Daniele Bolelli is a professor that emphasis engagement and humor in his teachings, endearing himself to creative stoners who can’t tolerate stale lectures. Most people know Bruce Lee for his movies, but Bolelli, like many thinkers, is influenced by Lee’s philosophy on development and potential:
Styles, according to Bruce Lee, limit the tools available to martial artists and restrict their freedom. Styles, with all their traditions, rigid rules and methodologies, are ideological prisons where innovation and experimentation are not welcome.
“Art lives where absolute freedom is, because where it is not, there can be no creativity.”
“Man, the living, creating individual, is always more important than any established style.”
– Bruce Lee
What Lee suggested instead was a process of constant personal research. Rather than entrusting oneself to prepackaged conclusions, Lee openly advocated for the necessity to create one’s own path.
Every individual is unique, he reasoned. Therefore it is suicidal to follow another person’s method and path. His approach was as simple as it was effective:
1. Research your own experience.
2. Absorb what is useful.
3. Reject what is useless.
4. Add what is specifically your own
In these words, Lee distilled an incredible dose of bravery and intellectual honesty to be applied to the martial arts, knowledge in general, and to life itself.
Alan Watts explains why our culture is destructive. Offering the possibility that an underlying unconscious thematic pattern within humanity is causing our disconnection with the world and ourselves.
Alan Watts – What is Wrong With Our Culture Transcript
Why is it that we don’t seem to be able to adjust ourselves to the physical environment without destroying it?
Why is it that in a way this culture represents in a unique fashion the law of diminishing returns. That our success is a failure. That we are building up – in other words, an enormous technological civilization which seems to promise the fulfillment of every wish almost at the touch of a button.
And yet as in so many fairy tales when the wish is finally materialized, they are like fairy gold, they are not really material at all. In fact, so many of our products, our cars, our homes, our clothing, our food. It looks as if it were really the instant creation of pure thought; that is to say it’s thoroughly insubstantial, lacking in what the connoisseur of wine calls body.
And in so many other ways, the riches that we produce are ephemeral, and as the result of that we are frustrated, we are terribly frustrated. We feel that the only thing is to go on getting more and more. And as a result of that the whole landscape begins to look like the nursery of a spoiled child – who’s got too many toys and is bored with them and throws them away as fast as he gets them; plays with them for a few minutes.
Also we are dedicated to a tremendous war on the basic material dimensions of time and space. We want to obliterate those limitations. We want to get everything done as fast as possible. We want to convert the rhythms and the skills of work into cash. Which indeed you can buy something with, but you can’t eat it.
And then rush home, to get away from work and begin the real business of life, to enjoy ourselves. You know, for the vast majority of American families, what seems to be the real point of life, what you rush home to get to. Is to watch an electronic reproduction of life, you can’t touch, it doesn’t smell, and it has no taste. You might think that people getting home to the real point of life in a robust material culture would go home to a colossal banquet or an orgy of love-making or a riot of music and dancing, but nothing of the kind.
It turns out to be this purely passive, contemplation of a twittering screen. You see mile after mile of darkened houses with that little electronic screen flickering in the room. Everybody isolated, watching this thing, and thus in no real communion with each other at all. And this isolation of people into a private world of their own is really the creation of a mindless crowd.
And so, we don’t get with each other except for public expressions of getting rid of our hostility, like football or prizefighting. And even in the spectacles one sees on this television, it’s perfectly proper to exhibit people slugging and slaying each other, but oh dear no, not people loving each other, except in a rather restrained way. One can only draw the conclusion that the assumption underlying this is that expressions of physical love are far more dangerous than expressions of physical hatred.
And it seems to me that a culture that has that sort of assumption is basically crazy and devoted – unintentionally indeed – but nevertheless in-fact devoted not to survival, but to the actual destruction of life.
Alan Watts shares his thoughts on reality, our shared connection and the process of waking up to fundamental truths.
Alan Watts – The Way of Waking Up (Transcript)
So then, here’s the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are: That there is the central self, you can call it God, you can call it anything you’d like – and it’s all of us.It’s playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere. And it’s playing the game of hide-and-seek with itself, it gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest out adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself.
And when you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’re going to stay pretending, that you’re just a little – poor little me. And since you’re all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture, I assume that you’re all on the process of waking up. Or else, you are teasing yourselves, with some kind of flirtation with waking up, which you are not serious about. But I will assume that maybe you are, not serious, but sincere, that you are ready to wake up.
So then, when you’re in the way of waking up, and finding out who you really are. You meet a character called a Guru; as the Hindu’s say this word: the teacher, the awakened. And what is the function of a guru? He’s the man who looks at you in the eye and says (laughs) “Oh, Come on..” (laughs)…”I know who you are.” You know, you come to the guru and say “Sir, I have a problem, I’m unhappy and I want to get one-up on the universe or I want to become enlightened – I want spiritual wisdom.” Ah, the guru looks at you and says “Who are you?”
