which is a separate thing—or rather, I would, instead of using the word “separate” I would like to use the word “distinct.” “Separate,” as I use the word, means: disjointed, cut off from.
“Distinct” means a feature of something, where an absolutely distinguishable pattern is part of a larger pattern of a whole. So something can be distinct without being separate in just the same way as back and front can be very different and yet inseparable. So then, there is, then, this sensation of practically every living being of constituting a center of tension and of resistance.
That is to say: of being a little bit blocked or, shall I say, of being in the way; being in one’s own way. Imagine the opposite. Let us suppose, for example, that you got up in the morning with a feeling of total transparency.
There’s no resistance in your organism to the external world. You just float through it. You’re part of it, it’s part of you.