The Book_ On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts [38]
Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time, or any other imaginable feature.
All these phenomena are interactions, or transactions, of vibrations with a certain arrangement of neurons. Thus vibrations of light and heat from the sun do not actually become light or heat until they interact with a living organism, just as no light-beams are visible in space unless reflected by particles of atmosphere or dust. In other words, it "takes two" to make anything happen.
As we saw, a single ball in space has no motion, whereas two balls give the possibility of linear motion, three balls motion in a plane, and four balls motion in three dimensions.
The same is true for the activation of an electric current. No current will "flow" through a wire until the positive pole is connected with the negative, or, to put it very simply, no current will start unless it has a point of arrival, and a living organism is a "point of arrival" apart from which there can never be the "currents" or phenomena of light, heat, weight, hardness, and so forth. One might almost say that the magic of the brain is to evoke these marvels from the universe, as a harpist evokes melody from the silent strings.
A still more cogent example of existence as relationship is the production of a rainbow.(1) For a rainbow appears only when there is a certain triangular relationship between three components: the sun, moisture in the atmosphere, and an observer. If all three are present, and if the angular relationship between them is correct; then, and then only, will there be the phenomenon "rainbow." Diaphanous as it may be, a rainbow is no subjective hallucination. It can be verified by any number of observers, though each will see it in a slightly different position. As a boy, I once chased the end of a rainbow on my bicycle and was amazed to find that it always receded. It was like trying to catch the reflection of the moon on water. I did not then understand that no rainbow would appear unless the sun, and I, and the invisible center of the bow were on the same straight line, so that I changed the apparent position of the bow as I moved.
The point is, then, that an observer in the proper position is as necessary for the manifestation of a rainbow as the other two components, the sun and the moisture. Of course, one could say that if the sun and a body of moisture were in the right relationship, say, over the ocean, any observer on a ship that sailed into line with them would see a rainbow. But one could also say that if an observer and the sun were correctly aligned there would be a rainbow if there were moisture in the air!
Somehow the first set of conditions seems to preserve the reality of the rainbow apart from an observer. But the second set, by eliminating a good, solid "external reality," seems to make it an indisputable fact that, under such conditions, there is no rainbow. The reason is only that it supports our current mythology to assert that things exist on their own, whether there is an observer or not. It supports the fantasy that man is not really involved in the world, that he makes no real difference to it, and that he can observe reality independently without changing it. For the myth of this solid and sensible physical world which is "there,"
whether we see it or not, goes hand-in-hand with the myth that every observer is a separate ego, "confronted" with a reality quite other than himself.
Perhaps we can accept this reasoning without too much struggle when it concerns things like rainbows and reflections, whose reality status was never too high. But what if it dawns on us that our perception of rocks, mountains, and stars is a situation of just the same kind? There is nothing in the least unreasonable about this. We