Become What You Are by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

In other systems of thought Brahman has many other names—“Tao” in Chinese, and mystics the world over find similar meaning in the words “God,” “Allah,” “Infinite Life,” “élan vital,” “the Absolute,” or whatever other term may be used. In fact, the intuition of the One Reality is the essence of all mystical religion, but few people understand clearly what it is to feel this intuition in oneself. We are perhaps more apt to think of this idea just as a metaphysical speculation, a more or less reasonable theory about the fundamental structure of life. Someday, we think, it might be possible for us to delve down into the deepest recesses of our souls, lay our fingers on this mysterious universal essence and avail ourselves of its tremendous powers. This, however, does not seem quite the right way to took at it. For one thing, it is not to be found only “in the deepest recesses of our souls,” and for another, the word “essence” makes it sound as if it were a highly refined, somewhat gaseous or electric and wholly formless potency that somehow dwells “inside” things. But in relation to Brahman there is neither inside nor outside; sometimes it is called the principle of “nonduality” because nothing else exists beside it and nothing is excluded from it. It is to be found on the surface as much as in the depths and in the finite as much as in the infinite, for it has wisely been said that “there is nothing infinite apart from finite things.” Thus it can neither be lost nor found and you cannot avail yourself of its powers any more than you can dispense with them, for all these conceptions of having and not having, of gain and loss, finite and infinite, belong to the principle of duality. Every dualism is exclusive; it is this and not that, that and not this. But Brahman as the One Reality is all-inclusive, for the Upanishads say:1

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