Alan Watts Continued: How To Find Yourself If You Are Lost
Hello everyone! This is the second edition of me diving into Alan Watts philosophy and reiterating it for you in a way that summarizes the information and makes it more 21st century appropriated. He is by far the best philosopher in human history in my opinion and to that point I'd love to continue sharing his work. What I'll be doing mostly is going over his lectures via YouTube so you can easily follow along and I can embed them here in the blog. A lot of these visualizations of his lectures are via Spiritual Mind on YouTube. This will be a series in dedication to him called Alan Watts Continued.
Let's begin!
Not Knowing
When you don't know what you want you've reached the state of desirelessness. There's different stages of not knowing. To start you don't know because you haven't thought about. The middle stage is thinking over all the things and trying them out. Beyond that you think is that what I REALLY want? Eventually you realize it's not. Why is it that you don't know what you really want?
Alan says the two reasons are
1. You have it.
2. You don't know yourself, because you never fully can.
He explains for the second reason, the true consciousness or "the god head" can never fully understand itself in the same way a knife doesn't cut itself and teeth don't bite themselves and the tongue cannot taste itself.
Understanding God
The more you try to believe you know what God actually is, the less you truly understand. When you fully understand you don't and cannot know, is when you're actually IN the know. He says "the brahmin is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not."
He explains that it's when you stop clinging to yourself is when you can actually start doing more. When you stop clinging to yourself and defending yourself all the time you're wasting all your energy. The principle is that the more you give it away, the more it will come back.
Most people don't have the courage to give it away. Alan says that you must first realize that you better give away because you cannot hold on to anything forever.
The Fundamental Problem With Most Religions
One of the fundamental issues with most religions as he explains is that the followers are saved through faith and belief with priority over their action. As long as their belief or faith was strong, their actions were secondary in terms of concern. "One is saved through faith, not through acts." This paints a very poor value set to the followers and causes a whole bunch of trouble.
You Can Never Know
You could never actually know God. God could not be an object of knowledge. Even agnosticism derives from gnosis which was Greek and had meant the dark knowledge of God, or the knowledge of the unknown. It's a perfect resemblance that this energy, this consciousness, this idea of spirituality is somewhat inescapable. You can take comfort in the unknown just as much as the known.
Your Mind Is Like Space
Space is not empty, it contains everything else within in it. Similarly, your mind doesn't have consciousness within it, but rather your mind is within consciousness because nothing exists outside of consciousness just like there is no outsides outside space.
Your Head Is A Blank Space
Your mind may be like space, but it is a blank space. We fill it with either left or right, light or dark, black or white. We create the balance and imbalance of everything.
The Highest Reality
The highest form of reality is non-dualistic. It has no outside. It's not one and not many, there are no restrictions or conditions.
Why It's So Hard To Teach And Learn Spirituality
To pursue any type of spiritual enlightenment, when seeking a mentor, most of the time they are trying to set you off on some impossible task to help you persist in your folly to wake you up. The idea is that as long as you can be tricked, you should be. The only way you can genuinely wake up is because you were tricked and figured it out. This is so interesting to me as it almost poses the idea that if they didn't try to fool you, you wouldn't have ever learned. It's like trying to trick a child by pretending you have something in your closed hand when you do not. You get them all riled up trying to figure out whats' inside and eventually you show them there was never anything there the whole time and you were the one created this fantastical idea in your mind out of belief.
An Explanation Isn't What You Wanted
If all explanations are a way to help us control things, then maybe an explanation about life will never let us fully control it so it is never truly explained. So maybe you didn't want an explanation. The vehicle of words is a clumsy one. What is complicated isn't the processes we describe, but the attempt to describe the processes. This push to always try to analyze everything. We dissect everything and then decide it was made up of pieces, but it was only that was after we made it so. There is no end to the minuteness that you can zoom in. There is no end to the factors you can take into account.
The Problem About Solving Problems
Solving problems is well and good, but the problem about solving problems is that it becomes a necessity. You will always be able to find another problem. Many people will create problems out of nothing because this problem focused mindset causes more problems because we're always focused on the problems and the fact that we think solving them will change something about ourselves. Solve problems or don't, but do not pretend that either course is better, for many of the problem causers were those looking to solve problems of their own.
How Do You Know You Want It?
How can you ask for enlightenment? If you don't know what it is, how can you want it? If you are seeking something that you want, it must be something you've already had. This means you are seeking the past. That's not it though is it, because you're looking for something new aren't you? What is new? I can only think of something new based off something old or something I once had. You don't need anything, you don't need religion, you don't need a mentor, a guide, or anything whatsoever. You can forget it all or you can realize that a large part of why people do it at all is because they enjoy doing so. You cannot escape this because then if you think by renouncing religion or having a mentor because in this way you are still seeking to secretly get a one up on life and not living genuinely. Everything you do should be done because you want to or else you cannot do so genuinely.
You Are Supposed To Call The Bluff
What any guru or teacher wants you to do is call the bluff. That's all any good teacher is trying to do to you. They want you to realize that they as the teacher have no actual authority or secret knowledge that you don't have yourself. They may have more trained skills of which you can attain via practice yourself, but there is no secret they have that will allow you to attain the things they have with minimal effort. The whole point is to push you to call the bluff and thus wake up. Whether the bluff being called is on luck, religion, or anything you can think of. Everything will fight against you on calling the bluff to really test your will and how serious you are about calling the bluff. Once you call the bluff, you're there. Only YOU can do this though.
Have Fun With It
You must realize that any form of ritual or religious activity is really just for fun. Have a ball with it, but don't take it so seriously that you don't enjoy the experience. In the same way people get together to sing or dance, it should be treated the same way like an art form. It can only be done genuinely if not done to attain anything. Most people pretend it's for fun, but really have a petition to ask from the omnipotence and hope that they are earning a special benefit. Salute the idols, read the scriptures, dance the dances, sing the songs, but don't get too worried about it. Don't take it too serious.
Way To Enlightenment
You can't sit and meditate unless you're already a Buddha in which case why meditate? Well meditation is just the way Buddha sits. He called this sitting just to sit, not in attempt to attain enlightenment. Once you have this egotistical goal, you've lost the point. The only way to actually benefit, is to not have any ulterior motive. It's impossible to do this ungenuinely and that's the point.
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Awesome video, let me know your thoughts. Some of this is speculation and relation to today from my point of view, but the majority is a summary of what Alan said. Cheers.