Alan Watts
What Fills The Gap
You sitting in this room, you think you're really here.
Well, you've persuaded yourself that way.
You've acted it so damn well that you know this is the real world.
But you're playing it.
We haven't realized that life and death, black and white,
good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center.
They imply each other.
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Books burn and stories will fade
The strength in our arms can't find against change
the wind's tide keeps rumbling on.
Look hard at the thunderous clouds there's a freedom inside whispering out.
Calling you, calling you home
Saying, ‘Oh time will pass and reduce to ash your bones.'
In a lightning flash what fills the gap? Of when it hits and when you know?
What exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the plenum the fullness of total joy.
Facts hold your feet to the ground, mind wanders off chasing the sound of the storm cloud that whispered of home.
From in between the truth and what we see the thunder calls out what we choose to perceive
Echoing the size of our world.
Oh time will pass and reduce to ash our bones.
In a lightning flash, what fills the gap?
Of what is real and what we know?
There's no point in just sustaining bliss.'
Let's suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would 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 ‘now let's have a surprise, let's have a dream which isn't under control.'
Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now.