I love the little synchronicities that happen in my life. It reassures me that, in spite of my lonely laziness these days, I am still connected to what’s going on and aligned with where I should be going. At open mic night this month, Bill Baldwin asked to be reminded about what the prompt is for our next meeting, August 6, and I mentioned it’s "under my skin". And we both started singing the Cole Porter song, which I first heard as performed by the Four Seasons group, "I’ve Got You Under My Skin". Some moments later it was Rick Merritt’s turn to play a song for the group, and he played and sang "I’ve Got You Under My Skin". When I later told him about the prompt I had chosen for our meeting, he was impressed with the connections we have with each other and the universe.
And synchronicity is relevant to the topic too, because it shows how we are connected to the world. Alan Watts is my guide to some of the right words about this topic, because his main point was how we don’t realize that we are connected and interdependent, and how we ourselves are really not limited to what’s inside our skin. What I notice about life is how often we get hold of ourselves and exert individual control in order to do our tasks, whether assigned to us by ourselves or by someone else. We think we have to focus upon ourselves alone and on the tasks at hand in order to accomplish them. And this usually involves thinking and planning what we’re going to do, and so we are locked not only inside our skin, but inside our heads.
Not only that, but society has imposed upon us certain views of the world that say it is outside of us and made of separate objects. Alan Watts points out that the story we were told from The Bible is that the world is nothing but unintelligent stuff which God fashioned according to his plans and breathed life into us. Then later thinkers who influenced us decided that God the architect was irrelevant to this picture of how the world works, and they left us with just the stupid stuff, and blind energy, together with the same old plans that they just renamed "the laws of Nature", and somehow by chance we automatically arrived out of this. So the new story in essence was that 1000 monkeys with typewriters eventually typed the Encyclopedia Britannica after a million years. But we also know that they will relapse into nonsense the moment we let them, so we’ve got to impose our will on the world as something hostile and alien to us in order to make things the way we want.
(these two worldviews Watts called the ceramic model and the fully-automatic model)
Thus we have been hypnotized by social convention to feel that we don’t belong in the world, and that we are just something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium. We are just flukes. Further what I notice is that we even see ourselves as an outside object. When a spiritual teacher says "look within", we think of taking up a microscope and using our eyes to study some part of our bodies or look inside at our various organs. So seeking to cure myself and others of this limited view, I look under my skin at my own awareness. I notice that I am in fact here. I am conscious. And where is this consciousness? Is it only in my head? Definitely not. I experience myself as located throughout my body, as all in one place. Everyone knows this, really. And I notice that this pure consciousness is not made of any stuff, and is in all my experience.
And I can see that it is extremely unscientific to think of myself as an isolated object locked into my skin, since I need to breathe in and out and eat and drink and excrete and talk and do things in the world, and all my language and memories have come into my mind from living in society. What’s more I notice that any awareness I have of others is inside my mind, and that I am also where they are, and that I’ve got them under my skin. And in my more illuminated moments I at least get the vague idea that I am the original force of the whole universe, not just the person society has defined me as; not my name and occupation or the story of my so-called life; that I am connected to all, and AM all, as well as being me. We all need to get out a little more-- outside of our skins, and deeper within and under them too, and reconnect beyond all the chatter in our heads or on the TV tube or on our phones or amidst our urgent tasks.
The fundamental lecture (Alan Watts)