Alan Watts Being in the Way

Alan Watts reveals the harmony of embracing our human role while also recognizing that we are the entire cosmos.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on the Being in the Way podcast, Alan Watts discusses:

• Remembering our inherent oneness with all things
• Living on two levels at once: the relative world and the ultimate reality
• Understanding life as a “controlled accident” and learning to play our social roles on demand
• Pretending not to notice the fundamental light of existence 
• Seeing life’s most serious predicaments as part of a cosmic game
• Recognizing how our fascination with details can cause us to lose sight of the bigger picture
• Engaging fully in the game of life while recognizing our true nature

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.

"Deep down, who are you? That’s the thing that’s been forgotten. That’s the underside of the tapestry, the thing that’s been left out because what we are carefully taught to ignore is that every one of us, fundamentally, deep, deep inside, is an act of, function of, performance of, manifestation of the works, the whole blinking cosmos with all its galaxies.” –Alan Watts

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Dismantling the illusion of separation, Alan Watts shares how recognizing our fundamental unity with the universe transforms the way we live, perceive, and prepare for death.

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Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

This week on Being in the Way, Alan Watts lectures on:

• Playing hide and seek with our true selves
• How your body knows that you are one with the universe
• Seeing things versus noticing things
• The yoga of preparing for death  
• The partial view that the ego keeps us trapped in 
• The continuous energy of our bodies
• Dissolving the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior 
• The transaction between the individual and the world 

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.

“Doesn’t it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you’re doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it? You never learned, but you’re this miracle. From a strictly physical, scientific standpoint, this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that’s going on. If I am my foot, I am the sun. Only, we’ve got this little partial view. We’ve got the idea that ‘I’m just something in this body’, the ego, that’s a joke.” –Alan Watts

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Moving beyond the imagined boundary of form, Alan Watts explores the idea that humanity is a microcosm of the universe and that the two are inseparable. 

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts discusses:

• Considering whether being part of a whole means that we are the whole
• The radial structure of humanity, Earth, and all beings
• Recognizing that skin is not the boundary of man
• How foreign the inner workings of the human body seem to humanness
• The nature of the mind, likened to the nature of space
• The illusion of an individual operating from himself 
• Blending together materialism and mysticism, not getting too stuck in one or the other 

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.

“Any other way of looking at things is kind of schizoid. It looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a barren tree. They just got settled there, they don’t belong, a sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Well, where is this other domain, and how does it relate to this one?” –Alan Watts

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Alan Watts explores the inseparable dance between structure and formlessness, revealing why the universe can never be fully captured by words alone.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts outlines:

• Two distinct schools of thought: those who focus on structure, and those who focus on what Watts calls ‘goo’
• How fixating on practicality is like knowing all the words to a song without ever truly hearing the music
• The difference between a scientific perspective and a spiritual perspective 
• Why structure and formlessness are inseparable aspects of the same cosmic process
• Understanding that the universe cannot be explained with words alone

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.

"What is it? What is this universe? What is an atom? What is energy? The only answer that would really please me wouldn't be an ordinary answer, because it wouldn't be in words." –Alan Watts

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Inviting listeners to question the nature of reality, consciousness, and perception, Alan Watts explores the limits of what the mind can truly know.

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.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts explains:

• Solipsism and how it subtly shapes modern human consciousness
• The philosophical case for idealism and the nature of reality as mind-dependent
• Relativity and how things exist for the purpose of other things
• The mind as a mirror and the illusion of an objective, external viewpoint
• Considering how the spiritual world affects the material world
• The enduring philosophical question: What exists when no one is observing?
• The Four Buddhist Inconceivables and the limits of conceptual thought

"Being is always being for something; it is, in other words, relational. The sun is light for eyes. Eyes are organs of vision for a mind. If there are no eyes, the sun gives forth no light. If there are no nerve ends it gives forth no heat. If there are no muscles, nothing is heavy.” –Alan Watts

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In this new, technological age, Alan Watts explains how seeing reality via only one perspective can lead to a fragmented view of the world; instead, he encourages listeners to adopt both the analytical and the organic. 

