Ep. 26 – Relevance of Eastern Philosophy

Taking a trip through the constructs of form and labeling, Alan Watts philosophizes about the limits of language.

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit play.alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts philosophizes about:

• Unexamined systems of belief underneath language
• Ideas that are built into our common sense
• The substance of form, pattern, and organization
• The profound mystery of matter
• Limitations in trying to use language to define the ineffable
• ‘Matter’ as a root word for many things
• Chinese views of nature
• Why verbs do not necessarily need subjects
• Being at peace with ourselves in a world of form
• Recognizing the universe as a process

“When we divide the world into operations and agents, doers and doings, then we ask such silly questions as ‘who knows, who does it, what does it?’ When the what that is supposed to do it is the same as the doing. You could very easily see that the whole process of the universe may be understood as process, nobody is doing it.” – Alan Watts

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In celebration of the waters that bring life to all things, Alan Watts reflects on the separation between human civilization and the natural world.

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit play.alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this unique and experimental recording, Alan Watts discusses:

• The beauty of life on the waters in Sausalito, California
• The rhythms of nature
• Time and timelessness
• The transformation of one form into another
• The separation of man from the natural world
• Objecting and Objectifying the world
• Identity and being able to know knowing
• The spacious environment of the ocean

“Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it’s not clock or calendar time, it has no urgency. It’s timeless time, because I know I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years.” – Alan Watts

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Using wisdom from Eastern philosophies, Alan Watts explains why Westerners should let go of any preconceived notions of God.

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

This Alan Watts lecture features a discussion on:

• Comparative studies on religion
• The absurdity of Christian imperialism
• Superiority and lack of faith
• The difference between faith and belief
• Blasphemy and those who claim to be God
• The political image of God in the west
• The ceramic model of the universe (material and form)
• Hindu mythology and drama
• Self-discovery of supreme reality
• The meaning of Maya
• Punitive reasons why people say that God is dead
• Fixed notions of God as idolatry
• Contemplative prayer and letting go of our ideas of God
• Existence as relationship
• Buddhist vows versus western obedience
• Looking beyond the skin-encapsulated ego

“It must be understood that the crux of the Hindu and Buddhist disciplines is an experience, not a theory, not a belief.” – Alan Watts

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Bringing awareness to ecstatic grace, Alan Watts enlightens us on the sexual archetypes formed by religion.

Two cultural icons. Two unique perspectives... One understanding of the presence of the way.

Ram Dass' Love Serve Remember Foundation and the Alan Watts Organization invite you to open your mind, open your heart, and tap into the living truth of Alan Watts and Ram Dass. Learn more about this special 4-week Virtual Course:"The Presence of the Way: The Dharma of Alan Watts and Ram Dass"

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this recording, Alan Watts lectures on:

• Baptism, confirmation, and religious initiation
• Masturbation and other supposedly sinful behaviors
• Defiance and wickedness
• The material world and sexuality
• The Semitic vs. Greek perspective on sex
• Sexual energy for reproduction rather than pleasure
• The fall in the Garden of Eden
• The institution of marriage
• Women throughout western literature
• Love and the illogical promises we make
• Prudism and extreme monogamy
• Subtle eroticism in the Victorian era
• How repression may lead to being overcame
• Libido as a fundamental reality
• Sexuality in religious iconography
• The function of sexual play beyond utilitarianism
• Sex as a sacramental expression of love
• Seeing the divine aspect in a lover

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

“The function of sexual play is not merely the survival and utilitarian function of reproducing the species as it is among animals to a very large extent. What peculiarly distinguishes human sexuality is that it brings the partners closer and closer to each other in an intense state of united feeling. In other words, it is a sacrament, the outward invisible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, bringing about love.” – Alan Watts

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This time on the Being in the Way Podcast, Alan Watts delves into questions of identity, purpose and buying into the ‘Myth of Myself’.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this episode, Alan Watts explores:

• The question of our own identity and our place in the world
• Myths of the self handed down through history
• Viewing ourselves and the world with a “floodlight consciousness” – rather than the narrow “spotlight consciousness” we are taught to see the world through
• How we are not born into this world, but grow out of it – “In the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”

“The most fascinating problem in the world is who am I? What do you feel when you say the word I? I myself?

