[ Featuring Alan Watts ]
To get into
The unitive world
Underneath, underlying, and supporting
The everyday practical world
There have to be certain alterations in one's common sense
Now there are certain ideas
And beyond these ideas, certain feelings
That are difficult to get across
Not because they're intellectually complicated
Not at all because of that
But because they're unfamiliar
They're strange
We haven't been brought up
To accommodate them
In exactly the same way that, in past times
People knew
That the planets were supported in the sky
Because they were embedded
In spheres of crystal
And if they weren't embedded in spheres of crystal
And, of course, you could see them, because you could see through them
They would fall down on the Earth
And now, when astronomers finally suggested that there were no crystal spheres
People felt unbelievably insecure
See?
They had a terrible time
Assimilating this idea
Now, do you see what it involves
To assimilate a really new idea?
You have to do quite a flip
For example, there are some people whose number systems
Only account (For) four quantities
One, two, three, many
So they don't have any concept of
Four corners to a table
See, a table has many corners
And a pile of pebbles is
In that sense, equivalent
In many-ness to the four corners of the table
Now, they have difficulty, you see
In beginning to assimilate the idea of counting through
And numbering all those corners or all those pebbles
But we've done that
So-to us-that is perfectly simple
But imagine the kind of mentality, the kind of person
To whom that is not simple at all
Now, in exactly the same way
There is, here
What I'm trying to explain
A new idea
That most people don't assimilate
And that is the idea of
The total interdependence
Of everything in the world
