Billions of years ago, you were a Big Bang. Now, you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off and don’t feel that we’re still the Big Bang. But you are. It depends how you define yourself.
If this is the way things started, if there was a Big Bang in the beginning, you’re not some thing that is a result of the Big Bang, on the end of the process — you are still the process. You are the Big Bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. See, when I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as (Mr. So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so), I see the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
And so what I’d call a basic problem that we’ve got to go through is that: there are no such things as ‘things’, that is, separate and contained events. That is only a way of talking. And if you understand this, you’re going to have no problems.
Alan Watts