You know Shri Ramana Maharshi that great Hindu sage of modern times? People used to come to him and say “Master, who was I in my last incarnation?”, as if that mattered. And he would say “Who is asking the question?” – and he would look at you and say “Basically go right down to it, you’re looking at me – you’re looking out, and you are unaware of what’s behind your eyes..go back in, find out who you are. Where the question comes from, why you ask.” And if you look at a photograph of that man – I have a gorgeous photograph of him, and you look in those – I walk by it everytime I go out of the front door, and I look at those eyes, and the humor, the lilting laugh, it’s a – ho ho, come on….(laughs) SHIVA, I recognize you.
When you come to my door and you say “I’m so-and-so.” I say “ha-ha” what a funny way god has come on today. (laughs) There are sorts of tricks of course a guru will play..they..they well, they’re going to put you through the mill. And the reason they do that, is simply: you won’t wake up, until you feel you’ve paid a price for it. In other words, the sense of guilt that one has or sense of anxiety is simply the way one experiences keeping the game of disguise going on. Do you see that? Supposing you say: “I feel guilty.” Christianity makes you feel guilty for existing. That somehow the very fact that you exist is an affront. You uh, a fallen human being.
I remember as a child when we went to the services of the church on good Friday, they gave us each a colored postcard with Jesus crucified on it, and it said underneath: This have I done for thee, what doest thou for me. You know you felt awful, you nailed that man to the cross. Because you eat steak, you have crucified Christ. Cause you’ve killed the bull, but after all you depend on it. Mithra, it’s the same mystery. And what are you going to do about that? This have I done for thee, what doest thou for me. You feel awful, that you just exist at all.But that sense, that sense of guilt, is the veil across the sanctuary:Don’t you dare come in!
In order to, you know, in all mysteries when you’re going to be initiated, there’s somebody saying: “uh, uh, uh, uh, don’t you come in – you’ve got to fulfill this requirement, and this requirement, and this requirement, this requirement, then we’ll let you in.” So you go, you go through the mill. Why? Because this is, you’re saying to yourself: “I won’t wake up until I feel I deserve it, I won’t wake up until I’ve made it difficult for me to wake up – so I invent for myself an elaborate system of delaying my waking up. I put myself through this test and that test and when I feel it’s been sufficiently arduous then I may at last admit to myself who I really am, and draw aside the veil.”
And realize that after all, when all is said and done…I am that I am. Which is the name of god. And when it comes to it, that’s really rather funny. They say in Zen, when you attain satori, nothing is left to you at that moment but to have a good laugh.
But naturally, all masters, Zen masters, Yoga masters, every kind of master, puts up a barrier. And says to you…He simply plays your own game, you know, we say anybody who goes to a psychiatrist or has his head examined, because you, when you go to a psychiatrist you define yourself as someone who ought to have his head examined. Same way the Zen masters say anybody who studies Zen or goes to a Zen master ought to be given 30 blows with a stick. Because he was stupid enough to pose the question that he had a problem. But you’re the problem, you put yourself in the situation. So, it’s a question fundamentally: Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?
Comedian George Carlin explains how money and religion have taken a big shit on human potential:
The Wrong Turn
I realized that I really didn’t care about the outcome on this planet, I didn’t care what happened to the human species. This is a species that was given great gifts and had great potential and squandered them. I think this species squandered them.
I think it choose poor ways of organizing itself, socially and politically. I think it made a wrong turn when it came to buying the okidoke that the spiritual leaders gave, the high priest. We turned it over to the high priest and the traitors.
It’s commerce and religion that have ruined and spoiled the potential of this species. And in this country the same two things are true, but this country is the leader in the decay of the soul.. if you will.. I use that metaphorically, I just don’t care what happens to this country.
Hypnosis of False Promises
Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do.
And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time.
But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money. That kinda shit is very limiting. It’s very limiting for this brain we have.
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.
An artistic visual presentation of a Terence McKenna lecture that explores simulation theory and how code can be the language behind our DNA, space, time, matter, and energy.
Terence McKenna -DNA, Life Codes Lecture Excerpts
In other words, we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations like quantum connectivity. It’s one thing to bask in the overarching metaphor, which says that everything is connected to everything else. It’s quite another thing to say, and so then what are the consequences, for me, of this? The answer seems to me to be that the inside of our imagination, the inside of our heads really is the most vast frontier imaginable, and we must leave it for future generations figure out why an animal nervous system would evolve a propensity for accessing non-local data, in other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the physics of things.
What we have to grapple with is that it is so, that you have the Hubble telescope inside of you. You have inside of you an informational gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence about things so immeasurably distant from this point that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless. It’s just elsewhere; the elsewhere of the absolute infinite of the plenum of the imagination in which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea, and of course the psychedelics are the naturally evolved nano-machinery of the Gaian matrix that knits together this cosmic ecology, this system of living relationships.
