"...It's alive; after all it has done something intelligent. We speak of coming into this world, and we look out upon a world that is foreign to us. This sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility between ourselves and the so-called external world. Everything that we know about living organisms from the stand point of the sciences shows us that we grow out of this world. That we, each one of us are what you might call symptoms of the state of universe as a whole. And so each one of us is a waiting of the whole cosmos, the entire world, all there is. And with each one of us it's waving and saying, yewhoo, here I am; only it does it different each time. Very few people today really believe in God. They say they do, but they really hope there is a God. They don't really have faith in God. They wish that there was one, and feel that they ought to believe that there is. But the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman is no longer plausible. So instead we got another myth, the myth of the purely mechanical universe. It has become fashionable to believe that the universe is dying. Stupid... That intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis. And that outside that the thing is simply a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces. And by some weird freak of evolution our intelligence is an unfortunate accident.

If you would think that the idea of the universe has been the creation of a benevolent old gentleman, you can have that one hand. And if that becomes uncomfortable, you can exchange for it's opposite, the idea that the ultimate reality doesn't have any intelligence at all. Now these ideas don't make any sense. You cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of unintelligent universe. You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. We grow out of this world in exactly the same way that an apple grows on the apple tree. But you see, we curiously twist it, we say well first of all in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock. And then intelligence happened to arise in it, like a sort fungus or slime on top of the whole thing. Yeah, but we are thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks. Where there are rocks, watch out; watch out, because the rocks are going eventually to come alive. And they are gonna have people crawling over them. It's only a matter of time. Rocks are not dead.   They're really conscious, but a very primitive form of consciousness. Our consciousness is much more subtle than that. When you heat a bell, and it rings, it has a very simple reaction. But both are equally conscious, it's just in different degrees..." Alan Watts, Who Am I? #2, (1965).