“Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power to dream in one night 75 years’ worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great.
But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ And you would dig that, and come out of it and say ‘That was a close shave, now wasn’t it?’
Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream, and finally, you would dream where you are now.
You would dream of the life that you are actually living in today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not.
The first thing that he says to himself is ‘Man, get lost,’ because he gives himself away. The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, for instance as in basketball; you’re always getting rid of the ball. You say to the other fellow ‘Have a ball.’ See? And that keeps things moving. That’s the nature of life.
So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is.
And you’re all that, only you’re pretending you’re not.”
(Dream by Alan Watts )
Soundtrack from Berlin 