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Alan Watts


Floyd

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as people become aware beyond the mundane & corporeal perceptions of realities, the words of people such as Alan Watts come more into focus . .

.. he's well worth a listen, or read. .

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap, lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination." ~Alan Watts

"the human body belongs in a continuous energy system which is co-extensive with the universe." ~Alan Watts

"And so in just precisely that way, every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence, and where every cell in our body, every every molocule, every atom is in constant flux, and nothing can be pinned down." ~Alan Watts

"All these things going on are essential extensions of your own inner tubing." ~Alan Watts

"how do you distinguish between something known now, and a memory?" ~Alan Watts

"Now, we like to think, you see, that houses and things go on existing in their natural state when we're not around looking at them or feeling them." ~Alan Watts

"And it is only a person who has discovered that he is already there who is capable of action, because he doesn't act frantically with the thought that he's going to get somewhere." ~Alan Watts

"Because things that are the poles apart happen to be very deeply connected." ~Alan Watts

"In fact, the more you try to think about what your self is, the more you discover that you can only think about yourself in terms of things that you thought were other than yourself." ~Alan Watts

"Then you suddenly have to wake up to the fact that the only real you is whatever it is that's determining what you do." ~Alan Watts

"And that means that suchess comes and goes like anything else because this whole world is an on-and-off system." ~Alan Watts

"All those people who try to realize Zen by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately to find it, and they're on the wrong track." ~Alan Watts

"We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarity and what we do involuntarity, and we define all those things which we do involunarily as things which 'happen' to us, rather than things that we do." ~Alan Watts

"All of you I see with your various shapes and colors, when I look out here, I am actually having an experience of how it feels inside my head." ~Alan Watts

"All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing." ~Alan Watts

"In other words, the human body belongs in a continuous energy system which is co-extensive with the universe." ~Alan Watts

"The monarchical image of God, with its implicit distaste for religious insubordination, has a more pervasive impact than many Christians might admit." ~Alan Watts

"If you say there is a god, that is a concept; if you say there is no god, that's a concept." ~Alan Watts

"At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is. Quoting Isaiah just a little out of context: "I am the Lord, and there is none else." ~Alan Watts

"What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things, your liable to become attached to them." ~Alan Watts

"Having committed so loathsome and serious a felony, his chances of clemency are better if he assumes a repentant demeanor, which is quite inconsistent with the sincere belief that his use of cannabis was religious." ~Alan Watts

"No satori around here, because anybody who has a spiritual experience, whether you get it through Za-zen, or through LSD, or anything, you know, that gives you that experience." ~Alan Watts

"A logical positivist, for example, can show conclusively that all metaphysical statements are meaningless." ~Alan Watts

Edited by Flobalobalobalot
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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for mentioning the book The Wisdom of Insecurity Greenfloyd, i bought a copy last week and it`s a revelation if i`m honest, so true in many many ways, but it`s so easy to forget and get sucked into the material world of trying to pretend we aint going to die.

can you recommend any other books of his as good as this one? :stoned:

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Thanks for mentioning the book The Wisdom of Insecurity Greenfloyd, i bought a copy last week and it`s a revelation if i`m honest, so true in many many ways, but it`s so easy to forget and get sucked into the material world of trying to pretend we aint going to die.

can you recommend any other books of his as good as this one? :stoned:

Nice one ratty :)

It's great to know someone else has discovered Watts.

That book was the first Watt's I had read and it had a huge impact on me, really pulling me from my depths of despair about the world and life.

For me, someone who thinks he thinks logically, Watt's has a flip logical way of dismantling preserved logic :mellow:

His work is still so relevant, probably more so today. In some of his lectures he talks about technology and he is spot on with what has been, where we are and it's evolution and where

it's heading.

These following books are fantastic reads :idea::book:

Nature, Man and Woman.

Become what you are.

Tao: The watercourse way.

Does It Matter?

This is it!

I haven't read one of his books that I haven't enjoyed greatly.

A New Earth by E Tolle is an interesting read too, a lot of parallels with The Wisdom of Insecurity. :D

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Wow. I never heard of him. I just started listening to He who has no ego video. The guy is bang on the money. He must use the same references as me because i share exactly his thoughts. Thanks so much for posting, this really is food for thought.

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Some interesting audio for Aldous Huxley fans. :skin_up:

Aldous Huxley interviewed: part 1

Aldous Huxley interviewed: part 2

Edited by GreenFloyd
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"Watt's has a flip logical way of dismantling preserved logic"

that, GreenFloyd, is the purpose of speaking in so-called 'kung-an' or 'koans'. .

& thank you for posting those PDF links.

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After reading these paragraphs bellow (some time between), I went on to buy a 1:1 scale resin skull and never told Mrs Floyd :unsure: I will never forget her reaction when she opened the box. lol

“Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death. To observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up— never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation. It’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.”

Extract from The Web of Life

"You can’t hang on to yourself. You don’t have to try to not hang on to yourself. It can’t be done, and that is salvation. That’s why you may think it a grisly habit, but certain monks keep skulls on their desks, ‘momentomori,’ ‘be mindful of death.’ Gurdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and every person you see will soon be dead. It sounds so gloomy to us, because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death. There is a wonderful saying that Anandakuri- Swami[?] used to quote: ‘I pray that death will not come and find me still unannihilated.’ In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die. In other words, if the ego’s disappeared before death caught up to him.

But you see, the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear, because it tells you you can’t hang on. So what we need, if we’re going to have a good religion around, that’s one of the places where it can start: having, I suppose they’d call it The Institution For Creative Dying, something like that. You can have one department where you can have champagne and cocktail parties to die with, another department where you can have glorious religious rituals with priests and things like that, another department where you can have psychedelic drugs, another department where you can have special kinds of music, anything, you know. All these arrangements will be provided for in a hospital for delightful dying. But that’s the thing, to go out with a bang instead of a whimper."

Extract from The World as Emptiness

Alan on Death

notes from the ever-emerging field

Edited by GreenFloyd
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