Alan Watts Being in the Way

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.

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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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Explaining the delicate balance of religiousness, Alan Watts lectures on the principle of leaving no trace.

“Religion of No Religion” is part of the Japan Tour 1965 series of talks that you can listen to in full over at the Alan Watts Streaming Channel

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 explains:

• How the highest kind of a Buddha is like an ordinary person
• Imitation and how all religious comments about life become cliches
• The way of the enlightened man as the track of a bird in the sky
• Zen Buddhism and the dance between metaphysical and ordinary
• Balance and compatibility between universality and the particulars
• The problem with being too spiritual or too worldly
• The connection of all events in the universe, past, present, and future
• How everything in the universe depends upon each 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.

“All religion, all religious comments about life, eventually become cliches. That’s why religion always is falling apart and becoming a certain kind of going through the motions, a kind of imitation of attitudes.” – Alan Watts

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In a lecture on symbolic reality versus real reality, Alan Watts explains the importance of total sensory awareness and looking at our motivations.

"Symbolic Reality vs. Real Reality" is part of Flow, a three-part session in the TAO for NOW series of talks that you can listen to in full over at the Alan Watts Streaming Channel

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:

• Being aware of all sensory inputs while meditating
• Allowing oneself ‘to be’ in a non-conceptual way
• Confusing the world of symbols for reality
• The limits to what we can enjoy in a material sense
• The uselessness of guilt
• Money, tithes, and western religion versus gurus
• Why our motivation and intention matters
• Experiencing life naked and directly
• The Taoist approach to letting go of your body-mind
• Using all five of our senses to witness our surroundings

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.

“The point is to be wide, wide awake and aware of your total sensory input without confusing it with the symbolic world of words and concepts so that you experience life naked and directly. Experience YOU naked and directly, without having in your head the concept of who you are a a role player, as a personality, as an ego.” – Alan Watts

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Join us on a journey of contemplation and enlightenment in this captivating introduction to Taoism.

Discover the profound wisdom of Taoist philosophy with Alan Watts as he invites us to embrace the course of nature. Through insightful exploration, he delves into the timeless significance of Yin and Yang, illustrating their inseparable connection and guiding us toward a deeper understanding of harmony and balance in existence.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this episode, Alan Watts speaks about:

• Ancient Chinese philosophies
• How social institutions are mistaken for the real world
• The self, Confucianism, and the roles we play in life
• Taoism and the basic energy of the universe
• Tao as the force of nature
• How space and solid are two facets of one reality
• Yang and Yin, positive and negative, male and female
• Conscious dying and preparing to let go
• Acting in accordance with 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.

“It is the inner connection, or rather the inseparability of Yang and Yin, which is what is meant by Tao. That’s why Tao cannot be explained. The reason again if I may put it in another way is that all thinking is classification. It’s asking ‘is you is or is you aint’. Is it this or is it that. After all, if you want to say something is inside it requires an outside. You can’t have an inside without an outside or an outside without an inside.” – Alan Watts

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Taking a trip through the constructs of form and labeling, Alan Watts philosophizes about the limits of language.

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit play.alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts philosophizes about:

• Unexamined systems of belief underneath language
• Ideas that are built into our common sense
• The substance of form, pattern, and organization
• The profound mystery of matter
• Limitations in trying to use language to define the ineffable
• ‘Matter’ as a root word for many things
• Chinese views of nature
• Why verbs do not necessarily need subjects
• Being at peace with ourselves in a world of form
• Recognizing the universe as a process

“When we divide the world into operations and agents, doers and doings, then we ask such silly questions as ‘who knows, who does it, what does it?’ When the what that is supposed to do it is the same as the doing. You could very easily see that the whole process of the universe may be understood as process, nobody is doing it.” – Alan Watts

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In celebration of the waters that bring life to all things, Alan Watts reflects on the separation between human civilization and the natural world.