This problem has fascinated me for many years. Most Western people locate their ego inside their heads. This is the ordinary average conception of what is oneself.” – Alan Watts

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit https://Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

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Picking up from our last episode, Alan elucidates faith versus belief, and how our individual existence is connected with the totality of the universe.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

From his houseboat in Sausalito, CA, Alan Watts explores:

• The two great myths which underly our Western sense of identity: the Judeo-Christian myth of an overly intelligent universe founded by a cosmic king; and the material myth of a universe which is mechanical, un-intelligent, and empty
• The problem of “believing” in God, versus the real attitude of faith which is being open to whatever reality is
• Finding out who we are beyond social institutions like time, money, value, language, and survival
• How you as an individual implies by your existence everything else in the universe

“The problem about believing in God, incidentally, is that believing is the wrong attitude. Believing is a form of mistrust, because it’s saying, ‘I fervently wish that you exist, and if you don’t, I don’t know what to do with myself.’ The real attitude of faith is not believing, but simply being open to whatever reality is, and to say you don’t know.” – Alan Watts

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Delving into the historically complicated human relationship to divinity, Alan Watts describes the trap of separateness. 

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this episode, Alan Watts explores:

• The sensation of our own existence 
• Jewish Christian mythology 
• Identifying with the tribe
• Universal law and the roots of justice
• Freud and the energies of the psyche 
• Man as a product of nature versus the supernatural

The idea that we were all subjects of a divine king you might say was a political model based on the organization of the great city-states of the ancient near east. That image, you see, has absolutely haunted Western man throughout his whole development because he has felt that he is in the universe on probation and sufferance. He doesn't quite belong here." – Alan Watts

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Offering us the possibility of waking up, Alan Watts contemplates the joyous cosmology that we are God playing the roles of ordinary people.

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In this episode, Alan Watts explores:

• If there could be a theory of the world that justifies and makes worthwhile the difficulties and suffering that we undergo
• The contemplation that an infinite omnipotent being would eventually get bored with being everything, so would begin to shield itself from this knowledge, and pretend to play the role of separate beings so it could experience the full thrill of waking up to itself
• The idea of reality as God playing a game of hide and seek with itself for it’s own excitement and cosmic joke
• The difference or potential complete non-difference between the experience and the experiencer
• That what you think of as outside yourself is actually just a hidden you

“We have within us a higher self who is pretending to be the ordinary everyday person that we are, who’s acting it. In other words, our everyday life is a dream from which we have the possibility of waking up.” – Alan Watts

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Sifting down behind the cultural myth of man as separate, Alan explores how we are all actually Earth, the Universe, and the Big Bang.

In this episode of Being in the Way, Alan takes us on a journey from childhood to adulthood, highlighting how we are trained into separation from a young age, and forced to focus on the never-arriving “future,” rather than being present in the moment. Through this lens, he further spelunks the “hoax of man” and offers insight into how this sense of ego identity creates tension and frustration.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this episode Alan discusses:

• How from childhood onward we are constantly preparing for something in the future, rather than being present for life
• The culture’s division of work and play, and the confused idea that money can buy you pleasure
• Growing up in society, identity, defining a person, and being a “genuine fake”
• How the sense of ego creates tension, separation, alienation, and frustration
• The inseparable connection of the polarity of self and other
• The dawn of creation and how we are not actually separate from the Big Bang
• The 19th-century myth that man is a fluke in an unintelligent, automatic universe

“Your actual self—what is finally and fundamentally you—is not a separate and lonely part of the world, but the real you is the world itself, everything that there is, expressing itself as this particular organism here and now.” – Alan Watts

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

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In this unique episode of Being in the Way, Alan Watts offers tribute to the life, humor, magic and ‘nonsense wisdom’ of writer, G. K. Chesterton.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

This series is brought to you by the Alan watts organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

“I read G.K. Chesterton’s works very carefully, and I have, by osmosis, imbibed an enormous amount of wisdom from him. Funny thing is, not so much in terms of specific ideas, as in basic attitude to life. This is a man, who above all virtues, has what I think is one of the greatest virtues which we don’t usually find catalogued—he had a sense of wonder.” – Alan Watts

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