Awesome Alan Watts

There is an Alan Watts podcast that is so good that I had to make a transcript.  It’s from a series called Images of God (no. 1) and concerns the importance of Wonder, which lies at the heart of primal religions like Shinto.  It also concerns the mystique of rocks, which are revered in Shinto and originally formed the ‘holy body’ into which the kami spirit descends.  Watts gives a fascinating demonstration of how, far from being inanimate, rocks are a host to life in a very real sense.

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Alan Watts 1915-73

Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves around an insignificant star on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies.

But on the other hand if you think about that for a few minutes, I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around the spherical fire.  It’s a very odd situation!  And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

Wonder in modern philosophy is something you mustn’t have.  It’s like enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England: very bad form…

But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy.  So there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in the sense of awe, astonishment at existence.  And that is also a basis of respect for existence.  We don’t have very much of it in this culture.    Respect is based on wonder, on the feeling of marvel of holding an ordinary pebble in your fingers.

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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 this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!

Rocks can be an opening into another world

Now maybe two million years ago somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over, shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘Just a bunch of rocks’, and they went away.

Later on, two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again, and they said, ‘Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks but it’s peopled, and it’s alive after all, it’s done something intelligent.

Because you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.  If evolution means anything, it means that.

But you see, we curiously twist it.  We say, first of all in the beginning, there was nothing but gas and rock.   And then intelligence happened to arise in it, like a sort of fungus or slime on top of the whole thing.  Ah, but we’re thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.

Where there are rocks, watch out!!  Watch out!  Because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.

The sacred rock of Koshikiiwa Jinja – alive with potential