I ask a lot of people for advice. A few days ago, I asked a new friend who’s a few years older than myself for any advice he’d have for me, off the record. Usually people tell me to follow my passions or take risks or travel more, but this guy sent me a video. That was a first.
It’s an old monologue by the late British philosopher Alan Watts. If you can get past the corny music, you’ll probably hear something you’ve never heard before. It only lasts a couple minutes, but the gist is that given the choice to dream any life you wanted, you’d eventually get tired of playing God. You’d want something out of your control. You’d want to be surprised. And after some time, you would dream of living the life you’re living today. To pretend you weren’t God and that you had the pleasure of constant surprises.
I think this idea acts as a reminder that the number of outcomes we face in life is practically endless. We often fall into routine and it’s good to rethink spontaneity. After all, we’re living the dream.
I’ll let Watts speak for himself:
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.
You can find the video here.
Until tomorrow,
Alex