"What are you going to do if you are God?"
Ridiculous idea?
But why would you feel that way?
Seriously. Why?
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." Marianne Williamson
“So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance & everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998.
Alan Watts 65 years ago argued “Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions but very few people know what they are." Below, Alan Watts: "The Constitution of Nature." Philosophy: East and West. Program 28. 1960. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/constitution-of-nature
"The high civilizations of the world have produced three different views of the constitution of nature, of the physical universe. I call them respectively: nature as a construct, nature as a drama, and nature as an organism.
The first view, nature as a construct, has until very recently been characteristic of the Western world. The view of nature as a drama has been largely characteristic of India. And finally, of nature as an organism, has been characteristic of the Far East. I’d like to compare these three views and point out certain of their advantages, disadvantages, and the ways in which they complement each other.
Our thinking about the world is strongly influenced by analogies that are almost hidden. They are so far back in the history of the thought of any given civilization or culture that they are taken as something more than analogies. They are taken almost as logical patterns. And they are basic to our grammar, to our common sense, and to our attitudes in ways that often go unsuspected.
Why don’t we start with the Western view of the world as a construct. The physical world has historically, in the West, been looked upon as a created or manufactured article; the world of a creator external to the world. And this view has continued in many ways even after the rise of deism in the eighteenth century and the general tendency of the scientist to dispense with the hypothesis of the creator. The idea still remains that the world is a construct, analogous to a machine, and indeed obeying laws or plans in the same way as a machine obeys a blueprint, even though the law-giver and the planner himself seems to have disappeared.
The basic metaphor, though, underlying this is not so much the machine as the work of clay: the pot or the modeled figure. For, as you know, it is said in the Book of Genesis that the lord god created Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And so our language, our poetry, is full of allusions to the fact that we are really, after all, clay.
And because of this figure, it is fundamental to our common sense that the world is formed matter — the form being the shape of the pot, the matter being the clay. And thus we think of life as being basically something done to a medium. The medium is stuff: a kind of formless and of itself inert and unintelligent goo, which requires an external agency to give it form and intelligence and life.
And naturally, because we have thought this way ((materialistically & dualistically)) for so long, it’s a terribly difficult idea to abandon—to get out of our heads the notion that, in the same way that tables are made of wood and houses of stone, so we tend to think that trees are made of wood and mountains of stone and people of flesh, and all of it eventually reducing itself to the primordial goo, the universal clay, the primal matter, the formless original water over which the spirit of god is said to have moved in the beginning of all time.
Now, beyond the idea of the world as a work of pottery lies the more sophisticated idea of the world as a mechanism in this Western view of the world as a construct. As soon as men began to understand mechanical principles, it became extraordinarily convenient to make analogies between various types of machinery and things to be found in the world. And it is really upon this analogy that the great achievements of Western technology have hitherto been based. And it’s really very difficult to think that we could have devised our technology, and that our practical sciences could have made such progress, without the idea of the analogy between the world and a constructed machine.
You see, one of the most fundamental things about a machine is that it is an assemblage of parts. And the successful measurement and description of nature depends upon the calculus, upon reducing it to parts. You know, the word “calculus” originally meant “pebbles,” and pebbles were one of the oldest methods of calculating: counting pebbles. In a funny kind of association of words, calculus is also calculating in the sense of having a calculating attitude; scheming. And scheming is associated with turning things to calculae, or stones. It is a sort of killing of the world, reducing it from the living to the dead, from the organism to the machine—but nevertheless it has had the most marvelous consequences so far as we’re concerned. And the cultures which thought of nature by analogy with drama and by analogy with an organism did not produce the technology that we in the West produced.
Let us contrast the other attitudes: the Indian attitude of the world as a drama. In Hindu thought, the world is not thought of as being made or constructed by god, but as being actually god himself playing a game. The idea of one single divine actor who is playing all the parts of all the creatures in the world, imagining himself to be them —assuming, as it were, myriads of masks, behind which there is simply one wearer of the mask. In "The Masks of God" Joseph Campbell contrasts the way in which the myth of the one who became two, the one that became many, has gone in two quite different directions. Beginning in ancient Sumeria (which constitutes, as it were, a sort of cultural watershed), it has flowed eastwards in one way and westwards in another.
