08/31/2023
Remind ourselves
of Truth, Love, Beauty
of our best
in a way that is Truthful
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August, we have two quotes from “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown” and a video on “Wu-Wei.”
“They found security in letting go rather than in holding on and, in so doing, developed an attitude toward life that might be called psychophysical judo. Nearly twenty-five centuries ago, the Chinese sages Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu had called it wu-wei, which is perhaps best translated as “action without forcing.” It is sailing in the stream of the Tao, or course of nature, and navigating the currents of li (organic pattern)—a word that originally signified the natural markings in jade or the grain in wood. As this attitude spread and prevailed in the wake of Vibration Training, people became more and more indulgent about eccentricity in life-style, tolerant of racial and religious differences, and adventurous in exploring unusual ways of loving.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
“The way of Wisdom lies, therefore, in recognizing things which happen to you as your own karma—not as punishments for misdeeds or rewards for virtue (for there really is no “bad” or “good” karma), but as your own doing. For in this way you come to see that the real “you” includes both the controlled and the uncontrolled aspects of your experience.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts – Wu Wei (Do Nothing) | Powerful lecture”
https://youtu.be/605s2QuYGX0?si=yqHkNyeddu2X-BgI
08/30/2023
Choicelessly aware of life
within us and without,
no fixed mental patterns,
not influenced by
or implicated by
our mental conditioning,
— The meditative state.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August, we have two quotes and a short video from “The Watercourse Way.”
“Chao-Chou asked, “What is the Tao?” The master [Nan-ch’üan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.” “How can one return into accord with it?” “By intending to accord you immediately deviate.” “But without intention, how can one know the Tao?” “The Tao,” said the master, “belongs neither to knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”
― Alan W. Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way
“As Chuang-tzu says, “It may be attained but not seen,” or, in other words, felt but not conceived, intuited but not categorized, divined but not explained. In a similar way, air and water cannot be cut or clutched, and their flow ceases when they are enclosed. There is no way of putting a stream in a bucket or the wind in a bag.” ― Alan W. Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way
Today’s Video: “The Watercourse Way (Alan Watts)”
https://youtu.be/YNBB6uYsDY8?si=zEHjTqyX3D2Ckltr
08/29/2023
When you park you car,
it does not follow you.
Why not so with emotional burdens?
Why carry them 24/7?
Park them
and go about life.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August, in today’s quote and the accompanying video, Watts urges us to Become What We Are…
“ALMOST EVERY FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF LIFE can be expressed in two opposite ways. There are those who say that to attain the highest wisdom we must be still and calm, immovable in the midst of turmoil. And there are those who say that we must move on as life moves, never stopping for a moment either in fear of what is to come or to turn a regretful glance at what has gone. The former are as those who listen to music, letting the flow of notes pass through their minds without trying either to arrest them or to speed them on. Like Chuang-tzu’s perfect man, they employ their minds as a mirror: it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep. The latter are as those who dance to music, keeping pace with its movement and letting their limbs flow with it as unceasingly and as unhesitatingly as clouds respond to the breath of wind. The one seems to reflect events as they pass, and the other to move forward with them. Both points of view, however, are true, for to attain that highest wisdom we must at once walk on and remain still. Consider life as a revolving wheel set upright with man walking on its tire. As he walks, the wheel is revolving toward him beneath his feet, and if he is not to be carried backward by it and flung to the ground he must walk at the same speed as the wheel turns. If he exceeds that speed, he will topple forward and slip off the wheel onto his face. For at every moment we stand, as it were, on the top of a wheel; immediately we try to cling to that moment, to that particular point of the wheel, it is no longer at the top and we are off our balance. Thus by not trying to seize the moment, we keep it, for the second we fail to walk on we cease to remain still. Yet within this there is a still deeper truth. From the standpoint of eternity we never can and never do leave the top of the wheel, for if a circle is set in infinite space it has neither top nor bottom. Wherever you stand is the top, and it revolves only because you are pushing it round with your own feet.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are
Today’s Video: Alan Watts- Become What You Are, Be More Creative
https://youtu.be/NF9-Z8k84dQ?si=adaDterVRYAvTZqv
08/28/2023
Life is a book,
one can read it,
or skim through it.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August, in today’s quote and the accompanying video, Watts discusses decision and how we make them.
