Sociopathic Society: The Military-Industrial Concept of Self

"I wonder if it's ever struck you how curious a thing it is that most of the things we experience we regard as things that happen to us; which we ourselves do not originate, which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves. And if you consider that, you realize that what you mean by your 'Self' is rather narrowly circumscribed. Even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of 'things that happen to us' in the same way as things that go on in the world outside our skin. If there is a thunderstorm or an earthquake, well, it happens to you; you're not responsible for it. The same way if you have hiccups; you didn't plan on it. If you have belly rumbles, you have no intention of doing it. And as for the catastrophic act of getting born, well, you had nothing to do with that! And you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in which you find yourself. And this way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood as 'something that happens to you' goes right down to our general feeling about life. It goes down to the way in which, as westerners, we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in the Cosmos, that on the whole, is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence.

In other words, if you are reared with a 20th century, or shall we say, an 'early 20th century common sense,' which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century, with its rejection of Christianity and Judaism, you regard yourself as an accident, a biological accident, in a 'stupid' universe, which is mechanical, but has no feelings; no finer feelings. A vast pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur; because if you don't have the point of view, and you are more traditional, you look upon yourself as a child of God, and therefore, under authority. In other words, there is a 'Big Boss' on top of all this, who allowed you, at his pleasure, to deign to have the disgusting affrontery to exist, with the attitude of 'this is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you.' And when you look at the world in that image, or in the other image, that it's a stupid mechanism, either point of view you take, you don't really belong.

You're not really part of all this. And I could use a stronger word than 'part,' only we don't have it in English. We have to say something like 'connected with it,' 'essential to it' or to put it in the strongest possible way, it is quite alien to western though to conceive that the external world, which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself as something that you got caught up with; it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as 'You, Yourself.' Because, you see, we have such a myopic view of what one's 'Self' is. It's as if, in other word, we have selected how much experience is really to be regarded as 'me.'

As if you focused your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole panorama of things that you experience, and say, 'I will take sides with that much of it.' Now, we come here, right at the start, to an extremely important principle, which is the different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification. That is, to say you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way; you can look at it with the naked eye and see it in a certain way; you can look at it with a telescope and you can see it in another way. Now, which level of magnification is the correct one? Well, obviously they are all correct. They're just different points of view.

You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under magnifying glass. And where, with the naked eye, you will see a human face, with a magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots, rather meaninglessly scattered. But as you stand away from that connection of dots, which all seem to be separate and apart from each other, they suddenly to arrange themselves into a pattern. What is, in other words, is conflict at one level, of magnification, is harmony at higher level. Now, could it possibly be that, therefore, that we, with all our problems: conflicts, neurosis, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures and everything that goes on in human life, are a state of conflict which can be seen in the larger perspective as a situation of harmony. And you can say, 'A-ha! At last, I see, I've got the point. I've seen how all this makes sense.' But what this insight depended upon was your overcoming the illusion that space separates things." --Allan Watts