“What If You Could Interview God?” by Alan Watts

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If you were told that you were going to be given half an hour's interview with God and you had the privilege of asking one question, I wonder what you would ask?  You might be given some preparation too. Because when you think what is your ultimate question?  You'll probably do many things before you arrive at it.  And I know many people would discover that they had no question to ask.   The situation would be altogether too overwhelming.  But many people to whom I’ve put this problem say that the question that they would ask is “who am I?”   That is something we know very little about — because whatever it is that we call “I”, is too close for inspection.  It's like trying to bite your own teeth or to touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger.  Although other people can tell you what or who you are and do.  They only see you from the outside, as you see them from the outside. You don't see from the inside.   And so the nature of what it is that we call I is extremely puzzling because there is some confusion as to how much of us is “I”.  

Nowadays, most of us seem to feel that whatever “I” is, is located in the head — somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears.  The rest of us is an appendage, a vehicle which carries the self around.   Now popular speech also reflects the sensation that I am very different from what we call the other — other people, other things, anything that we can become aware of is sort of other.

There is an opposition apparently between the knower and the known.  And so we talk about facing reality; we talk about coming into this world, as if somehow we didn't belong — as if instead of being leaves growing out of a tree, we were a lot of birds that had lighted on bare branches.   It has become common sense for most people living in the 20th century to adopt the 19th century philosophy of science, which interprets the physical universe outside human bodies as being a mechanical contraption — which is essentially stupid, unfeeling, automatic — composed of mainly geological elements, rocks, gases and so forth.  Therefore, we feel rather alone and left out of this thing — in contrast with the ideas of ptolemaic astronomy.  Instead of being at the center of the universe we are on the outer limits of a minor galaxy, revolving around an unimportant star, on a small minute ball of rock.   Therefore, that astronomical way of looking at things is simply overwhelming.  It makes us feel not only of no importance, but also very much left out.   That is the common sense of most people living today.  

We did of course have a religious view of our nature — that we were the children of a loving god who is in charge of this whole operation.  Very few people actually believe that anymore.   A great many people think they ought to believe in it, and would like to believe in it, but they don’t.   Most ministers that I know don't believe it, but they feel guilty about this because they feel they ought to.   It became implausible.  There never was a serious argument against it.  It simply became unthinkable in comparison with the dimensions of the universe as we now see it. 

So having lost a way of looking at the world, an image of the world, which gave us some sense of meaning, we now have an image of the world which gives us none at all.  So we feel rather inclined to put up a fight against the whole show.  Interestingly enough, when in the 19th century we switched our common sense from supernaturalism to naturalism — one would think that a naturalist would be a person who loved nature, just as a materialist ought to be a person who loves material, but certainly isn’t.   With what is called the philosophy of scientific naturalism, is to say what you are functioning as, a rational ego with values and with the capacity to love, is simply the epiphenomenon (a secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process) of a purely mechanical process.  Too bad.  As a result of this so-called naturalism we began to put up the most whopping fight against nature that was ever engaged in.  And that fight is an expression of our fury and of our feeling of being left out.   That technological experiment, which became possible as a result the mechanical sciences, has largely been conducted in a spirit of rage.   The results are evident all around us.  We are in a position where we realize that we cannot help interfering with the world.  To be alive is to interfere.   You must interfere.   You cannot go back and say hands off nature, let's leave it all alone — because you're stuck with it.   Especially once you've started to interfere in a major way.  We have so altered our environment that there is no hope for it, but to go ahead.  

But we can, to some extent, change direction.  The only way that I can see of our effectively changing direction is through a transformation of the feeling that we have of our own existence and by what we mean by “I”.   Because what we think of as “I” is much more a symbol than it is a reality.   The whole mind body is much more than anything we mean by “I”.  I largely stands for your personality, your role in life.  So when you speak of being a real person, it really means being a genuine fake.  The personality is only the front.   What is behind it?  Well of course the organism is behind it, the whole organism. We must be very careful not to confuse the organism, with various symbols that we have for it — because those symbols can be extremely misleading.  If we say the organism is the body what we usually mean by the body, is an impoverished meaning.   When we speak of my body that is an unenriched meaning of the word body.   What you really are as a body, as a living organism is not some sort of separate existence — coated by a skin which divides you from the rest of the world.  Actually, from a biological point of view, the human skin and all skins are osmotic membranes.  You are much more like a whirlpool in a stream you flow — you are a process…

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3XzDUieRho