George Carlin makes fun of the ten commandments and gives the list a needed revision in this clip from his stand up comedy special When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops (2004)
George Carlin – Ten Commandments Transcript
I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Why are there ten? We don’t need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It’s clearly a padded list.
Here’s how it happened: About five thousand years ago, a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to figure out how they could control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so these guys announced that God— God personally—had given one of them a list of Ten Commandments that he wanted everyone to follow. They claimed the whole thing took place on a mountaintop, when no one else was around.
But let me ask you something: When these guys were sittin’ around the tent makin’ all this up, why did they pick ten? Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I’ll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. They knew if they tried eleven, people wouldn’t take them seriously. People would say, “What’re you kiddin’ me? The Eleven Commandments? Get the fuck outta here!”
But ten! Ten sounds important. Ten is the basis for the decimal system; it’s a decade. It’s a psychologically satisfying number: the top ten; the ten most wanted; the ten best-dressed. So deciding on Ten Commandments was clearly a marketing decision. And it’s obviously a bullshit list. In truth, it’s a politic; document, artificially inflated to sell better.
I’m going to show you how you can reduce the number of commandments and come up with a list that’s a bit more logical and realistic. We’ll start with the first three, and I’ll use the Roman Catholic version because those are the ones I was fed as a little boy.
I AM THE LORD THY GOD, THOU SHALT NOT HAVE STRANGE GODS BEFORE ME.
THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN.
THOU SHALT KEEP HOLY THE SABBATH.
Okay, right off the bat, the first three commandments—pure bullshit “Sabbath day,” “Lord’s name,” “strange gods.” Spooky language. Spooky language designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious mumbo jumbo like this apply to the lives of intelligent, civilized human in the twenty-first century. You throw out the first three commandments, am you’re down to seven.
HONOR THY FATHER AND MOTHER.
This commandment is about obedience and respect for authority; in other words it’s simply a device for controlling people. The truth is, obedience and respect should not be granted automatically. They should be earned. They should be based on the parents’ (or the authority figure’s) performance. Some parents deserve respect. Most of them don’t. Period. We’re down to six.
Now, in the interest of logic—something religion has a really hard time with—I’m going to skip around the list a little bit:
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.
THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS.
Stealing and lying. Actually, when you think about it, these two commandments cover the same sort of behavior: dishonesty. Stealing and lying. So we don’t need two of them. Instead, we combine these two and call it “Thou shalt not be dishonest.” Suddenly we’re down to five.
And as long as we’re combining commandments I have two others that belong together:
THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.
THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR’S WIFE.
Once again, these two prohibit the same sort of behavior; in this case, marital infidelity. The difference between them is that coveting takes place in the mind. And I don’t think you should outlaw fantasizing about someone else’s wife, otherwise what’s a guy gonna think about when he’s flogging his dong?
But marital fidelity is a good idea, so I suggest we keep the idea and call this commandment “Thou shalt not be unfaithful.” Suddenly we’re down to four.
And when you think about it further, honesty and fidelity are actually parts of the same overall value. So, in truth, we could combine the two honesty commandments with the two fidelity commandments, and, using positive language instead of negative, call the whole thing “Thou shalt always be honest and faithful.” And now we’re down to three.
THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR’S GOODS.
This one is just plain stupid. Coveting your neighbor’s goods is what keeps the economy going: Your neighbor gets a vibrator that plays “O Come All Ye Faithful,” you want to get one, too. Coveting creates jobs. Leave it alone.
You throw out coveting and you’re down to two now: the big, combined honesty/fidelity commandment, and the one we haven’t mentioned yet:
THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
Murder. The Fifth Commandment. But, if you give it a little thought, you realize that religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.
To cite a few examples, just think about Irish history, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is negotiable. It just depends on who’s doing the killing and who’s getting killed.
And so, with all of this in mind, folks, I offer you my revised list of the Two Commandments:
First:
THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE HONEST AND FAITHFUL, ESPECIALLY TO THE PROVIDER OF THY NOOKIE.
And second:
THOU SHALT TRY REAL HARD NOT TO KILL ANYONE, UNLESS, OF COURSE, THEY PRAY TO A DIFFERENT INVISIBLE AVENGER THAN THE ONE YOU PRAY TO.
Two is all you need, folks. Moses could have carried them down the hill in his pocket. And if we had a list like that, I wouldn’t mind that brilliant judge in Alabama displaying it prominently in his courthouse lobby. As long he included one additional commandment:
Steve Cutts presents a short hand-drawn animation on how a lame job can consume your life.
In a bearable but uninspiring job, the days slip by so freely that suddenly you wake up to find a decade has gotten behind you and you’re nowhere closer to anything you love.
With the exception of what simple pleasures you can cram in on weekends and evenings, it isn’t life, it’s a slow death.
There is too much up for grabs for the intelligent and passionate individual to pass the years that way. – David Cain, What Passion Will Buy You
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.
