Alan Watts on Destorying Someone

        In times of such escalating insanity and indiscriminate violence, it’s prudent to turn to the sensible voices of those who have consistently questioned the status-quo and drew attention to the fact that humanity will either go up together or go down together.  Alan Watts is one such person (Martin Luther King and Carl Sagan are among others); below is an excerpt from his lecture titled The Nature of Consciousness (the lecture sub-title is The Myth of the Automatic Universe), part of the Out of Your Mind Lecture series.

        We have been brought up, by reason of our two great myths – the ceramic and the fully-automatic – not to feel that we belong in the world.  So our popular speech reflects it, we say “I came into this world,” you didn’t, you came out of it.  We say, “face facts,” we talk about “encounters with reality,” as if it was head on meeting of completely alien agencies, and the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists inside a bag of skin – the center of consciousness which looks out at this thing, and what the hell’s it going to do to me?

The Andromeda Galaxy.  Image from: http://www.skyfactory.org/m31deep/m31deep_fullview.jpg

        You see?  “Uhh, I recognize you and you kind of look like me and uhh, I’ve seen myself in a mirror, and uhh, you look like you might be people…so maybe you’re intelligent, maybe you can love too.  And perhaps you’re alright, some of you are anyway, if you’ve got the right color of skin or you have the right religion or whatever it is then you’re okay, but there are all those people in Asia and Africa and they may not really be people.”  When you want to destroy someone you always define them as unpeople – not really human – monkeys maybe, idiots maybe, machines maybe, but not people.  But we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory that you yourself exist only inside your skin.  Now I want to propose another idea altogether… 

Victims of U.S drone strike in Pakistan.  Image from: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/