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It

It You were probably brought up in a culture where the presiding image of It has for centuries been God the Father, whose pronoun is He, because It seems too impersonal and She would, of course, be inferior. Is this image still workable, as a functional myth about life and its meaning for all the diverse peoples and cultures of the planet? Frankly, the image of God the Father has become ridiculous – that is, unless you read St. Thomas Aquinas or Martin Buyer or Paul Tallish, and realize that you can be a devout Jew or Christian without having to believe, literally, in the Cosmic Male Parent. Even then, it is difficult not to feel the force of the image, because images sway emotions more deeply than conceptions. As a devout Christian you would be saying day after day the prayer “Our Father who art in heaven,” and eventually it gets you: you are relating emotionally to It as an idealized father – male, loving but stern, and a personal being quite other than yourself. Obviously, you must be other than God so long as you conceive of yourself as the separate ego, but when we realize that this form of identity is no more than a social institution, and one which has ceased to be a workable life-game, the sharp division between oneself and the ultimate reality is no longer relevant. Furthermore, the younger members of our society have for some time been in growing rebellion against paternal authority and the paternal state. For one reason, the home in industrial society is chiefly a dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that wife and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character who brings in money, and after working hours is supposed to forget about his job and have fun. Novels, magazines, television and popular cartoons therefore portray “Dad” as an incompetent clown. And the image has some truth in it because Dad has fallen for the hoax that work is simply something you do to make money, and with money you can get anything you want. It is no wonder that an increasing proportion of college students want no part in Dad’s world, and will do anything to avoid the rat race of the salesman, commuter, clerk and corporate executive. Professional men, too – architects, doctors, lawyers, ministers and professors – have offices away from home, and thus, because the demands of their families boil down more and more to money, are ever more tempted to regard even professional vocations as ways of making money. All this is further aggravated by the fact that parents no longer educate their own children. Thus the child does not grow up with an understanding of the father’s work. Instead, the child is sent to an understaffed school run mostly by women which, under the circumstances, can do no more than hand out mass produced education which prepares the child for everything and nothing. It has no relation whatever to the father’s vocation. Along with this devaluation of the father, we are becoming accustomed to a universe so mysterious and so impressive that even the best father-image will no longer do for an explanation of what makes it run. But the problem then is that it is impossible for us to conceive of an image higher than the human image. Few of us have ever met an angel, and probably would not recognize it if we saw one, and our images of an impersonal or suprapersonal God are hopelessly subhuman – jello, featureless light, homogenized space, or a whopping jolt of electricity. However, our image of a man is changing as becomes clearer and clearer that the human being is not simply and only his physical organism. My body is also my environment and this must be measured by light-years in the billions. Hitherto the poets and philosophers of science have used the vast expanse and duration of the universe as a pretext for reflections on the unimportance of man, forgetting that man, with “that enchanted loom, the brain” is precisely what transforms this immense electrical pulsation into light and color, shape and sound, large and small, hard and heavy, long and short. In knowing the world we humanize it, and if we discover it, we are astonished at its dimensions and complexity, we should be just as astonished that we have the brains to perceive it. Hitherto we have been taught, however, that we are not really responsible for our brains. We do not know (in terms of words or figures) how they are constructed, and thus it seems that the brain and the organism as a whole are an ingenious vehicle which has been “given” to us, or an uncanny maze in which we are temporarily trapped. In other words, we accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think – only we can’t put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details. Thus it will often happen that when you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will often say, “Now isn’t that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I’m beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and that was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis.” Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks which she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which our bodies can come to birth and live. Yet we can still awaken the sense that all this, too, is the self – a self however, which is far beyond the image of the ego, or of the human body as limited by the skin. We then behold the Self wherever we look, and its image is the universe in its light and in its darkness, in its bodies and its spaces. This is the new image of man, but it is still an image. For there remains – to use dualistic words – “behind,” “under,” “encompassing,” and “central” to it all the unthinkable It, polarizing itself in the visible contrasts of waves and troughs, solids and spaces. But the odd thing is that this It, however inconceivable, is no vapid abstraction: it is very simply and truly yourself. In the words of a Chinese Zen master, “Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh!” As James Broughton put it: “This is It and I am It and You are It and so is That and He is It and She is It and It is It and That is That.” - Alan Watts
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