My, My, oh My!

Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living organisms and bounded by a physical body --- a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came int this world.” You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”
    This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is a flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside of bags of skin.

THE BOOK
By Alan Watts
Inside Information
(Chapter One pp. 8-9)

*****

 Isn’t it alarming that I possess problems as though they are mine? I have alcoholism… my financial distress… my cancer… my fears, my obsessions, my weight problem, my anger, my, my, oh my… even my loved ones. The truth is that cancers, alcoholism, fears and all others are expressions… a way of the universe reminding me that I am a part of the big scheme of things. This is not to say that the universe goes about reminding anyone of anything but rather, it is a fact that all of these have a prognosis… a source and a predictable way of winding … entwining within and without me. Of course, I understand that all of us have different fingerprints/DNA and all of us have distinctive faces etc.; but, we all (all that I know of) have fingerprints and, most definitely, DNA.
    When the universe looks at itself through the eyes of this bag of skin beholding the stars through devices such as an orbiting telescope, I can understand that this solid ground I stand on is but a speck surrounded by a vast sea of the cosmos. Just as a micro-organism in the ocean is as much the amazing wonder of the whole of what it swims in, the problems… the illnesses… the human interactions are not mine but are all just the sea I swim in and am a part of. The grace of God is the humility that heals and moves me through suffering. I don’t own it either. It is that which empowers me to let go of it. It is no longer my disease but merely the ocean I can swim through. When I say, “I am an alcoholic” I don’t own it. I am admitting that it has qualities that are recognizable and predictable in everyone who admits to alcoholism… whether or not they are actually an alcoholic is irrelevant at this point. It is not so much a confession as it is an observance. I no longer have to face this reality because I am it.

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