To the East, the idea that the one (the godhead, in other words) split itself and dismembered itself into many parts quite voluntarily, and thus became the world as a play.
To the West, the theme of the one who became many is different, because (as he points out in the Book of Genesis) it is not the divine who becomes male and female, it is the creature. In the Upanishads—say the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad—the divine Self is described as saying in the beginning of time, “Let me become two,” and he splits into male and female, and thus generates the world. But in the Book of Genesis it is not the godhead who splits, it is man, the creature, who is split into Adam and then into Eve. But thus, in the Eastern world, we have the dramatic view—in India in particular. And although it’s interesting to note that in, say, the writings of the great philosopher Shankara and others, you very often encounter the analogy of the potter or of pots as representing the world. The roles are reversed. Clay is used as the symbol for the divine reality. Just as pots are all made of clay, or as jewels are all made of gold, so all things in the world are of one divine substance, which is of the nature of the godhead, or Brahman. It’s interesting, the different use of the simile.
And so, from the standpoint of the dramatic view of the universe, all the divisions & distinctions of the world are looked upon as being a kind of as-if. They are in play. They are not quite serious.
And this contrasts very sharply with what has been the characteristic ((dualistic)) Western view: that the distinctions in the world are the most important things about it, that they are deeply serious. The distinction of good and evil is an eternal distinction, as is the distinction between the creator and the creature. The world in this view is not a drama. It is played not by actors, but by what we call real individuals, even real persons—although, funnily enough, as I suppose you know, the word “person” is originally persona: the megaphone mask worn by actors in classical Greek drama.
Then, thirdly, there is the organic view characteristic of China. In this, there is no real thought of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world, but rather the world is thought of as being self-moving & self-creating. The word for nature in Chinese means “what is of itself so.” When, in the West, a child asks its mother, “Who made me?” and she replies, “Darling, god made you,” and the child asks, “But who made god?” she has to say, “Nobody made god.” And that is a great puzzle to the child who thinks of the world as a construct. And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that god makes himself; he exists of himself, because he is existence.
There is a certain sense in which the Chinese view is fundamentally almost anarchical—or, if you don’t like that word, you could call it democratic. A world which is self-governing—not even through a president, but self-governing in every way. ... which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we’re doing and how we move them (we don’t)."
NOW, 65 years later, we have an EXCEPTIONALLY FINE summary of how we have evolved beyond rule by barbaric force to all individuals (potentially) living in attunement with the cosmos:
A few excerpts from Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/
"The world was viewed as inert, mechanical, & mute. In such a cosmos, control becomes necessary—an external force imposed upon the otherwise unruly.
But if the universe is alive, conscious, & self-organizing — as mystics, complexity theorists, and post-materialist scientists increasingly affirm — then governance as enforcement becomes obsolete. A deeper model must emerge.
Order does not require laws. It requires resonance. This is evident in the natural world: ecosystems, galaxies, human consciousness itself. There is structure, but it is not forced. There is hierarchy, but it is dynamic, fractal, and non-coercive. These systems organize through patterns of self-similarity, feedback, & relational intelligence.
Therefore, any model of governance that fails to reflect the actual metaphysical conditions of the universe is not only oppressive—it is inefficient. It is maladaptive. A politics of force is the symptom of a civilization that does not yet trust its own source.
If we accept that the cosmos is psyche — structured consciousness — then the political must become the art of attunement, not the science of enforcement.
This is the paradox: Anarchy is not the breakdown of order, but the maturation of it.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called pirate utopias—from Madagascar’s Libertalia to the floating cities of the Caribbean—offered living examples of anarchic coherence. These were not lawless zones, but radically self-organised societies governed by codes of mutual agreement, shared spoils, elected leadership, and often racial and gender egalitarianism unthinkable in the empires they subverted.
Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey resurrected these spaces as what he called Temporary Autonomous Zones. The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is a fleeting pocket of liberation—a territory of freedom in time & space, where hierarchical control is momentarily suspended and replaced by spontaneous, decentralised order. The TAZ is not a static utopia—rather, it is ephemeral, ecstatic, emergent, and arises in the cracks of empire—in festivals, secret societies, pirate enclaves, desert rituals, rave cultures, and sacred gatherings***. It resists capture because it is non-cartographic: a zone of resonance, not regulation.
