The Universe Is Peopling
The Teaching
You are not something that the universe is happening to — you are something the universe is doing. Just as a whirlpool is not a separate thing from the river but a 'whirlpooling,' a happening in the river — so the self is not a thing separate from the cosmos but a 'selfing,' a process the cosmos is performing.
The universe peoples, just as the field grasses, the ocean waves. We are not strangers who arrive in this universe from some alien elsewhere. We grow here as naturally as hair on a head. And just as a hair is not alienated from the head — it is continuous with it, an expression of it — the self is continuous with, an expression of, the whole.
The drama of life is one in which the universe has forgotten that it is a single process and become many characters who genuinely believe themselves to be separate. Waking up spiritually is the cosmos recovering its memory — remembering what it is through the very beings it has become.
Commentary
Watts's whirlpool analogy, the self as a 'selfing,' not a separate thing, was later taken up by David Bohm as a model for quantum reality itself. The 'separate electron' is not a separate thing but a whirlpool in the holomovement. Two minds approaching from completely different directions, philosophy of mind and quantum physics, arrived at the same image. This is the perennial hypothesis at work: the same recognition appearing in different vocabularies.
'The universe peoples' is Tat Tvam Asi in English prose: Thou Art That. It is Sagan's 'we are a way for the cosmos to know itself' in philosophical language. It is Dogen's 'to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things', the same recognition that what we thought was a wall between self and world is actually a door.
Watts was the great translator of the perennial wisdom for the post-religious West, doing for the English-speaking world what Rumi did for the Persian-speaking world. His method was not scholarship but living demonstration: showing, through the quality of his perception and expression, what the traditions were pointing at.