Spheres of Crystal - Akira the Don, Alan Watts

To get into the unitive world underneath, underlying, and supporting the

everyday practical world

There have to be certain alterations in one’s common sense

There are certain ideas and beyond these ideas, certain feelings that are

difficult to get across not because they’re intellectually complicated not at

all because of that

But because they’re unfamiliar

They’re strange

We haven’t been brought up to accommodate them

In exactly the same way that, in past times, people knew that the planets were

supported in the sky because they were embedded in spheres of crystal

And if they weren’t embedded in spheres of crystal and, of course,

you could see them, because you could see through them they would fall down on

the Earth

And now, when astronomers finally suggested that there were no crystal spheres

People felt unbelievably insecure.

See?

They had a terrible time assimilating this idea

Now, do you see what it involves to assimilate a really new idea?

You have to do quite a flip

For example, there are some people whose number systems only account four

quantities: one, two, three, many

So they don’t have any concept of four corners to a table — see,

a table has many corners

And a pile of pebbles is, in that sense, equivalent in many-ness to the four

corners of the table

Now, they have difficulty, you see, in beginning to assimilate the idea of

counting through, and numbering all those corners or all those pebbles

But we’ve done that

And so to us that is perfectly simple

But imagine the kind of mentality, the kind of person, to whom that is not

simple at all

Now, in exactly the same way, there is, here what I’m trying to explain,

a new idea that most people don’t assimilate, and that is the idea of the

total interdependence of everything in the world