It Will Give You Goosebumps - Alan Watts on The Secret

 

The only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this, that for every outside, there is an inside. And for every inside, there is an outside. And although they are different, they go together. There is in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides. And the conspiracy is this to look as different as possible and yet underneath to be identical because you don't find one without the other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle, note that, agreed. So, there is a secret what is esoteric what is profound and what is deep is what we will call the implicit. What is obvious and on the open is what we will call the explicit. 

 

And I and my environment you and your environment are explicitly as different as different can be. But implicitly you go together. And this is discovered by the scientist, when he tries as the whole art of science is to describe what happens exactly. And when he describes exactly what you do, he finds out that you, your behavior is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you. 

 

He realizes that you are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when the sea has waves on it, well, right in the sea, the ocean is waving. And so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.

 

And with each one of us, it's waving and saying, "yoohoo here I am". Only it does it differently each time. Because variety is the spice of life. But you see, the funny thing is, we haven't been brought up to feel that way.

 

Instead of feeling that we each one of us are something the whole realm of being is doing, we feel that we are something that has come into the whole realm of being as a stranger. When we were born, we don't really know where we came from. Because we don't remember. And we think when we die, that's just going to be that. Some people can sell themselves with the idea that they're going to heaven, or that they're going to be reincarnated or they're going to summer land or something. People don't really believe that. For most people, it's plausible, the real thing that haunts them is that when they die, they're going to sleep and never going to wake up. They're going to be locked up in the safe deposit box of darkness forever.

 

But that all depends you see upon false notion of what is oneself. Now, the reason why we have this false notion of ourselves is as far as I can understand it, that we have specialized in one particular kind of consciousness. Being very general rough, we have two kinds of consciousness. 

 

One I will call the spotlight and the other floodlight. The spotlight is what we call conscious attention. And that is trained into us from childhood as the most valuable form of consciousness. And the teacher in class says "Pay attention!", everybody stares looks fast at the teacher like that. That spotlight conscious, fixing your mind on one thing at a time - concentrate! And even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span. Nevertheless, you concentrate you use your spotlight one thing after another one thing after another flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip like that. 

 

But we also have another kind of consciousness which I'll call the flatline. For example, you can drive your car for several miles, your friend sitting next to you. And your spotlight consciousness will be completely absorbed in talking to your friend. Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving the car ,will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on and you'll get there safely, without even thinking about it. 

 

But our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight consciousness and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness alone. I am my spotlight consciousness, my conscious attention that is my ego that is me. And very largely we ignore the floodlight. 

 

Now the floodlight consciousness is working all the time. every nerve in that we have is its instrument. Now, because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued. We have the sensation of ourselves as being just the spotlight. Just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other. 

 

And so we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of the people who by various methods, become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called a mystical experience or a cosmic consciousness, because they discover that the real deep deep self that which you really are fundamentally and forever is the whole of being, all that there is, the works. 

 

That's you, just as a sun, or star has many rays. So the whole cosmos expresses itself. You, and you, and you, and youm and you... All the different variations. It dances with infinite variety, but every single dance that it does, that is to say, you is what the whole thing is doing. But you see, we forget it. We don't know we brought up in a special way so that we are unaware of the connection. The external world is your own body extended.