My book, In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All talks in detail about the fundamental unity of all things. It's a unity so full and fundamental that thing-hood itself becomes revealed as a type of illusion; it's something that is shaved away by taking reductionism to its logical conclusion.
Consciousness is real, eternal, and fundamental. Thinghood is not.
You, the real you, are real, eternal, and fundamental. The unreal you is not.
The proverbial apple tree is real, eternal, and fundamental. The alien-ness of an alienated apple is not. In other words, in a sense, the apple itself is not real, let alone eternal or fundamental. And that's clear to see when explore that phrase "apple itself" and what a self is and the difference between a real self versus a false or unreal self. The thing-hood of an apple and the very apple-ness of an apple are a type of illusion; to treat them as truly real separate entities with births and real selfs and deaths would be a fallacy of reification. The real self is eternal and fundamental and unified and unifying. Whenever we talk about a mortal or physical thing in itself we are talking about an illusion--a fiction, like Santa Clause or Batman--even if we don't use the word 'itself'. The real self is eternal and transcends thinghood. The real self is more real than time and space. The real self is more fundamental than time and space. Anything that is limited in time or space or is otherwise is unreal is not a real self.
The proverbial ocean and water is real, eternal, and fundamental. The alien-ness of an alienated wave or alienated whirlpool in the water is not, meaning in some sense the thing-hood of a wave or whirlpool are a type of illusion; to treat the wave or whirlpool as truly real separate entity with a real birth, real self, and real death would be a fallacy of reification. Instead the lines of conception that define the thinghood of the thing itself, and separate the thing from reality, and act as the divider between that part of reality that is the thing and that which isn't, and the divider between the birth and the life and the death of thing, are all just conceptual constructs, like lines and borders on a map of a land that don't actually exist on the land itself.
For more on these concepts, here are some selected excerpts from a lecture by Alan Watts, titled "The Nature of Consciousness":
Alan Watts wrote: If you have what it takes, you don't need to put on that show. And you don't need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature? Because after all, you ARE a symptom of nature. You, as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in exactly the same way an apple grows off an apple tree.
So let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using 'apple' as a verb. And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples. And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in. Just as spots on somebody's skin is symptomatic of chicken pox. Just as hair on a head is symptomatic of what's going on in the organism.
But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths--the ceramic and the automatic--not to feel that we belong in the world. So our popular speech reflects it. You say 'I came into this world.' You didn't. You came out of it. You say 'Face facts.' We talk about 'encounters' with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies. And the average person has the sensation that he is a someone that exists inside a bag of skin. The center of consciousness that looks out at this thing, and what the hell's it going to do to me? You see? 'I recognize you, you kind of look like me, and I've seen myself in a mirror, and you look like you might be people.' So maybe you're intelligent and maybe you can love, too. Perhaps you're all right, some of you are, anyway. You've got the right color of skin, or you have the right religion, or whatever it is, you're OK. But there are all those people over in Asia, and Africa, and they may not really be people. When you want to destroy someone, you always define them as 'unpeople.' Not really human. Monkeys, maybe. Idiots, maybe. Machines, maybe, but not people.
So we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory that you, yourself, exist only inside your skin. Now I want to propose another idea altogether.
[...]
It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
And so what I would call a basic problem we've got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say separate things, or separate events. That that is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems.
The world doesn't come thinged; it doesn't come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And as I wave and say to you 'Yoo-hoo!' the world is waving with me at you and saying 'Hi! I'm here!' But we are consciousness of the way we feel and sense our existence. Being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things, our consciousness has been influenced, so that each one of us does not feel that. We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, just something out on the end of it. And therefore we are scared stiff. My wave is going to disappear, and I'm going to die! And that would be awful. We've got a mythology going now which is, as Father Maskell put it, we are something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium. And that's it. And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.
This is what people really believe today.
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Camus said there is only one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions.
