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Alan Watts
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The Myth of the Ceramic Construct
this ceramic model of the universe, originated in cultures where the form of government was monarchical, and where, therefore, the maker of the universe was conceived also at the same time in the image of the king of the universe. '
King of kings, lords of lords, the only ruler of princes, who thus from thy throne behold all dwellers upon Earth.' I'm quoting the Book of Common Prayer.
And so, all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way feel related to basic reality as a subject to a king.
And so they are on very, very humble terms in relation to whatever it is that works all this thing.
I find it odd, in the United States, that people who are citizens of a republic have a monarchical theory of the universe.
That you can talk about the president of the United States as LBJ, or Ike, or Harry, but you can't talk about the lord of the universe in such familiar terms.
Because we are carrying over from very ancient near-Eastern cultures, the notion that the lord of the universe must be respected in a certain way.
People kneel, people bow, people prostrate themselves, and you know what the reason for all that is: that nobody is more frightened of anybody else than a tyrant.
He sits with his back to the wall, and his guards on either side of him, and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can't use weapons that way.
When you come into his presence, you don't stand up and face him, because you might attack, and he has reason to fear that you might because he's ruling you all.
And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch.
Because he's the one who succeeded in crime.
The other people are pushed aside because they--the criminals, the people we lock up in jail--are simply the people who didn't make it.
So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him.
And so when you design a church, what does it look like?
Catholic church, with the altar where it used to be--it's changing now, because the Catholic religion is changing.
But the Catholic church has the altar with its back to the wall at the east end of the church.
And the altar is the throne and the priest is the chief vizier of the court, and he is making obeisance to the throne, but there is the throne of God, the altar.
And all the people are facing it, and kneeling down.
And a great Catholic cathedral is called a basilica, from the Greek 'basilikos,' which means 'king.' So a basilica is the house of a king, and the ritual of the Catholic church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium.
A Protestant church is a little different, but basically the same.
The furniture of a Protestant church is based on a judicial courthouse.
The pulpit, the judge in an American court wears a black robe, he wears exactly the same dress as a Protestant minister.
And everybody sits in these boxes, there's the jury box, there's a box for the judge, there's a box for this, there's a box for that, and those are the pews in an ordinary colonial-type Protestant church.
So both these kinds of churches which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe decorate themselves, are architecturally constructed in accordance with political images of the universe.
One is the king, and the other is the judge.
Your honor.
There's sense in this.
When in court, you have to refer to the judge as 'your honor.' It stops the people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude.
There's a certain sense to that.
But when you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life, it has limitations.
For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit.
This idea doesn't work anymore.
Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question '
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What is matter?' They began that way.
They wanted to know, what is the fundamental substance of the world?
And the more they asked that question, the more they realized the couldn't answer it, because if you're going to say what matter is, you've got to describe it in terms of behavior, that is to say in terms of form, in terms of pattern.
You tell what it does, you describe the smallest shapes of it which you can see.
Do you see what happens?
You look, say, at a piece of stone, and you want to say, '
Well, what is this piece of stone made of?' You take your microscope and you look at it, and instead of just this block of stuff, you see ever so many tinier shapes.
Little crystals.
So you say, '
Fine, so far so good.
Now what are these crystals made of?' And you take a more powerful instrument, and you find that they're made of molecules, and then you take a still more powerful instrument to find out what the molecules are made of, and you begin to describe atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles.
But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff.
Because there isn't any.
What happens is this: '
Stuff' is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus.
Fuzzy.
Stuff--the idea of stuff is that it is undifferentiated, like some kind of goo.
And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy.
When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern.
But when you want to change the level of magnification, and go in closer and closer and closer, you get fuzzy again before you get clear.
So every time you get fuzzy, you go through thinking there's some kind of stuff there.
But when you get clear, you see a shape.
So all that we can talk about is patterns.
We never, never can talk about the 'stuff' of which these patterns are supposed to be made, because you don't really have to suppose that there is any.
It's enough to talk about the world in terms of patterns.
It describes anything that can be described, and you don't really have to suppose that there is some stuff that constitutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the essence of pots.
And so for this reason, you don't really have to suppose that the world is some kind of helpless, passive, unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to inform and make into intelligent shapes.
So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff--potted clay--but pattern.
A self-moving, self-designing pattern.
A dance.
And our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with this.
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