If you were to peer into the mind of the fish, what would you see?

A FLOOR of many-coloured pebbles lies beneath clear water, with fish at first noticed only by their shadows, hanging motionless or flashing through the liquid, ever-changing net of sunlight. We can watch it for hours, taken clear out of time and our own urgent history, by a scene which has been going on just like this for perhaps two million years. At times, it catches us right below the heart with an ache of nostalgia and delight compounded, when it seems that this is, after all, the world of sane, enduring reality from which we are somehow in Exile.

Take a moment to read that again from the perspective of an onlooker of the fish, and then from the perspective of the fish itself. This is what it means to blur the lines between where you begin and end.

In the introduction of his book Nature, Man and Woman, Watts explores the ways we think we know the world. He explains that modern science may have us believe in a “tough guy” nature of reality, where fish are a brutish and fearful creature, on guard for predators and starving for the next meal. Though this is one way of “knowing” the world, it is…

as much a re-creation of the natural world in our own image as the most romantic and escapist of country ecstasies. Our view of nature is largely a matter of changing intellectual and literary fashions, for it has become a world strangely alien to us. This estrangement is intensified in a time and a culture wherein it is widely believed that we must depart from the principles which have hitherto governed the evolution of life.

If not an advocate for returning, participating, or meditating on our interconnected nature, what one might call the Fish and Pebbles Nature of Reality, Watts appeals to each of our desires to know something by virtue of being human. He concludes:

There is, indeed, a place for commentary, for interpretations of nature and predictions of its future course. But we need to know what we are talking about, which requires a primary background of contemplation and inward silence, of watching without questions and jumping to conclusions. May we go back, then, to the floor of pebbles beneath the water and the fish in the sunlight’s rippling net … and watch?