What Is Consciousness?

Our attention is captured by the figure rather than the background, by the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area, and by something moving rather than what is relatively still. And to all those phenomena that in this way attract our attention, we attribute a higher degree of reality than the ones we don't notice. That's only because for the moment, those are more important to us. Consciousness, you see, is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble just in the same way as a ship's radar is looking for rocks or other ships. And the radar, therefore does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks, no other ships. So in the same way, our eyes or rather, the selective consciousness behind the eyes only pays attention to what we think is important. I am at this moment aware of all of you in this room, of every single detail of your clothing, of your faces and so on. But I'm not noticing it all, and therefore I will not be able to remember tomorrow exactly how each one of you looked and what you were wearing. Because what I notice is restricted to things that I think are particularly important. If I notice some particularly beautiful girl in the audience. Then I might notice also what she's wearing, and that would be memorable. But by and large, you see, we scan things over, but we pay attention only to what our set of values tells us we ought to pay attention to. 

But quite obviously, you, as a complete individual, are much more than the scanning system. You are in relationships with the external world that on the whole are incredibly harmonious. And so in this way we have this rather myopic way of looking at things and we screen out from attention anything that is not immediately important to a scanning system based on sensing danger. But quite obviously, you as a complete individual, are much more than the scanning system you are in relationships with the external world that on the whole are incredibly harmonious. Going back to this illustration of every living body as something like the flame of a candle, the energies of life in the form of temperature, light, air and food and so on are streaming through you all at this moment in the most magnificently harmonious way. And you, all of you, far more beautiful than any candle flame just sitting in these chairs just going, you know, only we are so used to it. We say about that, so what? Show me something interesting. Show me something new. Because it's a characteristic of consciousness that it ignores stimuli that are constant. When anything is constant, it says, okay, that's safe. It's in the bag. I don't need to pay attention to that anymore. And therefore, we eliminate systematically from our awareness all the gorgeous things that are going on all the time and instead only become focused on the things the troublesome things that might happen to upset it, which is all right, but we make too much of it. 

We make so much of it that we identify our very selves. I, ego, with the radar, with the troubleshooter, and that's only a tiny fragment of one's total being. So that if you do become aware that you are not simply that scanning mechanism, but you are your complete organism, then very swiftly, in turn, as a consequence of that that, you become aware that your organism is not the way you think about it. When you look at it from the standpoint of conscious attention, from the standpoint of the ego, your organism is your kind of vehicle, your automobile in which you go around. But from a physical point, of view your organism is again, like the candle flame or the whirlpool. It is something which is a continuous patterning or activity of the whole cosmos. The key idea here is pattern. 

Let's suppose I'm going to borrow a metaphor from Buckminster Fuller. Suppose we have a rope and one section of this rope is made of Manila hemp. The next section is cotton. The next section is silk. The next section is nylon. And so on. Now we tie a knot in this rope, just an ordinary, one over knot. And you find by putting your finger in the knot, you can move it all the way down the rope. Now, as this knot travels, it's first of all, made of Manila hemp. It's then made of cotton. It's then made of silk. It's then made of nylon and so on. But the knot keeps going on. And that's the integrity of pattern, the continuing pattern, which is what you are, because you might, you know, for several years, you might be a vegetarian and you might be a meat eater and so on. And you know, your constitution changes all the time. But people your friends still recognize you because you're still putting on the same show. It's the same pattern that is the recognizable individual. But we are trained in our language. The very structure of the language we talk deceives us into misunderstanding this, because when we see a pattern, we ask what's it made of? Like you see a table, is it made of wood or is it made of aluminum. But then when you inquire into what is wood and how does wood differ from aluminum? The only thing a scientist can tell you is the different patterns. That is to say, the different molecular structure of the two things and a molecular structure is not not a description of what something is made of. It is a description of what dance it is performing, what motions, what kind of a symphony this is. Because basically all phenomena of life are musical and gold differs from lead in the exactly the same way that a waltz differs from a mazurka. It's a different dance, and there isn't anything that's dancing. 

That is a deception we get into because we have two parts of speech in our grammar. We have nouns and verbs and verbs are supposed to describe the activities of nouns, and this is simply a convention of speech. You could have a language with only verbs in it. You don't need any nouns, or you could also have a language with the nouns only and no verbs, and it would perfectly adequately describe what's going on in the world. So if you were used to speaking with a part with a language that had one part of speech, you could say just as much as we can with two and be a lot clearer. Only at first. It would sound awkward, but you would soon get used to it. And then when you got used to it, it would be a matter of common sense that the patterning of the world is not some kind of stuff that's patterning. You don't have to seek for a substance underlying the whole thing, it's just patterning. And we are all that. 

To a person who really wakes up, you very soon realize that your existence is not something that is just hopeless little creature that's suddenly confronted with a great big external world that goes 'ga' at him, you know, and eats him up. Every tiniest little thing that comes into being, every minute little fruit fly or gnat or bacterium. I will go so far as to say is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends. This thing goes both ways. It's not only that every little organism which exists depends on its total environment. The reverse is also true that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms. So that you could say this universe consists of an arrangement of patterns in which every event is essential to the whole thing.

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, speaker, and self-styled 'philosophical entertainer', best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen, one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais.

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