Food For Thought

"My friend Alan Watts in a lecture once proposed...'The truth of the matter is that you didn't come into this world at all. You came out of it, in the same way that a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby from a womb...Just as Jesus said that one doesn't gather figs from thistles or grapes from thorns, so also you don't gather people from a world that isn't peopling. Our world is peopling, just as the apple tree apples, just as the vine grapes.' We are a product of this earth, that is to say; and, as Dr. Watts observed in that same talk, if we are intelligent beings, it must be that we are the fruits of an intelligent earth, symptomatic of an intelligent system; for 'one doesn't gather grapes from thorns.'

"We may think of ourselves, then, as the functioning ears and eyes and mind of this earth, exactly as our own ears and eyes and mind are of our bodies. Our bodies are one with this earth, this wonderful 'oasis in the desert of infinite space'; and the mathematics of that infinite space, which are the same as of Newton's mind-our mind, the earth's mind, the mind of the universe-come to flower and fruit in this beautiful oasis through ourselves."

-Joseph Campbell, Myths To Live By