Alan Watts

Now, who hasn’t come across this figure if you’ve even touched the world of ‘spirituality’.

YouTube algorithm especially loves the man.

And why not!

He’s fabulous. With the mystique of a wizard and the sense of humour of a kindly uncle.

He’s a great guide through the world of the mysterious.

Here are some notes from various sources that I have recorded of him:

On growth: remember, an oak is no better than an acorn. After all, what does the oak produce but more acorns. The oak is just an acorns way of becoming more acorns. So do not see yourself as more superior to people who are not spiritually enlightened. We are living different life’s.

On perspective: we can look at something through a microscope or through our eyes and it looks different. A face becomes a mass of dots. Could it be that we see our lives on the microscopic level, and that actually where there is conflict or meaninglessness, at a macro level there is great harmony.

Existence is musical in nature. It is playful. It’s not about getting to the end of the composition. It’s not about achieving some goal.

Pleasure cannot be experienced when one is grasping it. To have life you must let go of it. Like having sex and making orgasm the object.

You are aware of your own head, your own self, only in terms of experience. You have an inner view whereas you see the outer view of other peoples heads. Yours is based on the neurons and senses and connections. (In that sense, maximum experiences would reveal maximum amount of the self and it would make sense why god is experiencing itself through humans)

Explanation is just a form of trying to achieve control. Complexity is created by our attempted to analyze and explain. A flower could be explained by a botanist and it would be very hard to follow. But it is simple. Words are clumsy to explain things and we do not need to analyze.

You can’t sit and meditate unless you’re already a Buddha. So why meditate? Meditation is just the way the Buddha sits. And so it is sitting just to sit. If you’re thinking about enlightenment you’re not meditating. You only become a good mediator if you’re not looking for anything

Do not take religion seriously. It is just an art form, and expression of something, something to be enjoyed. And it can only be a good art form if you’re not using it to get something. It is like playing poker or going sailing or chanting together.

“Now I know the word discipline isn’t very popular these days. And I would like to have a new word for it, because most people who teach disciplines don’t teach them very well. They teach it with a kind of violence. As if a discipline was something that is it going to be extremely unpleasant and you’re going to have to put up with. But that’s not the real secret of discipline. I would prefer to use the word skill. And discipline is a way of expression. Say, when you want to express your feelings in stone. Now stone doesn’t give way very easily. It’s tough stuff, and so you have to learn the skill of the discipline of the sculptor in order to express yourself in stone and so in every other way whatever you do you require a skill and it’s enormously important especially for American people to understand that there is absolutely no possibility of having any pleasure in life at all without skill. Money doesn’t buy pleasure.”

Discipline is less about forcing yourself to do something and more about learning how to do something. Alan Watts was a teacher of Eastern philosophies, which have a common thread of “letting go.” Rather than viewing discipline as an act where we overcome the opposition in our minds through sheer willpower, we can instead learn to let go of the opposition and accept what it is before us.

Money is a measuring stick, like inches or kilos. It is an abstraction. People think that prosperity comes from money but it’s the other way around. We have confused the symbol with what it’s supposed to represent.

What we call life is fundamentally willingness to die. We must take a gamble. If there is no chance in a game, it is no fun. It must be a balance between skill and chance. And we must trust the game. We must act out of faith.

Self policing culture is like using the left hand to control the right. You lose a hand. A self conscious individual is so worried about himself that he can do no right thing.

Who am I is another way of asking what do I want.

When you don’t know what you want you’ve reached the stage of desirelessness.

In the first stage you don’t know what you want because you haven’t thought about it. Or you’ve only thought about it superficially.

In the second stage, you think you’d like certain thing. Then the final stage, you ask if that’s what you really want. But you know that isn’t it. You know you might be satisfied for a while.

Why don’t you really know what you want? Two reasons. One, you have it. Two, you don’t know yourself because you never can. The god head does not know itself. A knife doesn’t cut itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself. I don’t know is the same thing as I love, I let go, I don’t try to force or control. It’s the same thing as humility. If you think you understand Brahman, you do not understand. If you do not think you understand, then you know it.

