Alan Watts and Terence McKenna talk about our need for a collective consciousness as our solvable global issues get neglected, causing us to become enemies of our planet and each other. Video produced by the Omega Point
What I am involves what you are, the problem is you see… We haven’t been taught to feel that way.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it–aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us.
– Alan Watts, The Nature Of Consciousness
It comes out of a personal act of courage made by the individual. An act of courage which involves Surrender. Surrender is the opposite side of the coin of Ego. The central issue of our times is the inability to surrender to what we KNOW is right.
We have the ability to feed the hungry, we have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment, to eliminate sexism, to eliminate racism. The question is: CAN WE CHANGE OUR MINDS FAST ENOUGH?
– Terence McKenna, MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Conference 1990
Alan Watts provides a philosophical analysis of the bible.
Alan Watts – Notable Excerpts
The Gospel of Jesus, which of course was hushed up since its inception, was that, wake up everybody and find out who you are.
Is it not written in your law, “I have said ye are gods.” And if that is what the scripture says it can’t be denied. So why do you tell me I blaspheme because I say, “I am a son of god.”
“Son of” in Hebrew and in Arabic means of the nature of. When we call someone a son of a bitch, we mean bitchy. And so if you call someone a son of god, you mean divine.
What happened was, that this being blasphemous for the Jews. It became blasphemy for the Christians for anyone else than Jesus to say it.
They said, “Ok baby it was so with you, but there it stops. No more of this business.” And as a result of that Jesus was made irrelevant by pedestalization, by being kicked up stairs! In spite of the fact that he’s said greater works than these, that I do, shall you do; oh no, upstairs with you baby…because we just can’t have that sorta thing going on in a monarchical universe. We are not gonna have democracy in the kingdom of heaven.
This is why the gospel is impossible, because we’re suppose to follow the example of Christ…where he says for example, “Be not anxious for the morrow. Do not worry about what you shall eat, what you shall drink and what you shall wear. God will take care of you! Doesn’t he take care of the birds? Don’t the flowers grow? And they’re wonderful, they’re crazy, they’re great. What are you worrying about? I’ve never heard a sermon preached on that…never. Because it’s totally subversive the economy would crash! So they say, “That’s all very well, but that was the boss’s son!” See he had that colossal advantage…
He had an unfair advantage. So how can you ask us to follow the example of Christ. But supposing he didn’t have an unfair advantage. Supposing that was true about Jesus as a son of god is true of us.
Why talk about this? Is it interesting? Is it important for the human being to realize that in some sense of the word, whatever it means, he is god or one with god?
The importance of it is this. To know that you are god is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it.
If you don’t know that. If you don’t feel that. Well naturally you feel alien. You feel a stranger in the world and if you feel a stranger you feel hostile. And therefore you start to bulldoze things about to beat it up and to try and make the world submit to your will.
You obviously can blame someone and say, “I didn’t ask for this! Take it away!” And yet very few people are all too ready to take it away. Camus said that the only serious philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide. And if you don’t, if you don’t say take it away. What are you gonna do? You really gotta assume responsibility for it, you have to say yes to what happens.
The real meaning of Karma, the word in Sanskrit means simply: doing. And if I say of an event, “it is your karma”, it is saying, “it is your doing.”
So the exposition, a book which would expound karma, would be not so much a who done it? But, a you done it. But that seems, fantastic.
Alan Watts discusses the perceptually blurred line between voluntary and involuntary actions.
Going through everyday life seemingly exercising free will while apart of a larger system of life and creation is wondrous. You are not only a part of the big picture, you are the big picture.
Alan Watts – Voluntary and Involuntary Actions Transcript
You see the problem is this; we identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
We have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary; we feel in control of those.
And then over against that there is all those things that are involuntary. But the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary.
Because for example, when you move your hand you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask yourself how do you decide?
When you decide to open your hand. Do you first decide to decide? You don’t do you. You just decide. And how do you do that? And if you don’t know how you do it; is it voluntary or involuntary?
Let’s consider breathing. You can feel that you breathe deliberately. You can control your breath. But when you don’t think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary or involuntary?
So we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self; that much of my activity that I feel I do.
That then doesn’t include breathing most of the time. It doesn’t include the heart beats. It doesn’t include the activity of the glands. It doesn’t include digestion. It doesn’t include how you shape your bones, circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things?
