Alan Watts - Individual and the World Pt 1 Full Lecture - Alan Watts Organization Official

THE WORKS OF ALAN WATTS AUDIO:

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More about "The Works"
The Works includes the following recordings :

Essential Lectures Collection

Tao of Philosophy
Not What Should Be
Sense of Nonsense
Coincidence of Opposites
Seeing Through the Net
Myth of Myself
Man and Nature
Limits of Language

Philosophies of Asia
Relevance of Oriental Philosophy
Mythology of Hinduism
Introduction to Buddhism
Eco-Zen
Taoist Way
Intellectual Yoga

Myth & Religion
Images of God
Jesus: His Religion
Spiritual Authority
Image of Man
Democracy in Heaven
Religion & Sexuality

Philosophy & Society
Veil of Thoughts
Divine Madness
We as Organism
On Being God
Mysticism & Morality
What Is Reality

Comparative Philosophy
Mind Over Mind
Philosophy of Nature
The Cosmic Drama
Spectrum of Love
Love of Waters
Game of Yes and No
The Smell of Burnt Almonds
Spiritual Alchemy

Eastern Wisdom Collection
Ways of Liberation
Introduction to Oriental Philosophy
On Buddhism
On Taoism
Way of Liberation

Introduction to Hinduism
On Hinduism
On Yoga
Religion of No Religion
Journey to India

The Middle Way
Buddhism as Dialogue
Religion of No Religion
Wisdom of the Mountains
Diamond Web
Transcending Duality

Eastern & Western Zen
Introduction to Zen
Early Chinese Zen
Uncarved Block
Zen Bones
Biting an Iron Bull
World As Just So

Taoism
Swimming Headless
Wisdom of the Ridiculous
Philosophy of the Tao
Way Beyond Seeking
Landscape, Soundscape

Zen & Meditation
Democratization of Buddhism
The Controlled Accident
Meditation
Zenrin Poems
Art of Meditation
Why Not Now?
Introduction to a Contemplative Ritual
A Contemplative Ritual

Extended Seminars Collection

Comparative Religion
Four Ways to the Center
Worldly Religions

Buddhism
Net of Jewels
Problems in Meditation
Thusness
World as Consciousness
Zen Reconsidered

Early Radio Talks
Aldous Huxley
Art of Psychoanalysis
Bang or Whimper
Bhagavad Gita
Buddhist Mysticism
Constitution of Nature
Daylight Savings
Fundamentals of Buddhism
G.K. Chesterton
Gateless Gate
Ghosts
Humor in Religion
Laws of Karma
Man is a Hoax
Parallel Thinking
Play & Sincerity
Problems of Preaching
Reconciliation of Opposites
Return to the Forest
Seeing Through the Game
Study of Asia
Symbolic and the Real
Tribute to Carl Jung
Un-Preachable Religion

Human Consciousness
Ecological Awareness
Education for Non-Entity
Nature of Consciousness
Transformation of Consciousness

Psychedelics
The Psychedelic Experience
The Psychedelic Explosion
Turning the Head or Turning On

The Arts
Bushido
The Importance of Space
The Way of Tea

The Future
Future of Communications
Future of Politics
Future of Religion
Time and the Future

The Self
Birth, Death and the Unborn
Pursuit of Pleasure
World as Play
World as Self
The Universe
Individual and the World
Power of Space

Don't forget to not take anything too seriously. Happy listening!

Some great Quotes from the works of Alan Watts:

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

I owe my solitude to other people.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

[Teeveepicksures]

THANK YOU for not putting music behind this

[narithization]

NO BACKGROUND MUSIC! thank you 👍👍👍 (yes, I've got three thumbs😊)

[natureisallpowerful]

I'm grateful Alan watts left us all this wisdom and knowledge. Also left it to humble us I believe.

[Emiester]

Simultaneously omnipotent and helpless. That hit it on the head for me.

[Inner-wellbeing]

Wish I could have met AW when he was in his physical body. A special man indeed.

[retrospectivelyspectacular]

Such wisdom, makes me realize how much I still have to learn about myself and my place in the world.

[all-things-under-heaven]

He's not just one of those old wise guys who speak little and tell you little. He's a funny and highly informed source of real wisdom.

[michaelaaronson]

Absolutely one of his most comprehensive talks and with masterful clarity

[chasecollins]

Thank for giving this entire video subtitles.

[DRAMDENER]

What a fucking intro.... this man is amazing

[chrisjeffords]

Unbelievable detail on life from an amazing spokesperson about life!!!!

[mortonvrose]

Most fascinating indeed. Thanks. He never fails to amaze me deeply.

[slowwco]

Alan Watts quote highlights from this video: “What is your ultimate question? … I know many people would discover that they had no question to ask. The situation would be altogether too overwhelming. But many people to whom I've put this problem say that the question that they would ask is, ‘Who am I?’ And that is something we know very little about. Because whatever it is that we call ‘I’ is too close for inspection. It's like trying to bite your own teeth or touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger.”

“The nature of what is that we call ‘I’ is extremely puzzling because there is some confusion as to how much of us is ‘I.’”

