THE BOOK
By Alan Watts
Chapter titled;
So What?

… For there is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for the ego even as a passive witness. I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere there is no here, so that --- in this sense --- self is other and here is there.

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 This selflessness idea didn’t really matter all that much to me until I saw how damaging to my own well being it was to see myself in terms of an ego separate from the rest of the world. If I take the idea that God is a divine baby-sitter instead of an active participant in every cell of my body there is no sense that I can be a co-creator of reality. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and every kind of sorrow and crime can be seen as the inevitable outcome of the will of God. Everything I do is my destiny and, if God deals me a bad hand, that is the hand I am forever doomed to play out unless God changes His mind about me. Even when I am relieved of all obsessions and addictions, an undercurrent is always there that I am saved because I am somehow the apple of God’s eye and you other unfortunates are not. The idea that I am as much god as God is me is considered blasphemy and egocentric when it is in fact the ultimate confession of humility because it recognizes your divinity too. This is why a Hindu greets others politely, bowing respectfully, and putting hands together says, “Namaste”. This awareness gives me the courage and strength to see life in terms of harmony with the divine order of the universe because I am not merely a spectator of the dance but I am one of the dancers.

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