“We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide–an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. We are free to decide because decision “happens.” We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it. In fact, it is neither voluntary nor involuntary. To “get the feel” of this relativity is to find another extraordinary transformation of our experience as a whole, which may be described in either of two ways. I feel that I am deciding everything that happens, or, I feel that everything, including my decisions, is just happening spontaneously. For a decision–the freest of my actions-just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me. Such a way of seeing things is vividly described by a modern Zen master, the late Sokei-an Sasaki: One day I wiped out all the notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude. I felt a little queer–as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were touching some power unknown to me … and Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming towards me, but all were the same man. All were myself! I had never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created; I was the cosmos; no individual Mr. Sasaki existed.7 It would seem, then, that to get rid of the subjective distinction between “me” and “my experience”–through seeing that my idea of myself is not myself–is to discover the actual relationship between myself and the “outside” world. The individual, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, are simply the abstract limits or terms of a concrete reality which is “between” them, as the concrete coin is “between” the abstract, Euclidean surfaces of its two sides. Similarly, the reality of all “inseparable opposites”–life and death, good and evil, pleasure and pain, gain and loss–is that “between” for which we have no words.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts Making Decisions”
https://youtu.be/Idccm2zmbVc?si=F4HxNw9HrTiQSXZJ
08/26/2023
Consciousness
is the hearth
from which sparks fly
and then die out.
Duality identifies with the sparks
and not with the hearth.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August, in today’s quote and video, Watts critiques the Future and those who live in it.
“The decay of belief has come about through the honest doubt, the careful and fearless thinking of highly intelligent men of science and philosophy. Moved by a zeal and reverence for facts, they have tried to see, understand, and face life as it is without wishful thinking. Yet for all that they have done to improve the conditions of life, their picture of the universe seems to leave the individual without ultimate hope. The price of their miracles in this world has been the disappearance of the world-to-come, and one is inclined to ask the old question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry. For the heart has learned to feel that we live for the future. Science may, slowly and uncertainly, give us a better future—for a few years. And then, for each of us, it will end. It will all end. However long postponed, everything composed must decompose.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Enjoy your weekend, everyone. And here is more on the Future from Alan Watts…
Today’s Video: “Putting Hope In The Future Is A Good Way To Suffer | Alan Watts”
https://youtu.be/zq7b9GwH65U?si=MFPMy_PyIvaIcDdG
08/25/2023
Through global vision,
all intentions subside,
leaving only silent awareness,
total presence,
freeing one
from the kaleidoscope of the ego
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August, here Watts compares the world outside and inside your skin…
“The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities—to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead, of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In the accompanying short video, Watts discusses life free of a skin-encapsulated ego.
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts ~ The Skin Encapsulated Ego”
https://youtu.be/vked7sJrRN0?si=LjJw7zLT6NpiSMEn
08/24/2023
Most action are reactions
from fear, anxiety, desire,
a kaleidoscope
rearranged and sustained
by one’s ego and memory.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Rather than posting an Alan Watts quote, today we will present an excerpt from Watts’ classic seminar on Myth and Religion. This is part one of that lecture series, entitled f”Not What Should Be, But What Is.”
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts Podcast – (Tao of Philosophy) – Not What Should Be, But What Is”
https://youtu.be/VDAjeQwDdAw?si=a4tMdJ2PSNJomSlg
08/23/2023
Fear and anxiety
pawns of memory and the known.
Emotional involvement blinds,
a reaction of a psyche
separated from its Source.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Watts focuses on the vicious circle of trying to produce “happiness.”
“Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire. For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
In today’s accompanying video, Watts discusses confusing money with happiness.
Today’s Video: “How To Waste Your Life & Never Be Happy – Alan Watts’ Antidote to Guilt”
https://youtu.be/O-chgIYYTtQ
08/22/2023
In the realm of the known
all is qualified, classified,
filed away in memory.
Beyond the known,
lies never-ending discovery.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Watts focuses on scriptures and religion…
“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness—an act of trust in the unknown. An ardent Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In today’s accompanying video, Watts continues his talk on scriptures and religion.
Today’s Video: Alan Watts Opens Up About Religion (thought provoking video)
https://youtu.be/0wi7Wtocj9M
08/21/2023
When desire arises
before fixation on an object
become conscious of it.
Without the ‘I’ being involved
the power of the desire
dies away into
the all-containing I-Observer
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Watts focuses on detachment in his quote and how to break free of emotional attachment in the video.
