“We need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body… is not just what’s inside the skin, but our whole total external environment… because if we don’t experience ourselves that way, we mistreat our environment, we treat it as an enemy… We exploit the world we live in. We don’t treat it with love and gentleness and respect… We need a new kind of consciousness, because you see underneath the superficial self… there is another self, more really us, than I, and if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is. That you are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way… and that, furthermore, this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies and that vast thing that you see far off, far off, far off with telescopes and you look and look and look, one day you’re going to wake up and say, “why… that’s me!””
Alan Watts
Chorlton Unitarians 