TRUST - ALAN WATTS

Courtesy of Organism.Earth

It’s very funny to come to California—you know, when you’ve lived elsewhere and it’s been an ideal—and suddenly you wake up and you realize you’re there! You know? You’re on vacation, you’ve got there, and everybody else envies you. And so we have to learn how to be there—or rather, to be here. Of course, it is always possible to construe the thing in another way and to say, “Yes, it may be a game, but it’s a ghastly game; it’s a grim game.” It’s like a child who’s caught a fly alive and is picking the wings off it. The universe is that sort of scheme. It’s a trap. It’s a thing that gives you hope, is always dangling possibilities in front of you to keep you going, but then it grinds you up. And then it revives you a little, like a master torturer keeping a person alive in order to experience pain. There is a kind of inverted mystical experience that people occasionally have where they see the whole universe as this sort of trap, and everything looks crummy. People look as if they’re made of plastic, and aren’t really people but only make-believe people. They’re mechanisms which are going “Yakety yak” and pretending that they are really there and alive. And everything looks as if it were made of patent leather or enameled tin, and just a nasty, dead scene. That’s the inverted mystical experience. And one might ask, “Well, you could take that view, too.” And here you come to what Albert Camus said: “The fundamentally important philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.”