Grischa wrote:
Been reading Alan Watts, "What To Tell Children About God And The Universe"
https://www.facebook.com/notes/alan-watts-wisdom/what-to-tell-children-about-god-and-the-universe/239561399422139/
God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, He has no one but himself to play with. But He gets over this difficulty by pretending that He is not Himself. This is His way of hiding from Himself. He pretends that He is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way He has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when He wakes up they will disappear.
Now when God plays hide and pretends that He is you and I, He does it so well that it takes Him a long time to remember where and how He hid Himself. But that’s the whole fun of it-just what He wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find Himself out too quickly
So If I'm correct Watts doesn't have the classic christian concept of God but a pantheistic one, God externalized/particularized himself in nature (as a game?).
I don't know what to think of it. It is basically eastern or Indian philosophy "with a modern edge"
Maybe this is positive: that in this theory there is some necessity in the proces of creation, it is not just at random that life occurs. There's a reason why (against all odds) there's life, fine tuning, etc etc
Otherwise you get Hawking c.s. with the theory of the multiverse, but multiverse explanations seem no better.
Still I don't know, everything just a dream, it goes against common sense
I have not read that particular book of Alan's I am mostly familiar with his lectures. My very favorite lecture of his where I feel he most eloquently "says what needs to be said" is his lecture on G.K. Chesterton. The basic idea is that God is pretending not to be God. Indeed this is the fundamental teaching of the esoteric traditions of most of the world's religions. Alan Watts was a new age thinker, who strove to show the underlying fabric that is mutual to all ideologies. God, Brahman, the Eternal Tao all are words that circumscribe the same ineffable something. It is extremely difficult to talk about the nature of God. I actually would recommend reading about Brahman from Hinduism. Brahman is not exactly like "God"... but in my own ontology they are describing the same "Substance." I actually prefer the Hindu conception of Brahman over the conception of a "Monarchical God" of the Abrahamic tradition. Alan Watts was personally very heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, which blends the Taoism with Buddhism (itself entirely based in Hindu philosophy and ontology.)
_________________
“In the same way that you see a flower in a field, it’s really the whole field that is flowering, because the flower couldn’t exist in that particular place without the special surroundings of the field; you only find flowers in surroundings that will support them. So in the same way, you only find human beings on a planet of this kind, with an atmosphere of this kind, with a temperature of this kind- supplied by a convenient neighboring star. And so, as the flower is a flowering of the field, I feel myself as a personing- a manning- a peopling of the whole universe. –In other words, I, like everything else in the universe, seem to be a center… a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself- comes alive… an aperture through which the whole universe is conscious of itself. In other words, I go with it as a center to a circumference.”~ Alan Watts
12 May 2016, 9:51 pm