“To be detached from the world, (in the sense that Buddhist and Taoists and Hindus often talk about detachment), does not mean to be non-participative. By that I don’t mean that you just go through doing everything mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere. I mean a complete participation, but still detached.
And the difference between the two attitudes is this..
On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid that you won’t make it, that you grab it too hard..that you just have to have that thing, and if you do that, you destroy it completely.. and therefore after every attempt to get it, you feel disappointed, you feel empty, you feel something was lost..and so you want it again, you have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating..because you never really got that. And it is this that’s the hang up, this is what is meant by attachment to this world…
But on the other hand, pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced, when one is grasping it..
I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit. She was so delighted with the bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it, that taking it home in the car, she squeezed it to death with love. And lots of parents do that to their children. And lots of spouses do it to each other. They hold on too hard, and so take the life out of this transient, beautifully fragile thing that life is.
To have it, to have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go of it.”
― Alan Watts
Today’s Video: Alan Watts – How To Break Free From Emotional Attachment
https://youtu.be/Sv43jZqLXeM
08/19/2023
in truly creative moments
no ‘I’ interference.
thing occur of and by themselves.
such action is total action.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote is an excerpt from Watts’ book, “The Wisdom of Insecurity.” The accompanying video Watts sumarises the entire book.
“To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet. We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being “exclusive” and “special,” seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the “nice” people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and live in the best way; but this, too, is a contradiction.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Today’s Video: “The Illusion of Psychological Security – Alan Watts 📖 The Wisdom of Insecurity Summary”
https://youtu.be/X7vn1OtxwDU
08/18/2023
Live Simply,
or not at all.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote and accompanying video Watts discusses the mask of love and in his video he humorously depicts falling in love.
“Behind the mask of love I find my innate selfishness. What a predicament I am in if someone asks, “Do you really love me?” I can’t say yes without saying no, for the only answer that will really satisfy is, “Yes, I love you so much I could eat you! My love for you is identical with my love for myself. I love you with the purest selfishness.” No one wants to be loved out of a sense of duty. So I will be very frank. “Yes, I am pure, selfish desire and I love because you make me feel wonderful—at any rate for the time being.” But then I begin to wonder whether there isn’t something a bit cunning in this frankness. It is big of me to be so sincere, to make a play for her by not pretending to be more than I am—unlike the other guys who say they love her for herself. I see that there is always something insincere about trying to be sincere, as if I were to say openly, “The statement that I am now making is a lie.” There seems to be something phony about every attempt to define myself, to be totally honest. The trouble is that I can’t see the back, much less the inside, of my head. I can’t be honest because I don’t fully know what I am. Consciousness peers out from a center which it cannot see—and that is the root of the matter.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
In his video, Watts takes a humorous if not profound look at falling in love.
Today’s Video: “The Mystery of Falling in Love – Alan Watts”
https://youtu.be/DIChudNdFQ8
08/17/2023
All actions of the “me”
intentional and implicated,
trapping one in a vicious circle,
chained in a psychological relationship
to the action or thought.
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote and accompanying video Watts discusses our faulty feedback system and in the video how to apply Zen in life.
“The system can be paralyzed in yet another way. Every feedback system needs a margin of “lag” or error. If we try to make a thermostat absolutely accurate–that is, if we bring the upper and lower limits of temperature very close together in an attempt to hold the temperature at a constant 70 degrees–the whole system will break down. For to the extent that the upper and lower limits coincide, the signals for switching off and switching on will coincide! If 70 degrees is both the lower and upper limit the “go” sign will also be the “stop” sign; “yes” will imply “no” and “no” will imply “yes.” Whereupon the mechanism will start “trembling,” going on and off, on and off, until it shakes itself to pieces.
The system is too sensitive and shows symptoms which are startlingly like human anxiety. For when a human being is so self-conscious, so self-controlled that he cannot let go of himself, he dithers or wobbles between opposites. This is precisely what is meant in Zen by going round and round on “the wheel of birth-and-death,” for the Buddhist samsara is the prototype of all vicious circles. We saw that when the furnace responds too closely to the thermostat, it cannot go ahead without also trying to stop, or stop without also trying to go ahead. This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself. It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. Furthermore, the effort to remain always “good” or “happy” is like trying to hold the thermostat to a constant 70 degrees by making the lower limit the same as the upper.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Way of Zen
Alan Watts ~ How To Apply Zen In Life
https://youtu.be/e04tK9g1H34
08/16/2023
The person, an autonomous entity,
a fictional viewpoint
without substance or independence
like characters in a dream.
Dear Friends and Practitioners
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote and accompanying video Watts why God plays hide-and-seek.
“God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.
Now when God plays “hide” and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself! But that’s the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But- when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will WAKE UP, stop pretending, and REMEMBER that we are all one single Self- the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever.
You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards and play again, and so it goes with the world.”
― Alan Watts, A. Book
And here is the accompanying video…
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts – Life is a Game of Hide & Seek (And Why YOU Are God?)”
https://youtu.be/ipGEg4rT4zk
08/15/2023
The Self, the Continuum, Life,
not found in experiences
or in mental exercises.
Clarity which knows limitation
free the way
to what lies beyond.
Dear Friends and Practitioners
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote and accompanying video Watts discusses finding out that you are all of yourself…and the universe as well.
““So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the
beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing,
then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you’re not only
beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your
bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the
shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the
waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that’s continuous with the Atlantic
Ocean, and that’s all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being
the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a
continuous energy system. It isn’t just that the East River is part of it. You can’t draw any
line and say ‘Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,’ as if you can
in the parts of an automobile, where you can say ‘This is definitely part of the generator,here,
and over here is a spark plug.’ There’s not that kind of isolation between the elements
of nature.”
― Alan Wilson, Watts
In today’s video, Watts suugests we are all of ourselves…and more.
Today’s Video: Alan Watts “You Are The Universe”
https://youtu.be/fjpcMoaNtBM
08/14/2023
True aim of existence
to be without conditioning,
a life promising
joy, freedom and peace.
Dear Friends and Practitioners
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote and accompanying video Watts discusses what is science.
“The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
In the accompanying video, Watts continues his discussion of science and the art of definition.
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts ~ What Is Science?”
https://youtu.be/yqf4an9ra4s
08/12/2023
non-directed listening,
an openness, a living meditation.
everything heard points directly
towards ultimate reality,
not conceived
of words or thoughts
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. In today’s quote and accompanying video Watts discusses the great hallucination.
“We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.” This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.”
― Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Learn more about the Truth behind this Hallucination in today’s video lecture…Have an enjoyable weekend, everyone, and keep practicing.
Today’s Video: “You are a Hallucination – Alan Watts – Find the Truth”
https://youtu.be/2JZdTW_6wXM
08/11/2023
Spontaneous clarity
dissolves all patterns, habits
that produce states,
a condition called – enlightenment
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Alan asks us how we feel about vanishing forever.
“So if you really go the whole way and see how you feel at the prospect of vanishing forever. Have all your efforts, and all your achievements, and all your attainments turning into dust and nothingness. What is the feeling? What happens to you? That’s what it’s all going to come to. And for some reason or other, we are supposed to find this depressing. Do you see in a way, how that is saying: the most real state is the state of nothing? But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness. Where does all this come from? Obviously from nothingness. Once again you get how it looks behind your eyes. You see?
So in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it’s your reality. Then how can anything contaminate you? All the idea of you being scared, and put out and worried, and so on, this is nothing, it’s a dream. Because you’re really nothing. But this is most incredible nothing. So cheer up! You see?
The essence of your mind is intrinsically pure. Pure means clear, void.
See? If you think of this idea of nothingness as mere blankness, and you hold onto this idea of blankness then kind of grizzly about it, you haven’t understood it. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the sun and the stars and the mountains, and rivers, and the good men and bad men, and the animals, and insects, and the whole bit. All are contained in void. So out of this void comes everything and You Are IT. What else could You BE?”
― Alan Watts, The Essence of Alan Watts
In the video today, Watts discusses Nothingness and our place in it.
Today’s Video:”The Truth about Nothingness ~ Alan Watts”
https://youtu.be/ghQl77-tiXM
08/10/2023
The ultimate non-state
without cause
existing in itself,
by itself.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Alan discusses the rat race – thinking you’re going to get somewhere.
“For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an
abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.”
― Alan Watts
And here’s a video containing excerpts from several of Watts’ talks pertaining to the rat-race.
Today’s Video: “It’s Already Happening But People Don’t See It – Alan Watts on Rat Race”
https://youtu.be/iYaPFZW7Q30
08/09/2023
Hear the sound around you.
Hear its music.
Hear the sound within you.
Hear the body’s music.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Alan discusses the superficiality of how we view our existence.
“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In his video discourse, Watts discusses why life seems so meaningless to many.
Today’s Video: “ALAN WATTS MEANINGLESS LIFE”
https://youtu.be/m72iWC-0UpU
08/08/2023
Seeing facts as they are
is discernment,
but the discerner must be absent.
Discernment only happens
when there is no controller.
Then clarity is present.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Alan discusses the Fear of Death.
“Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “I” and all other “things” now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them – to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it’s no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over – fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Below is Alan Watts’ complimentary video on the Fear of Death
Today’s Video: “How to Conquer One’s Fear of Death – Alan Watts”
https://youtu.be/fIWfcThb5_0
08/07/2023
Your natural state
needs no learning.
Be free
from learning and unlearning.
No volition is necessary
to see you are conditioned.
In seeing what is false
all that remains is unconditioned,
the inconceivable non-state..
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Today we have more from Alan Watts as Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Alan discusses Space.
“Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it’s not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is rally extremely simple, and that is the way it is.”
― Alan Watts
More about Space with Alan Watts in today’s video…
Today’s Video: “Space Is Not Nothing, It’s Everything – Alan Watts On What Lies Beyond”
https://youtu.be/nlUNHMsp8Xs
08/05/2023
The Presence and Words
of a real Teacher
come directly from the Freedom
the disciple longs for.
They do not free the disciple
but bring the disciple
to that threshold
where Freedom abides.
It’s his/her own autonomy
that takes the disciple across.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today Alan is fascinated by the “rhythm of the waves.”
“Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves.”
― Alan Watts
Here it is below in a video format. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone, and keep practicing. If you are near a beach, take some time just to listen to the rhythm of the waves.
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts on Waves”
https://youtu.be/ogG11nMdKXI
08/04/2023
Meditation is not a state
but the background and substance
of all states.
No anticipation, no projection,
no striving toward a goal,
neither an inside,
nor an outside,
beyond time and space.
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today his quote and video focuses on the ‘Wisdom of Insecurity.”
“For man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. At once new myths come into being – political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them – for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.”
― Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Today’s Video: “Alan Watts On The Wisdom of Insecurity”
https://youtu.be/XU-aB5ylcjo
08/03/2023
True Meditation,
the absence of a meditator
and anything meditated on,
the absence of subject-object relationship,
a timeless awareness,
freeing one from automatic reactions
of thought and memory,
freeing the energies
engaged in these reactions
Dear Friends and Practitioners,
Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today we read and view Watts’ thoughts on the “Double-Bind.”
“This state of affairs is known technically as the “double-bind.” A
person is put in a double-bind by a command or request which contains
a concealed contradiction…
“This is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t
situation which arises constantly in human (and especially family)
relations…
“The social doublebind game can be phrased in several ways:The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
Everyone must play.
You must love us.
You must go on living.
Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural.
Try to be sincere.
Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain
kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are
spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like
digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire
that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone
deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like
forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate
them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of
allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its
own time.”― Alan Watts, “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”
In his video lecture, Watts delves deeper into the “Double-Bind.”
Today’s Video: “The Double Bind – Alan Watts”
https://youtu.be/PYvQlVQJSds
08/02/2023
separated from perception,
separated from the body,
from its organic memory,
paralyzed by an overactive mind,
driven by desire and intentional thinking
separated from total understanding.
Alan Watts Month continues throughout August. Today we read and view what happens if we can dream any dream we wanted…
“Let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. 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 “Well, that was pretty great.” But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream … where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today…”
― Alan Watts
Now here is the full lecture in a video…
Today’s Video: “If You Could Dream Any Dream You Wanted by Alan Watts”
https://youtu.be/abWBb1SxkXc
08/01/2023
conceptual memory,
localized in the brain,
concretized perception,
recognition of name and form,
living in concept and recognition
is living in abstraction.
Dear Friends and Practitioners.
August is Alan Watts Month. That’s right an entire month of Alan Watts quotes, lecture and videos. We start off with Alan reminding us that we are still part of the Big Bang and its primordial energy.
““It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually–if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning– you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so–I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ” ― Alan Watts
Now here’s how the above quote would look and sound like in video…
Today’s Video: “You Are the Big Bang”
https://youtu.be/JEunth9YCgo
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