In my book, In It Together, I explain that all humans are on the addiction spectrum. Roughly speaking, the war against temptation and addiction (a.k.a. spiritual slavery) is the common struggle that unites us all. In other words, the fight for unwavering inner peace (a.k.a. true happiness) and full-fledged unwavering spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) is the struggle that unites us all.
While discussing that topic, on Page 86, I writing the following which includes paraphrasing of Alan Watts:
In It Together (Page 86) wrote: If true conscious love is by definition a sense of true oneness with so-called others, then by little surprise its opposite entails a deep loneliness.
Indeed, perhaps the idea of prison makes an appropriate image for the state of spiritual slavery—of being imprisoned in the comfort zone or some other cyclical pattern of addiction. It is a state associated with the kind of deep spiritual loneliness that has one feel lonely even in a crowded room full of other humans.
It can come with a sense of otherness. Our language betrays this sad view sometimes. We speak of our human birth and say, “I came into this world.” But to paraphrase Alan Watts, we must ask, from where would you have come other than the world?
Humans don’t come into the world; they come out of it, like an apple comes out of an apple tree, like a rose comes out of a rose garden. As a human, you are a rose in a rose garden; you are a part of the world, not ‘other’ than it, not a trespasser.
And here is an excerpt from one of the lectures by Alan Watts in which he discusses the concept of his which I was paraphrasing:
Alan Watts wrote:it has become fashionable, and it is nothing more than a fashion, to believe that the universe is dumb. That intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis, and that outside that, the thing is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces. Courtesy of Dr. Freud, for example, biological life is based on something called libido, which was a very loaded word: blind, ruthless, uncomprehending lust. The human unconscious, and similarly to thinkers of the 19th century like Ernst Haeckel, even Darwin, and T.H. Huxley, there was this notion that at the root of being is an energy, and this energy is blind. This energy is just energy, and it's utterly and totally stupid.
Our intelligence is an unfortunate accident. By some weird freak of evolution, we came to be these feeling and rational beings, more or less rational, and this is a ghastly mistake because here we are in a universe that has nothing in common with us. It doesn't share our feelings, has no real interest in us; we're just a sort of cosmic fluke. Therefore, the only hope for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission, conquer it, and master it.
Now, all this is perfectly idiotic. If you would think that the idea of the universe as being the creation of a benevolent Old Gentleman, although he's not so benevolent, he takes a sort of "this hurts me more than it's going to hurt you" sort of attitude to things. You can have that on the one hand, and if that becomes uncomfortable, you can exchange it for its opposite, the idea that the ultimate reality doesn't have any intelligence at all. At least that gets rid of the old bogey in the sky in exchange for a picture of the world that is completely stupid. Now, these ideas don't make any sense, especially the last one, because you cannot get an intelligent organism such as a human being out of an unintelligent universe. The saying in the New Testament that figs do not grow on thistles nor grapes on thorns applies equally to the world.
You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. Look, here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree apples. That's what it does. All right, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of the solar system is that, at least on the planet Earth, the thing peoples. It's the same way that an apple tree apples. Now, maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at the solar system. They looked it over, shrugged their shoulders, and said, "Just a bunch of rocks," and they went away. Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and looked at it again and said, "Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling, and it's alive after all. It has done something intelligent."
Because you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that apples grow on the apple tree. If evolution means anything, it means that. But you see, we curiously twist it. We say, "Well, first of all, in the beginning, there was nothing but gas and rock, and then intelligence happened to arise in it, you know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the gas and rock." Now, we're thinking in a way that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.
I like the idea of seeing rocks like Earth itself as being intelligent living rocks.
I can imagine of huge aliens who are each 1,000 times bigger than the Earth who, in terms of size, see the Earth like we see a single cell organism or small barely visible mold colony growing on bread.
You can imagine an asteroid is flying at Earth in a hundred years, but then (from the view of the huge aliens) seems to magically radiate away, or even evaporate suddenly.
The aliens might say, "Wow, look that little pebble over that, that third little pebble rotating around that little light bug. It has evolved the capacity to protect itself by radiating away debris that would otherwise hit it. It's as if the little pebble is alive and intelligent."
Our little spaceship or rocket flying to the asteroid from Earth might be like an invincible spore from mold colony as far as the huge aliens, as if like some hypothetical point particle theorized by their huge alien scientists. Their scientists would say, "We believe the way the pebble protects itself it it shoots out even smaller tinier more simplistic pieces of itself as a type of defensive projectile. It can even use a similar process not for protection but reproduction, to infect other nearby pebbles with its life-force causing them to behave similarly to it and have its same powers of defense and reproduction."
Would the huge aliens be wrong? I don't think so. I think they would be correct to think of this little pebble called Earth as being a smart rock and as being a living rock. It's a rock that grew intelligence, came alive, and can even protect itself, maintain a rough degree and type of homeostasis, and reproduce.
What do you think?
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
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.
