It is quite alien to western thought to conceive that the external world — which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself as something that you got caught up with — it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you yourself. Because we have such a myopic view of what one's self is. It's as if, in other words, we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as me, as if you focused your attention on certain restricted areas of the panorama of things that you experience and say, I will take sides with that much of it.
When we examine our blood streams under a microscope, we see there's one hell of a fight going on. All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the microscope, we should start taking sides, which would be fatal. Because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle. What is in other words conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level. Could it possibly be therefore that we, with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures, and everything that goes on in human life, are a state of conflict, which can be seen in a larger perspective, as a situation of harmony.
The only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being. It's the way we behave, the way we dance. Only there's no “we” that dances, there's just the dancing.
Well, who do you think you are? How do you answer that question; who are you? Well, you give a name, you say, I'm Joe Dokes, I'm Alan Watts. That's not true. That's what people told you you are. They put that name on you and they taught you to identify with it and to behave as it was expected to behave. But that's not who are you are. You know very well. Go back in your memory. Go back into your infancy, before they started telling you all this stuff. Who are you? And if you get with that, you'll know very well who you are. The jolly old ancient of days. Only there's a conspiracy that you mustn't let on about that, because everybody is. And if one person realises it, the other is a little bit offended. And they'll say, well, how come you're so great? We worked it in Christianity by a very clever thing, of allowing just one individual to be recognized as the God incarnate.
We allowed one person, you see, one human individual, to be the incarnate God. Because we have all been living in a theory of the universe in which the individual is simply involved in something that happens to him, and we feel that this thing that happens to us is reality, it is facts that we have to face and accept and cope with, you see, it's always something other than you, you don't recognise it as an integral part of your own being.