(((*** On a week-long silent meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, 20 years ago or so, early on somebody had found a solid gold wrist watch and pinned it on the announcement board. It stayed there untouched for the entire week.
While entirely silent, with even eye contact generally avoided at such retreats, a remarkable sense of intimacy spontaneously arises between all participants by the end of the retreat, despite the fact that most participants had never met.
To really test this phenomenon, at the end of one such retreat, I once intentionally went over to two specific people to chat & get to know them. I picked them because at first glance, at the beginning of the retreat, I had judged them as the least attractive. Now, chatting with them at the end of the retreat, I couldn't believe what fine human beings they were. We are capable of INFINITELY more intelligent, wise, loving & effective way of relating to ourselves, others & the cosmos!)))
In this sense, the TAZ is a model of anarchic advent—not a total revolution, but a sovereign moment. A glimpse of what becomes possible when we stop waiting for permission and begin to live from coherence now.
As Bey writes: “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere.”
In biology, we see similar nodes of coherence in swarms & flocks—patterns of grace and coordination emerging without a single commander.
This is not chaos. It is emergent order—a coherence that arises from within, not imposed from above. In complexity science, such systems are called self-organizing. Their intelligence is not centralized but embedded in every node. The mycelial network, the blockchain, the ant colony, the neural net: all are examples of distributed intelligence that outperforms hierarchy.
In an anarchic society, the leader is not the one with the most control, but the one with the most alignment—the one who is so attuned to the deeper frequency of the Real that others orient around them effortlessly, not out of obedience but recognition.
This is how the cosmos leads. Not with domination—but through radiance.
... when beings are unshackled from repressive systems, and attuned to the inner source, they act in service to divine order.
Christ was not a revolutionary against Rome—he was a vibrational insurgent, subverting the very metaphysics upon which empire rests. His leadership was anarchic in the truest sense: not the assumption of power, but the disruption of its necessity.
In this light, Jesus becomes the prototype of the Anarch—the figure who dissolves external rulership not by force, but by rendering it obsolete through the radical coherence of divine being.
To live anarchically is to live from kairos, not chronos—from the sacred time of right alignment, not the mechanical tick of the clock. It is to act, as Christ did, from impulse, not from protocol—from the soul’s timing, not the calendar’s. To live from kairos is to become temporally sovereign. One ceases to move through time as sequence, and begins to modulate time as frequency—a vibratory reality shaped by alignment, not duration. When time is understood in this way, individuation is no longer a psychological journey within time—it is a re-tuning to time’s deeper structure.
Individuated, anarchic beings are not merely free—they are temporally generative. Their presence carries the power to dislodge timelines, to open unexpected pathways, to bend probability. In this sense, they function like strange attractors in a chaotic system—subtle but catalytic forces around which reality reorganises itself. Not through force, but through the coherence of their inner architecture.
They do not push history forward. They change the pattern altogether.
In anarchy, freedom is not deferred—it is not something granted by the future, but something activated in the now through resonance with higher-order time. The anarchic subject becomes a temporal node—a being whose very presence rewires the causality of the world.
This shift in time is not abstract—it is the scaffolding of a new civilization, one rooted not in deadlines and duties, but in destiny and divine attunement."
Arabella Thaïs “Attunement as Governance: A New Political Possibility. The End of Hierarchy, the Dawn of Sovereignty.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/attunement-as-governance-a-new-political-possibility/ I HIGHLY RECOMMEND READING this ENTIRE SUPERB ESSAY.
"I am, by the sheer complexity of my structure, far more evolved than any system which I can imagine. ... you (too) are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos and you can’t figure you out." Alan Watts "The Process of Life" (https://www.thealpinereview.com/articles/alan-watts-the-process-of-life )
We have a GREAT DEAL to learn.
“In this choiceless, never ending flow of lifeThere is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.” Dorothy Hunt
"When you know you’re the ocean, you’re not afraid of the waves.” Tara Brach
"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present." Alan Watts
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| Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com |
