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Lessons from Alan Watts
Lessons from 'In My Own Way: An Autobiography' by Alan Watts.
Alan Watts is a philosopher who introduced and popularized Eastern philosophy and religion especially Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism to the West in the mid-20th century. He influenced Steve Jobs, Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, and more.
The mystical experience we seek is found in the fullest of every moment we fully embrace. “For when you have really heard the sound of rain you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way—as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what. I have tried for years, as a philosopher, but in words it comes out all wrong: in black and white with no color.”
Be a person who is in this world but not of this world. Awakened but grounded in this reality. This is how Watts describes the Zen master, Sokei-an Saski: “He was humorously earthly as he was spiritually awakened.”
We don’t laugh enough. And sadly we don’t know how to breathe properly. “Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe.”
There’s a reality beyond our perception that many mystics from different traditions have attempted to expound. “My own work though it may seem at times to be a system of ideas, is basically an attempt to describe mystical experience—not of formal visions and supernatural beings, but of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and minding.”
Our separateness arises because we fail to see reality as it truly is, namely, that you and I aren’t different. “And it has been obvious to me, for as long as I can remember, that whatever it is, I am that, and whatever I am is also what stars and galaxies, space and energy are. My whole work in religion and philosophy has been to convey this feeling to others, and to show that our apparent separateness from what there is and all that there is arises, in the main, from our failure to notice space as a vital reality, which is just as important as the negative pole in an electric circuit.”
To be a genuine individual—one lives true to their convictions—we have to be willing to kill our egos. “There is a widespread and wrong impression that anyone who sees through the illusion of the ego must become a self-effacing and anonymous personality, whereas my own feeling has always been that in order to be a real person you must know how to be a genuine fake. In other words, only those who can accept their own annihilation can have the courage to be true individuals.”
Our inability to see the interconnectedness of all things allows us to justify hatred, wars, and murder. “The five fingers move independently only because of their union with the hand, the arm, the body, and the organism-environment field.”
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