If the human organism is fascinating, the environment which accompanies it is equally so – and not merely as a collection of particular things and events. Chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy, are special fascinations with the details of our environment, but metaphysics is fascination with the whole story.
I find it almost impossible to imagine a sensitive human being bereft of metaphysical wonder, a person who does not have that marvelous urge to ask a question that cannot quite be formulated. But the question almost always implies a search for something basic to everything, for an underlying unity which our ordinary thinking and feeling do not grasp. Thought and sensation are analytical and selective, and thus present the world as no more than a multiplicity of things and events. Man has, however, a "metaphysical instinct" which apparent multiplicity does not satisfy.
Man is intuitively certain that the entire multitude of things and events is "on" or "in". Something as reflections are on a mirror, sounds on a diaphragm, lights and colors in a diamond, or the words and music of a song in a singer. This is, perhaps, because man himself is a unified organism, and that if things and events are "on" anything at all, they are on his nervous system. Yet there is obviously more than one nervous system, and what are all nervous systems on? – each other?
This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite – names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectability with the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the Universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense – that the idea of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensory concrete experience – the "intuitive" experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations is found in almost all cultures at all times.
This experience is the transformed sense of Self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in "Naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about Mind, Soul, Spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words: All things are known by their differences from and likenesses to each other. All knowledge is a recognition of the mutual relations between sense-experiences and/or things and events. Backed up into this position, the anti-metaphysician can be carried, albeit with screams of protest, to an even deeper metaphysical level.
To go anywhere in philosophy, other than back and forth, round and round, one must have a keen sense of correlative vision. This is a technical term for a thorough understanding of the Game of Black and White, whereby one sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies – correlative in the sense that they go with each other and cannot exist apart.
With a slight shifting of viewpoint, nothing is more obvious than the interdependence of opposites. It is this that religions and non-religions – all established in the name of brotherhood and universal love – are invariably divisive and quarrelsome. It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity, whoever is not self-ish has no Self.
Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet; in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore, larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps.
Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question "Who am I"? – the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else.
This understanding is at first paralyzing. You are in a trap – in the worst of all double-binds – seeing that any direction you may take will imply, and so evoke, its opposite. Decide to be a Christ, and there will be a Judas to betray you and a mob to crucify you. Decide to be a devil and men will unite against you in the closest brotherly love. Your first reaction may simply be "to hell with it!"
But there is another possibility. Instead of checking out, let us ask what the trap means. What is implied in finding yourself paralyzed, unable to escape from a game in which all the rules are double-bonds and all moves self-defeating.
Surely this is a deep and intense experience of the same double-bind that was placed upon you in infancy, when the community told you that you must be free, responsible, and loving, and when you were helplessly defined as an independent agent. This sense of paralysis is, therefore, the dawning realization that this is nonsense and that your independent ego is fiction. It simply isn't there, either to do anything or to be pushed around by external forces, to change things or to submit to change. The sense of "I", which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that universe.
In the preceding chapter we saw that this unity of organism and environment is a physical fact. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life; experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences this from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety.
Far from being the free center of personality, ego is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with – perhaps – a touch of heredity thrown in. This may give you the temporary feeling of being a zombie or a puppet dancing irresponsibly on strings that lead away to unknown forces. Yet in this moment when one seems about to become a really total zombie, the whole thing blows up. For there is not fate unless there is someone to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily.
This is when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievingly harmonious. Every This goes with every That. Without others there is no Self, and without somewhere else there is no here, such that – in this sense – Self is other and here is there.
When this new sensation of Self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own and you wonder whether you will lose it – as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold onto it.
In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside; they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside.
Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities – to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present; the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.
You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use – which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound. Yet what would we think of a society which had no place for music, which did not allow for dancing, as for any activity not directly involved with the practical problem of survival?
Excerpt from The Book, edited for brevity and clarity.