Alan Watts - Do you do it or does it do you?

The moment you see that intervals, that space, is connected, you can understand at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of consciousness that occurs between two eternal darknesses, which is the popular common sense view that a westerner has of his own life. That you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth, there was no you, and in the eternal darkness, your death, there is likewise no you.

And I'm going to discuss these matters, not by appealing to any special, spooky knowledge, as if I had been travelling on the higher planes and knew all my previous incarnations and therefor could tell you authoritatively that you are much more than this individuality, I'm going to do it on the basis of complete common sense thtat everybody has access to the facts, and just what you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense complexity, and what you call yourself as a living organism, say I am my whole body at the very least, now what is that body? that body is recognizable, and I recognize my friends when i meet them again with luck, and you recognize me, although the last time any of you saw me, I was absolutely something entirely different from what I am now. 

Just as the flame of a candle is never a constant, a flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas. Only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant, well it is a recognizably constant pattern. The spearshape (?)line of the flame and it's coloration is a constant pattern, but in exactly the same way that we are all constant patterns and that's all we are, the only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being. The way we behave, the way we dance, only there's no we that dances, there's just the dancing. Just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas. Just as a whirlpool in the river is a whirling of streaming water. 

There is no thing that whirlpools, there is the whirlpool and in the same way each of us is a very delightfully complex undulation of the whole universe, only by process of miseducation we've been deprived of the knowledge of that fact, not as if there were someone to blame for this, because it's always with our tacid consent. Because life is basically a game of hide and seek, because life is pulsation, on and off, here it is and now it isn't, and by being this pulsation we know it's there. See, you don't know what you mean by on unless you know what you mean by off.

(this video is part 1 of 6)