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You see, this whole idea that the universe is nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it is a putdown theory of the world. People who had an advantage to make, a game to play by putting it down, and making out that because they put the world down they were a superior kind of people. So that just won't do. We've had it. Because if you seriously go along with this idea of the world, you're what is technically called alienated. You feel hostile to the world. You feel that the world is a trap. It is a mechanism, it is electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught. And you, poor thing, have to put up with being put into a body that's falling apart, that gets cancer, that gets the great Siberian itch, and is just terrible. And these mechanics--doctors--are trying to help you out, but they really can't succeed in the end, and you're just going to fall apart, and it's a grim business, and it's just too bad. So if you think that's the way things are, you might as well commit suicide right now. Unless you say, 'Well, I'm damned. Because there might really be after all eternal damnation. Or I identify with my children, and I think of them going on without me and nobody to support them. Because if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them, I shall teach them to be like I am, and they'll go on, dragging it out to support their children, and they won't enjoy it. They'll be afraid to commit suicide, and so will their children. They'll all learn the same lessons.'
So you see, all I'm trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world that is influencing most people in the United States today is simply a myth.
If you want to say that the idea of God the father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth, in a bad sense of the word 'myth,' so is this other one. It is just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs. Why? Let's get this clear. If there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty, well you've found it in other people. In other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I said, if it is there, in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things. We are as symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree or the rose of the rose bush. The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people, and our existence on the Earth is a symptom of this other system, and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of a whole company of other galaxies.
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When, as a scientist, you describe the behavior of a living organism, you try to say what a person does, it's the only way in which you can describe what a person is, describe what they do. Then you find out that in making this description, you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. In other words, you cannot talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor, because when I walk, I don't just dangle my legs in empty space. I move in relationship to a room. So in order to describe what I'm doing when I'm walking, I have to describe the room; I have to describe the territory. So in describing my talking at the moment, I can't describe it as just a thing in itself, because I'm talking to you. And so what I'm doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also. So if that is necessary, in other words, in order to describe MY behavior, I have to describe YOUR behavior and the behavior of the environment, it means that we've really got one system of behavior. Your skin doesn't separate you from the world; it's a bridge through which the external world flows into you, and you flow into it.
Just, for example, as a whirlpool in water, you could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape you have a definite form. All right? Here is a flow of water, and suddenly it does a whirlpool, and it goes on. The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it. The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and in exactly the same way, the whole universe is doing each one of us, and I see each one of you today and I recognize you tomorrow, just as I would recognize a whirlpool in a stream. I'd say 'Oh yes, I've seen that whirlpool before, it's just near so-and-so's house on the edge of the river, and it's always there.' So in the same way when I meet you tomorrow, I recognize you, you're the same whirlpool you were yesterday. But you're moving. The whole world is moving through you, all the cosmic rays, all the food you're eating, the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything is just flowing right through you. When you're wiggling the same way, the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you.
But the problem is, you see, we haven't been taught to feel that way. The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it--aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us. Otherwise we're going to go out of our heads. We're going to commit suicide, collectively, courtesy of H-bombs.
What do you think?
In the lingo of my book, the same thing can be said like this:
The unreal you is a proverbial whirlpool. The real you is the proverbial water.
The unreal you is a proverbial wave in the ocean. The real you is the proverbial ocean.
The unreal you is a thing with thinghood. It is mortal, limited, tiny, infinitesimal, and alienated. It is fundamentally unreal and illusory, a figment of fallacious reification.
The real you is the eternal reality underlying and unifying all things, which itself transcends thinghood.
The one thing that is doing everything is not a thing, in that it transcends thinghood and transcends duality, all dualities.
Everything alien to it is illusory.
To it, to the universe and all would-be things, there is nothing alien. To it, meaning to reality as a unified whole, there is nothing alien.
Anything that would divide it, alienate part of it, or cut it up into separate pieces is illusory.
They are borders in a map that exists only in the imagination not in the real land that is mapped.
Neither the borders nor the map are fundamentally real, only what they map, represent, and conceptually divide with imaginary lines of division and imaginary borders.
In fundamental reality, there are no apples, or humans, or separation, or divisions, or separate things. There is just the thingless unified it and what it does and what it is doing. That isn't three different things, but still just one non-thing that transcends thinghood, because it is the doing and the doing is it. It is what is done, and what is done is it.
It is one. And it is you, the real you.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
- Consciousnesses is real, eternal, and fundamental.
You--the real you--are real, eternal, and fundamental.
In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.