Any time you voluntarily let up control, cease to cling to yourself, you have an access of power. You are wasting energy all the time in self defence, trying to conform things to your will. When you let go, that wasted energy is available. At the sense you are one with the divine principle. When you try to act as if you were God (you don’t trust anybody) you lose the energy of the divine.

The more you give it away, the more it comes back. If you don’t give it away because you are afraid, you must realise that you better give it away because there is no holding onto it. The meaning of the fact that everything is dissolving constantly, in a state of constant death, is your helper. It allows you that you don’t have to let go because there’s nothing to hold onto. It’s achieved for you by the process of nature.

When you get behind this idea, suddenly you have all the power. It didn’t come to you because you grabbed it, quite the opposite. It’s power with which you can be trusted.

Your behaviour cannot be separated from the behaviour of the environment. The secret paradox of life is that for every inside there is an outside and they must look as different as possible but underneath it all they are the same thing. You are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when the sea has waves on it, the ocean is waving. Each one of us is a waving of the cosmos.

We have two kinds of consciousness.

One I call with the spotlight and the other the floodlight. The spotlight is what we called conscious attention and that is trained into us from childhood as the most important consciousness. Fixing your mind on one thing at a time. Even though you may not have a long attention span you concentrate.

The floodlight - for example you can drive a car for several miles with your friendship next to you and yet your spotlight is completely engaged in conversation and your floodlight gets you home. In our culture we say that ‘I am my spotlight attention. That is me. My ego’. Floodlight consciousness is working all the time. Every nerve end we have is it’s instrument.

We are unaware of the vast extent of our being. People who become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness experience awakening, moksha (liberation), cosmic experience. They experience that the deep self, that which you are fundamentally forever, is the whole of being.

When you use the word I, as William James said this is a word of position like ‘this’ or ‘here’. Just as a sun has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself in variations of you.

“You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only one you know. Everyone operates on certain basic assumptions but very few know what they are.”

Thought experiment: if you could design heaven ln earth, what would it look like? If you could control your dreams so each night would last 70 years, what would you do? First you might enjoy all sorts of sensual pleasures and adventures. Soon you would want to forget you were dreaming at all. And then you would want to completely lose control and leave life to chance for the thrill. And maybe that’s what you’re doing now.

“Thus the true meaning of life is no meaning. It’s purpose is no loud pose. Its sense now nonsense. But still we still call it signifancat. It is not just chaos. It has in it rhythm. Fasinating complexity. A kind of artistry. It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we get the profoundest meaning.”

The invisibility of god is his self forgetfulness. The visibility of the world is the game being played.

One of the peculiar properties of self Consciousness is to be able to know it’s a game and yet enjoy doing it. It’s like being happy and knowing you’re happy. A lot of people are afraid of it. That saying they are happy will means it stops. Like being too conscious of digesting your food. There’s a point there where enjoying dinner very slowly turns into disgust. Lowing it’s a game and yet enjoying it has a certain level of resonance. Not giving the show away but giving it away enough can be quite fascinating. That is the joker’s function.

The joker gets the giggles when people take the game too seriously. When he sees that reality is a game, it is not a mere game. Hamlet, although a play, is not just a play. The idea of game is that the nature of the world is musical. It is doing all these forms just to do them. It has no purpose beyond doing it.

Part of the fun of the game is to take it seriously.

The art of the joker is to give the show away that it is a game and yet keep the show going on.

Just as the balances of a garden, in which the birds eating the worms and the snails eating the lettuce. All these processes of conflict build up the ongoing miracle of the garden itself. So in the same way things you see in yourself as neuroses, forms of I’ll health, things that you shouldn’t be, they are your slugs and worms. There is nothing at all in your whole being that’s unnatural. All of it is an integral part of the game.

One can only be moral because you like to do it that way. There really is no other reason whatsoever and to find other reasons always perverts morality.

Positive and negative are always in a constant battle. One is required for the other. But positive must always win. Else if negative did, this would cease to be a game. It would be an ongoing tragedy.

Understanding only comes when logic and intellect are transcended

Wanting a positive experience is itself a negative experience. Accepting a negative experience is a positive experience

If bees nests are natural. So too are buildings.

All words are classifiers and we understand them by contrast with other words. Black and white. One and many.