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit play.alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this unique and experimental recording, Alan Watts discusses:

• The beauty of life on the waters in Sausalito, California
• The rhythms of nature
• Time and timelessness
• The transformation of one form into another
• The separation of man from the natural world
• Objecting and Objectifying the world
• Identity and being able to know knowing
• The spacious environment of the ocean

“Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it’s not clock or calendar time, it has no urgency. It’s timeless time, because I know I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years.” – Alan Watts

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Using wisdom from Eastern philosophies, Alan Watts explains why Westerners should let go of any preconceived notions of God.

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.

This Alan Watts lecture features a discussion on:

• Comparative studies on religion
• The absurdity of Christian imperialism
• Superiority and lack of faith
• The difference between faith and belief
• Blasphemy and those who claim to be God
• The political image of God in the west
• The ceramic model of the universe (material and form)
• Hindu mythology and drama
• Self-discovery of supreme reality
• The meaning of Maya
• Punitive reasons why people say that God is dead
• Fixed notions of God as idolatry
• Contemplative prayer and letting go of our ideas of God
• Existence as relationship
• Buddhist vows versus western obedience
• Looking beyond the skin-encapsulated ego

“It must be understood that the crux of the Hindu and Buddhist disciplines is an experience, not a theory, not a belief.” – Alan Watts

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Bringing awareness to ecstatic grace, Alan Watts enlightens us on the sexual archetypes formed by religion.

Two cultural icons. Two unique perspectives... One understanding of the presence of the way.

Ram Dass' Love Serve Remember Foundation and the Alan Watts Organization invite you to open your mind, open your heart, and tap into the living truth of Alan Watts and Ram Dass. Learn more about this special 4-week Virtual Course:"The Presence of the Way: The Dharma of Alan Watts and Ram Dass"

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this recording, Alan Watts lectures on:

• Baptism, confirmation, and religious initiation
• Masturbation and other supposedly sinful behaviors
• Defiance and wickedness
• The material world and sexuality
• The Semitic vs. Greek perspective on sex
• Sexual energy for reproduction rather than pleasure
• The fall in the Garden of Eden
• The institution of marriage
• Women throughout western literature
• Love and the illogical promises we make
• Prudism and extreme monogamy
• Subtle eroticism in the Victorian era
• How repression may lead to being overcame
• Libido as a fundamental reality
• Sexuality in religious iconography
• The function of sexual play beyond utilitarianism
• Sex as a sacramental expression of love
• Seeing the divine aspect in a lover

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.

“The function of sexual play is not merely the survival and utilitarian function of reproducing the species as it is among animals to a very large extent. What peculiarly distinguishes human sexuality is that it brings the partners closer and closer to each other in an intense state of united feeling. In other words, it is a sacrament, the outward invisible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, bringing about love.” – Alan Watts

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This time on the Being in the Way Podcast, Alan Watts delves into questions of identity, purpose and buying into the ‘Myth of Myself’.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

In this episode, Alan Watts explores:

• The question of our own identity and our place in the world
• Myths of the self handed down through history
• Viewing ourselves and the world with a “floodlight consciousness” – rather than the narrow “spotlight consciousness” we are taught to see the world through
• How we are not born into this world, but grow out of it – “In the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”

“The most fascinating problem in the world is who am I? What do you feel when you say the word I? I myself?

This problem has fascinated me for many years. Most Western people locate their ego inside their heads. This is the ordinary average conception of what is oneself.” – Alan Watts

This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit https://Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

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Picking up from our last episode, Alan elucidates faith versus belief, and how our individual existence is connected with the totality of the universe.

Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alan

From his houseboat in Sausalito, CA, Alan Watts explores:

• The two great myths which underly our Western sense of identity: the Judeo-Christian myth of an overly intelligent universe founded by a cosmic king; and the material myth of a universe which is mechanical, un-intelligent, and empty
• The problem of “believing” in God, versus the real attitude of faith which is being open to whatever reality is
• Finding out who we are beyond social institutions like time, money, value, language, and survival
• How you as an individual implies by your existence everything else in the universe

“The problem about believing in God, incidentally, is that believing is the wrong attitude. Believing is a form of mistrust, because it’s saying, ‘I fervently wish that you exist, and if you don’t, I don’t know what to do with myself.’ The real attitude of faith is not believing, but simply being open to whatever reality is, and to say you don’t know.” – Alan Watts

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