The Nature of Consciousness:

Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ And you would dig that, and come out of it and say ‘That was a close shave, now wasn’t it?’ Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today.

Watts also brings to life the cliched observation that we are not separate from the universe. We are a part of it. We did not come into the world when we were born, we are agglomerations of atoms that existed for billions of years before we were born and will continue to exist for billions more after we die. The distinction between “self” and “other” is an illusion.

just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it’s all one.

Our individuality was implicit in the universe from the time it began.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

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So don’t differentiate yourself and stand off and say ‘I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff.’ It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks. What are you going to stand on?

Watts also has a theory of consciousness I quite like: Our bodies do almost everything without consciousness. Consciousness is not involved in circulating blood, digesting food, or breathing (most of the time). Even when we consciously decide to walk or move our hand, consciousness is not involved in the micro-movements. I’m sitting here typing just now, but I’m not consciously making my fingers move. I just look at the screen, and I perceive the words appearing on the screen directly from my brain.

Consciousness evolved to handle the small fraction of tasks that our bodies can’t do without consciousness. We think our consciousness is our entire selves — some philosophers say you are not your body — but that’s wrong. Consciousness is only part of our selves.