Do you do it — that is, are you really in charge of your intentions, emotions, and actions? Or, is the universe doing you — manifesting the grandeur and wonder of the cosmos through the astonishing phenomenon known as “you”?

“The moment you see that intervals, that space, is connected, you can understand at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of consciousness that occurs between two eternal darknesses, which is the popular common sense view that a westerner has of his own life. That you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth, there was no you, and in the eternal darkness, your death, there is likewise no you.

Just as the flame of a candle is never a constant, a flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas. Only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant, well it is a recognizably constant pattern. The spearshape (?)line of the flame and it’s coloration is a constant pattern, but in exactly the same way that we are all constant patterns and that’s all we are, the only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being. The way we behave, the way we dance, only there’s no we that dances, there’s just the dancing. Just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas. Just as a whirlpool in the river is a whirling of streaming water.”
Excerpt from – Do you do it or does it do you?
Allan Watts

approximately 6 x 8 inches oil on paper
available