I enjoy reading and listening to Alan Watts. I learned about him in 2020 and have been having fun noodling the ideas and concepts he likes to talk about. It is right up my alley in many ways.
Here are some quotes from an audio of his that I like. He talks about the topic of cause and effect that so many of us believe in. His take is that the universe, life, works in a way that is different from our commonly accepted view of cause and effect in our life.
The quotes come from the audio and transcript here.
"We really have to rid our brains of the notion of causality. The notion of causality being that present sets of circumstances are the result of past sets of circumstances and that, therefore, certain events (which are called causes) are responsible for following events (called effects). And all this is an enormous piece of mumbo-jumbo, because what is not seen and what is not clear in thinking that way is that, in physical nature, there are no separate events. This is startling to people. But it’s really quite easy to see that there are no events in nature, because you can ask very simply—let’s take something called an event: how do we demark it from other events?
At what point, shall we say, were you born? Were you born at parturition? Or when the doctor slapped you on the bottom? Or cut the umbilical cord? Or when you were conceived? Or when your father and mother were first attracted to each other? When was it? When did you begin? There’s no way of deciding except arbitrarily.
So, the thing is this. It’s just like riding a bicycle. It’s a balance trick. You suddenly find yourself falling over one way. Well, to balance that you turn into that direction and you stay up. And so in the same way when you find yourself becoming too attached to life, you correct that with the realisation that there is nothing except the eternal now. Then when you feel it’s all right now and you see you’re safe again, you go and get attached. Or you get involved, you get concerned, about some enterprises - social, political, amorous, familial, scholarly, artistic - whatever it is, you get involved. And the two always go together.
When you see that what we call separate events don’t exist, it becomes nonsense to speak of one event causing another. What you really mean is that the two events which you speak of as being causally related are simply two parts of the same event. They go with each other in the same way as this with that. The relationship is not causal, it is mutual. And the difficulty we have in seeing this to be so is that we think in an either/or way.
Whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not, the relationship between you and the environment is always one that is harmonious. You are always living the uncalculated life. And you have to find out, first of all, that you’re always doing it, and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations.
In other words, your ego (you) has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it. Because, as I pointed out, most of the functions, most of the goings-on in you, around you, the circumstances of life, have nothing to do with your ego (you) at all. And you don’t even know why you make up your mind to do certain things. We know superficially; we have a few ideas."
Some ideas to noodle as you observe the ins and outs of how you operate each day