Why your life matters- The Deep Structure of existence | Alan Watts

Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self, more really us than I. And if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is. That you are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that furthermore this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. And that vast thing that you see far off, far off, far off with telescopes, and you look and look and look, one day you're going to wake up and say, why that's me? And in knowing that, know you see that you never die. That you are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown. So it goes forever. The experience you are having, which you call ordinary everyday consciousness, pretending you're not it, that experience is exactly the same thing as it. There's no difference at all. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. You evoke light out of the universe. In the same way, you, by virtue of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being the whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything. You see? Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out. You see, it's as if you had a light covered with a black ball, and in this ball were pinholes, and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out. So in that way, every one of us is actually a pinhole through which the fundamental light, that is the existence itself, looks out. Only the game we're playing is not to know this. Therefore, what you call the external world is as much you as your own body. Your skin doesn't separate you from the world. It's a bridge through which the external world flows into you, and you flow into it. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly.