Though opposites, they need each other to define one another.
We’ve got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious. You are not a result of the Big Bang, you are still part of the process of the Big Bang.’. ‘You are not victims of the scheme of things, of a mechanical world or an autocratic god.’ This is a game you chose, even if you were born with syphilis or in a Nazi concentration camp. If you ask me ‘How am I going to get here?’ It will be like the famous story of the American tourist in England. God/dess is playing Hide’n’seek with Him/Herself.
So then, when you die, you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that’s not an experience. And that then doesn’t include breathing most of the time; it doesn’t include the heartbeats; it doesn’t include the activity of the glands; it doesn’t include digestion; it doesn’t include how you shape your bones; circulate your blood. There isn’t a separate you. So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the world is round. But the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training of the "Muscular Christian" sort) from early years. He tried LSD several times in 1958, with various research teams led by Keith S. Ditman, Sterling Bunnell Jr., and Michael Agron. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens.
In other words, what’s required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it’s not ordinary relaxation. So you suddenly begin to feel ‘Wow, what kind of situation is this? So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it’s like a hand beating on a skinless drum.
There may be billions of years between the birth of primeval energy and the arrival of intelligent life. He received a master's degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and became an … There cannot be an act of buying unless there is simultaneously an act of selling, and vice versa. You’re mind is what there is. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović.
Remember also when I tried to work towards a definition of omnipotence. These neighbours accomplished this by relying on their own talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty". Life is like a play, in that it’s pretend, it’s make-believe, it’s purposeful forgetting. And what it does depends upon its environment, which may include you and me.
It’s a long run. As if life were something they simply encountered as a foreigner.
Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts. According to critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity. That much of my activity which I feel I do. In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D. T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. And then maybe if that happens, we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense.
That’s the only way that will teach him. Nothing could be brighter. And how to explain that? Is there anything in the way? Watts attended The King's School, Canterbury, next door to Canterbury Cathedral. A proper study of the question runs, at the very beginning, into two obstacles. And then when the astronomers suggested that there weren’t any crystal spheres, people got terrified, because then they thought the stars would fall down. It isn’t that organisms by chance came into the world.
In the same way, you are unconsciously performing all the various activities of your organism. You see, the problem is this. In his last novel, Island (1962), Huxley mentions the religious practice of maithuna as being something like that which Roman Catholics call "coitus reservatus". The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. [42], After Watts' death, his lectures found posthumous popularity through regular broadcasts on public radio, especially in California and New York, and more recently on the internet, specifically YouTube.[43]. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the 'Out of Your Mind' series. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account.
And I don’t mean this in a kind of Pollyanna Christian Science sense.
He moved to San Francisco in early 1951 to teach.
Arthur (Brooklyn: Arthur Publishing Corp.) (16). We’ve got the idea that ‘No, I’m something IN this body.’ The ego. The environment grows the organism, and in turn the organism creates the environment. [5] Probably because of the influence of his mother's religious family[6] the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in.
Because your physical organism is one continous process with everything else that’s going on. Away from the drama, in the Green Room, the actors take off their masks. ‘Face the facts.’ As if they were outside you. In other words, the so-called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. His son, Mark, serves as curator of his father's audio, video and film and has published content of some of his spoken lectures in print format. See, the source of all light is in the eye. Alan Watts lived from 1915 to 1973.
But one of the interesting things in the world is–this is a yoga, this is a realization–try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up.
He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the emerging hippie counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. The first way, which is the usual way, is that a guru or teacher who wants to get this across to somebody because he knows it himself, and when you know it you’d like others to see it, too. I'm going to talk about what there is. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean. Written By Alan Watts. So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. He left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.[2].
In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy.
(Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.) But now we’re all used to it, and relativity and things like that are a matter of common sense today. He spoke extensively about the nature of the divine reality which Man misses: how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. He received a master's degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and became an Episcopal priest in 1945. How could a centipede control a hundred legs at once? In other words, if you are in a contest with the universe, he’s going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous. In the Ceramic Model, God is in complete control, God has a plan, God imposes His will. Only you are playing hide and seek, since that is the essential game that is going on. Reality is represented by symbols (like numbers and words), but those symbols are secondary–don’t mistake them for reality.
After my encounter with Alan, the context in which I was working shifted. By his own reckoning, and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact. Watts' books frequently include discussions reflecting his keen interest in patterns that occur in nature and which are repeated in various ways and at a wide range of scales – including the patterns to be discerned in the history of civilizations. The Zen master challenges you to be spontaneous. His involvement with the Buddhist Lodge in London afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth.
This became one of his passions in his research and thought. You watch other people moving, and you know you’re doing that, just like you’re breathing or circulating your blood. We have no problem feeling that the Earth is globular. Watts believed that we could shed the illusion of self and other through simple comprehension. He knows it’s flat.
But actually, it’s this funny little microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that’s way out somewhere, who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe out of what otherwise would be mere quanta.
He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. Though known for his discourses on Zen, he was also influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta.
He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written". And the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, we realize first thing how harmonious it all is. A personal account of Watts' last years and approach to death is given by Al Chung-liang Huang in Tao: The Watercourse Way. [40] His son Mark Watts has prepared a biographical documentary that details questions surrounding his father's death and performed ritual cremation on a nearby beach. Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley) to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. The current doesn’t even start until the switch is closed.
We’ve got all sorts of ideas built into us, which seem unquestioned, obvious…. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support.
How could you use so many arms at once? Watts had begun to experiment with psychedelics, initially with mescaline given to him by Oscar Janiger. [citation needed]. "[46], Watts has been criticized by Buddhists such as Philip Kapleau and D. T. Suzuki for allegedly misinterpreting several key Zen Buddhist concepts.
Of this religious training, he remarked "Throughout my schooling my religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin."[11]. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn’t try and not do anything, because that’s doing something. It’s what you’re experiencing. In last night’s session, I was discussing an alternative myth to the Ceramic and Fully Automatic models of the universe, I’ll call the Dramatic Myth. So the lord steps down out of heaven and says ‘The first and great commandment is `Thou shalt love the lord thy god.’ You must love me.’ Well that’s a double-bind. In David Stuart's warts-and-all biography of the man, Watts is seen as an unusually gifted speaker and writer driven by his own interests, enthusiasms, and demons.
Let’s consider breathing. His ashes were split, with half buried near his library at Druid Heights and half at the Green Gulch Monastery. And so what I want to discuss this morning is how this happens. "Work", "life", and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.
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