On Who You Truly Are

by Alan Watts

"Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However, if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God', they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out'."

"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."

"And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... as if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning."

"How is it possible that a being with such jewels as the eys, such enchanted instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god?"

"What I am really saying is that you don't have to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."

"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it against the wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So, in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourseves as only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually - if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning - you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You're still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as - Mr. so-and-so, Ms. so-and-so, Mrs. so-and-so - I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too. But we've learned to define ourselves separate from it."