Alan Watts

I think Watt's analysis of thinking of the self as only the skin you're in is completely accurate. I don't thik we think of ourselves as the whole universe. It is more common to seperate the universe from the self so that the self is not responsible for the Universe. Thus, the Universe becomes responsible for the self which gives humans an exuse for their actions and situations. The fatalist view of humans as puppets being pushed around in life is much easier to accept, although its implications are not always pleasant. It is much easier to take what life has handed to you or what you feel life has handed you and live in that small bubble. There is no effort required to change your situation, because your situation has been given to you, and that is it. Watt's challenges us to flip flop our notion of the individual and the universe.

The Individual is something the whole universe is doing. This really didn't click with me until the wave example was given. Just like every wave is something that the whole ocean is doing so is every human something the whole universe is doing. Our body is a part of a body, the universe. It is when we do not consider the universe that we mistreat the universe. We take from the universe what we want and treat it however we want to treat it. How we treat it is a reflection of our sense of relation to it. If we don't sense it as ourselves, we tend to treat it badly. The world, on the other hand, does not do this to us. The universe treats us as we truly are; it treats us as it since we are it.

In the beginning, the West treated the world as a construct of god. With the question of the existence of god, we lost the sense of all power in god's hands and took it into our own. The problem is that this means treating the world as a machine, a machine who's operation is unknown to most. Like Watt's says, most people don't even have an understanding of how the human body works, even though it is our own habitat, and we use and manipulate it as if we do know what is the essence of it. This results in irrational combinations such as morals invoked via war. This is a complete contradiction. Morals and war do not go together, and should not be used to achieve one another. To kill in the name of righteousness is unhuman. You would be killing part of the universe, yourself.