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.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

In this episode, Alan Watts dives into:

• Living in an age of technology in a culture obsessed with rational control 
• How someone can easily be obstructed by their own cautiousness
• The problem of human ecology and how one should best relate to their environment
• Considering what our idea of heaven is and what desires we truly want 
• The western model of the universe (intellectual, architectural, mechanical) 
• Reductive thinking: seeing  the world through a net and making everything into a comprehensible, geometrical unit
• The fundamental difference between a mechanism and an organism 
• How understanding the world through only conscious attention can lead to seeing everything as parts rather than the whole picture
• Combining the academic, analytical mind with the organic, ‘gooey’ mind 

“Go to the science of medicine. You get a specialist who really understands the function of the gall bladder. He studied gall bladders ad infinitum, and he really thinks he knows all about it. But, whenever he looks at a human being, he sees them in terms of the gall bladder.” – Alan Watts

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Diving into the cosmic drama of reality, Alan Watts describes the world as a divine dream which is poetic, playful, and only sometimes serious.

Being in the Way 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.

On this episode of Being in the Way, Alan Watts:

• Exploring how we get caught in the cosmic game and drama of life
• Seeing the universe as the playful expression of divine energy
• Questioning identity: the tension between acting and simply being.
• Confronting the spiritual taboo of realizing the self as God—tat tvam asi.
• Indirect awareness of the networks and systems in the physical world 
• Music and the pure delight in complex orders of sound
• Embracing the paradox of existence as poetic, musical, and playful, while still being serious.
• Considering all of the senses as forms of one, larger sense of touch
• The oneness of up and down, black and white, being and non-being 
• Complexities of human culture that arise out of duality 

Today's podcast is sponsored by Betterhelp & Dharma Seed:

Being in the Way is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

Join Krishna Das, the most well-known voice of Bhakti chanting (Kirtan) in the West, and David Nichtern - a senior Buddhist teacher, founder of Dharma Moon, guitarist in Krishna Das’ band, and producer of several of his albums - for a warm and engaging conversation about these two paths, their shared roots, and how they intersect in contemporary spiritual practice. Learn more about this FREE online gathering - THE HEART & MIND OF PRACTICE: BUDDHISM & BHAKTI

"The real taboo is 'that art thou'. You, lurking behind the mask of being an impermanent human person, are really responsible for the whole thing. If anybody claims that in our culture, we put them straight away into an asylum. That is the very hallmark of insanity. But, in India, if someone suddenly wakes up one morning and says 'My goodness, I'm God', everybody says, instead of you're crazy or blasphemous, they say 'Congratulations, at last you've found out'". – Alan Watts

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Breaking free from cause-and-effect and the formal ideas of Confucianism, Alan Watts describes mutual arising as the key idea of the Tao.

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This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts describes:

• Chinese philosophies of Taoism and Confucianism
• Our roles in social life and Confucianism as the way for people involved in the world
• Taoism as the way for those who do not prescribe to formal patterns
• How the Taoist goes with nature rather than against nature
• Ideologies of God as a ruler or a lord versus the Taoist perspective
• Experiences in terms of their polar experience (loud vs. soft)
• Mutual arising as they key idea of the Tao
• Man as being within nature rather than dominating it
• How Taoism gets rid of karma without challenging it
• The Chinese philosophy of time
• Sensing the flow of the present and flow of the Tao

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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Re-familiarizing us with Zen traditions, Alan Watts inspires listeners to move beyond going through the motions of practice.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

In this episode of Being in the Way, Alan Watts explains:

• Our lack of awareness of the basic structure of the world
• The world itself as meaningless (non-symbolic)
• Realizing fundamental energy and Zen as the religion of no religion
• The metaphysical in terms of the everyday
• The composition of Zen practice
• How westerners are bothered by ritual and splendor
• How Buddhism has degenerated over the years
• A re-familiarization with Buddhism for modernity

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.

“There is this tremendous problem, unless the Buddhist tradition is to go down the drain completely, of re-familiarizing the Japanese with what it’s all about. Over the years it has degenerated into going through the motions and into being something which is just a kind of magic.” – Alan Watts

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Focusing on cosmic balance, Alan Watts outlines the fundamentals of Taoism and how to skillfully interfere with our environment.

Find the full Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident series of talks at play.alanwatts.org.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts shares a lecture on:

• The philosophy of Taoism
• Taoism as the flow of things / the course of nature
• The pervasive illusion of separateness and seeing it within our language
• How we only experience the world bit-by-bit
• A transformation of our everyday consciousness into oneness
• How we are all indestructible beyond the ego
• Life as a game of yin and yang, crests and troughs
• The fundamental idea of mutual arising
• How everything we do interferes with our environment
• Learning how to interfere skillfully

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.

“We are not ordinarily aware of how we’re aware, and as a result of that, we don’t understand our connection with the world, and we don’t understand what our real self is. We get anxious; we’re afraid that death may be the end of us. This is, of course, the purest superstition, because everybody is indestructible.” – Alan Watts

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