Alan Watts - The Eternal Transaction

Physical and spiritual are out-of-date categories. It’s all a process. There isn’t stuff on one hand and form on the other—it’s just pattern. Life is pattern; it’s a dance of energy. I don’t claim to have any private revelations about this. I don’t have any mystical knowledge about any higher vibratory plane. All this is standing right in front of you. It’s just a question of how you look at it.

When you realize this, the most extraordinary thing happens. Some people will use the symbolism of God as a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all the forms you see. But the truth is actually funnier than that—you’re looking at the brilliant light right now. The experience you’re having right now—which you might call ordinary, everyday consciousness—is it.

And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That’s the great discovery. In other words, when you really start to see things and you look at an old paper cup, you realize that old paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter—ten thousand suns couldn’t be brighter. It’s just that all the points of infinite light are tiny when you see them in the cup, so they don’t blow your eyes out.

Actually, the source of light is in the eye. If there were no eyes to see the world, the sun would not be light. You evoke light out of the universe in the same way you evoke hardness out of wood by virtue of having soft skin. Wood is only hard in relation to soft skin. Your eardrum evokes sound out of the air. This is how you call into being the whole universe—light, color, hardness, heaviness, everything.