“To a person who really wakes up, you seen realize that your existence is not something that’s just the hopeless little creature in a world that goes, “Gahhhr!” at him and eats him up. Every tiniest little thing that comes into being. Every minute little fruit fly or gnat or bacterium, I’ll go so far as to say, is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends.
“The thing goes both ways. It’s not only that every little organism which exists depends on its total environment; the reverse is also true, that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms. So that you could say, this universe consists of an arrangement of patter in which every event is essential to the whole thing. Now, we screen that idea out of our consciousness in exactly the same way that we screen out the perception of space as an important reality. Just as we pay attention to the figure and ignore the background, so we see one way of looking at things, namely that the organism is very frail against the environment. That the environment lasts a long time, but the environment only lasts a short time.
“Well what do you mean the environment lasts a long time? What does the environment consist of? Just a lot of little things. And yet there is the environment just the same way as there is a face in the newspaper behind all the little dots. When you get far enough away, you see the face. When you get far enough away from all the little organisms, you see the environment. Just another scale of magnification. But actually the whole thing is arranged in a polar system in which the tiny depends on the enormous and the enormous depends on the tiny.”
Alan Watts