“Most of us seem to feel that whatever it is, that ‘I’ is, it is located in the head. Somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears is the center. And the rest of us is an appendage, a vehicle, which carries the self around.”

“Popular speech also reflects the sensation. That ‘I’ am very different from what we call the ‘other’. Other people, other things. Anything that we can become aware of is sort of ‘other’. There is an opposition apparently between the knower and the known.”

“We talk about coming into this world, as if somehow we didn't belong.”

“The only way that I can see of our effectively changing direction is through a transformation of the feeling that we have of our own existence and of what we mean by ‘I.’”

“What we think of as ‘I’ is much more a symbol than it is a reality. The living organism, the whole mind-body, is much more than anything we mean by ‘I’. ‘I’ largely stands for your personality, your role in life. And the very word ‘person’, as you probably know, comes from the Latin ‘persona’—a word originally used for the mask worn by actors in Graeco-Roman drama.”

“When you speak of being a ‘real person’, it really means being a genuine fake because the personality is only the front. What is behind it? Well of course the whole organism is behind it. And, we must be very careful not to confuse the organism with various symbols that we have for it because those symbols can be extremely misleading.”

“What you really are as a body, as a living organism, is not some sort of separate existence coated by a skin which divides you from the rest of the world.”

“You yourself actually are not so much an entity that moves around in an environment. You are much more like a whirlpool in a stream. And, as you know, the whirlpool is constant only in its doing, that is to say in its whirling. And you could recognize individual whirligigs in a stream. But the water is flowing through them all the time. They are never the same for a second. And so it is also with us … It is exactly the same with you. You flow. You are a process.”

“You as a living organism and all that is going on in your environment constitute a single process.”

“You think you decide things, but you don't know how you do it.”

“How are you an ego? Well, you don't know because the springs of being conscious, of being an ego, are outside the surveillance of consciousness.”

“What is ‘I’ is something very much deeper than the superficial consciousness. And, what you call ‘I’ in the sense of the voluntary willing center, ego, has very little to do with it. You are just a watchman on top of the mast or a radar on a ship that is scanning the environment by conscious attention looking out for trouble or looking for food. The real you is much too complicated to think about.”

“The separations between things are abstract. They are concepts.”

“Nature does not consist of separate things which you can just pull out like parts from an engine.”

“We always have a funny idea that to get a verb, that is to say to get action, you have to have an agent. Now this is the most ridiculous idea conceivable. How can a noun start a verb? How can a thing start an event? Because there's no action in a thing. Action can only come from action.”

“If we go through everything that I've been saying, we find, first of all, that the thing that we thought was ‘I’ is nothing more than a social institution … To mistake it, to reify it as Whitehead would say, is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It's strictly a hallucination. And, any certain amount of psychological self-exploration shows this to be the case.”

“What we are is the organism. And, the organism is a transactional interchange between the organism and the environment.”

“You do it, and it does you. But that's a clumsy way of talking about it: it's all one process, a unified process.”

“How on earth are we going to arrange a transformation of man's consciousness so that he'll know it? Not just in theory, but something he feels in the same way as you feel what you take to be ‘I’ at the present moment, confronting an external world. How will you transform that sensation? Because if you don't transform that sensation, you’ll not ever be fit to use technology. We shall continue to use our technology in a hostile spirit towards the external world, and we shall wreck the external world. We're busy doing it now. There is no necessity to abandon technology. We can’t abandon it. But, we can certainly use it in a different spirit.”

“If you really felt with your whole organism, instead of just with that part of it called conscious attention, you would become aware of this flowing fact. And you would get a very strange feeling which at first might frighten you. It is possible of course to have this feeling. And the feeling is like this: You would not be quite sure how to interpret it. You might feel that you yourself were doing everything else that's happening. That would be one way of feeling it. The other way of feeling it would be that you are doing nothing at all but that everything else is doing you. And you would feel completely passive like a puppet on the end of strings. Although on the other hand, if you got the feeling that you were doing it all, you would feel like God Almighty. It is very easy for our consciousness to slip into this state of sensation … One has to be very careful about this feeling because it's enormously easy to misinterpret it—either as being omnipotent, being God in the personal literal sense, or as being helpless and merely driven. Now, what should be understood is that both these ways of feeling are right, only they must both be taken together. To be simultaneously omnipotent and helpless. These are two poles, opposite poles of one and the same state. Because the message that is coming through—and that we find difficulty in understanding because it's contrary to our common sense, contrary to our whole history and conditioning—is: you as a living organism, and all that is going on in your environment, constitute a single process.”

[farrider]

*Horrray* this one me haven't heard yet 😍❗️
Me tank You much 🌼🌻🌹 .•°

[OutisHeirophant]

Beautiful & so relevant. Thank you 🙏🏻🌹♥️

[sally]

I have much gratitude to you for enabling a gathering of like minds. being with

[Djodosncb]

Thanks for not playing music in the background

[keithmurf]

We are the center. The earth is motionless

[Aurelius-VDB]

Son of ceylon listening to u after fifty years.. 💔 and i see that ur predictions are exactly right

[elmagodelmaryahoo]

Another delicious and always deeply appreciated