Now if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself; a very strange thing happens. You find that your body knows that you are one with the universe.
In other words, that the so called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shinning.
If you find out that it’s you who circulates your blood you will at the same moment find out that you are shinning the sun.
Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that is going on. Just as the waves are continous with the ocean. Your body is continous with the total energy system of the cosmos and its all you.
Only you’re playing the game that you’re only this bit of it. But as I’ve tried to explain there are in physical reality no such things as separate events.
So then remember also when I tried to work towards a definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done, it’s just doing it. You don’t have to translate it into language.
Alan Watts talks about how our society conditions children to live with constant frustration and worry about the future, and never learn how to live in the present. Society, A Perpetual Cycle by The Omega Point Project
We have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture and in various other cultures, high civilizations, to the new member of human society. Instead of saying frankly to children, ‘How do you do, welcome to the human race, we are playing a game! And we are playing by the following rules, we want to tell you what the rules are so that you’ll know your way around, and when you understand what rules we are playing by, when you get older you may be able to invent better ones.
But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation, he is not really a human being, he is a candidate for humanity, and in just this way we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life, which always is preparation, and never actually gets there.
We condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble, and therefore attended by constant frustration, and as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future. So that one is educated to live in the future and one is not ever educated to live today.
Now im not saying that let us drink today for tomorrow we die, and not make any plans. What i am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.
Alan Watts describes the nature of consciousness through a series of dream analogies.
Reality is a dream we share as one.
Alan Watts – The Connection Between Dreams and Consciousness Transcript
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death; or shall I say, death implies life. You can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world. Not as something here on probation. Not as something that has arrived here by fluke. But you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I’m not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it; I want you to play with it, I want you to think of its possibilities. I’m not trying to prove it. I’m just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes, you would have every kind of pleasure you could perceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say, “Well that was pretty great, but now let’s have a surprise! Lets have a dream which isn’t under control! Where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s gonna be”. And you would dig that and come out of that and say, “Wow that was a close shave wasn’t it!”.
Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today; that would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have, of playing that you weren’t god. Because the whole nature of the god head, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not god in a politically kingly sense but god in the sense of being the self; the deep down basic whatever there is. And you’re all that! Only you’re pretending you’re not.
In this lecture, Alan Watts expertly expresses eastern philosophiesthat look deeper into the question of what we all want.
We are in a game where we need to earn money for food and shelter, but what if that wasn’t the rule of the game? What if we lived in a society where money didn’t exist, what would get you up in the morning?
Alan Watts – What If Money Were No Object, Speech Transcript
What do you desire?
What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
Let’s suppose – I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say, “Well, uh, we’re getting out of college, and we haven’t the faintest idea of what we want to do.”
So I always ask the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”
Well, it’s so amazing. As a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers. But as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way.”
Or another person says, “I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses.”
I said, “Do you want to teach at a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?”
When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do. I will say to him, “you do that, and forget the money.
Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is STUPID!
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
And after all, if you do really like what your’e doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.
So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are.
But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is we’re bringing up children, and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. It’s all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there!
And so therefore it’s so important to consider this question. “What do I desire?”
Alan Watts explores the fear of enlightenment. Don’t be afraid of how great you are.
Supposing I say to you: each one of you is really the Great Self, the Brahman. And you say, ‘All you’ve said up to now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually. But I don’t really feel it. What must I do to feel it really?’ My answer to you is this: you ask me that question because you don’t want to feel it really. You’re frightened of it. And therefore what you’re going to do is you’re going to get a method of practice so you can put it off. So you can say, ‘Well, I can be a long time on the way of getting this thing, then maybe I’ll be worthy of it after I have suffered enough. See, because we are brought up in a social scheme where we have to deserve what we get and the price one pays for all good things is suffering. But all that is precisely postponement because one is afraid, here and now to see it.
“So, you know the story; when the sixth patriarch was given his office as successor, because he was truly enlightened, there was a poetry contest, and the losing one wrote the idea that the mind (the consciousness) was like a mirror, which had to be polished. And constantly, you know, I have to polish my mirror; I have to purify my mind, see? So that I am detached and calm and clear-headed, you know, Buddha. But the one who won the contest said that there is no mirror, and the nature of the mind is intrinsically void, so where is there anywhere for dust to collect? By seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it’s your reality, then how can anything contaminate you?”
