The Illusion of Life – Alan Watts

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death, (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world – not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived by fluke – but you can begin to feel you own existence as absolutely fundamental.

I am not trying to sell you on this idea, in the sense of converting you to it. I want you to play with it. I want you to think of it’s possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.

So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream for 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would naturally, as you begin on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you can concieve. And after several nights of seventy five years of total pleasure each, you would say “Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream that’s not under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be. And you would do that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it”? Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further-in and further-out gambles to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living a life that you are actually living today.

That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally
the ultimate reality, not God in a political kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic, whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending that you are not.

We need a new experience — a new feeling of what it is to be ‘I.’ The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.”

“As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is *so* obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of ‘I’ as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe.”

“The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or ‘ground’ of our existence and awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known.”

“You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego.”

“Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not *better* than the eggs from which they have broken.”

–Alan Watts