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"

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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.

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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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Delving into the historically complicated human relationship to divinity, Alan Watts describes the trap of separateness. 

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In this episode, Alan Watts explores:

• The sensation of our own existence 
• Jewish Christian mythology 
• Identifying with the tribe
• Universal law and the roots of justice
• Freud and the energies of the psyche 
• Man as a product of nature versus the supernatural

The idea that we were all subjects of a divine king you might say was a political model based on the organization of the great city-states of the ancient near east. That image, you see, has absolutely haunted Western man throughout his whole development because he has felt that he is in the universe on probation and sufferance. He doesn't quite belong here." – Alan Watts

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Offering us the possibility of waking up, Alan Watts contemplates the joyous cosmology that we are God playing the roles of ordinary people.

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In this episode, Alan Watts explores:

• If there could be a theory of the world that justifies and makes worthwhile the difficulties and suffering that we undergo
• The contemplation that an infinite omnipotent being would eventually get bored with being everything, so would begin to shield itself from this knowledge, and pretend to play the role of separate beings so it could experience the full thrill of waking up to itself
• The idea of reality as God playing a game of hide and seek with itself for it’s own excitement and cosmic joke
• The difference or potential complete non-difference between the experience and the experiencer
• That what you think of as outside yourself is actually just a hidden you

“We have within us a higher self who is pretending to be the ordinary everyday person that we are, who’s acting it. In other words, our everyday life is a dream from which we have the possibility of waking up.” – Alan Watts

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Sifting down behind the cultural myth of man as separate, Alan explores how we are all actually Earth, the Universe, and the Big Bang.

In this episode of Being in the Way, Alan takes us on a journey from childhood to adulthood, highlighting how we are trained into separation from a young age, and forced to focus on the never-arriving “future,” rather than being present in the moment. Through this lens, he further spelunks the “hoax of man” and offers insight into how this sense of ego identity creates tension and frustration.

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 discusses:

• How from childhood onward we are constantly preparing for something in the future, rather than being present for life
• The culture’s division of work and play, and the confused idea that money can buy you pleasure
• Growing up in society, identity, defining a person, and being a “genuine fake”
• How the sense of ego creates tension, separation, alienation, and frustration
• The inseparable connection of the polarity of self and other
• The dawn of creation and how we are not actually separate from the Big Bang
• The 19th-century myth that man is a fluke in an unintelligent, automatic universe

“Your actual self—what is finally and fundamentally you—is not a separate and lonely part of the world, but the real you is the world itself, everything that there is, expressing itself as this particular organism here and now.” – Alan Watts

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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In this unique episode of Being in the Way, Alan Watts offers tribute to the life, humor, magic and ‘nonsense wisdom’ of writer, G. K. Chesterton.

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 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.

“I read G.K. Chesterton’s works very carefully, and I have, by osmosis, imbibed an enormous amount of wisdom from him. Funny thing is, not so much in terms of specific ideas, as in basic attitude to life. This is a man, who above all virtues, has what I think is one of the greatest virtues which we don’t usually find catalogued—he had a sense of wonder.” – Alan Watts

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Exploring modern culture as actually anti-materialistic, Alan tackles matters of sedentariness, sensuousness, isolation, work, play, God, and sexuality.

Host, Mark Watts, returns to introduce another thought-provoking talk from his father, Alan Watts. In this powerful lecture—one of his earlier field recordings, entitled ‘The Unpreachable Religion,’—Alan turns our common idea of modern materialism on its head.

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 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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Alan Watts pulls back the veil of ‘the human game,’ digging into language, ethics, finding balance, and the art of the controlled accident. 

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, Mark Watts introduces Alan Watts in ‘Learning the Human Game’ – originally recorded at a seminar at the University of Michigan. In this lecture, Alan explores the connection between language and ethics, helping us understand why the perfect balance between randomness and order is the optimal middle-ground for experiencing life.

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.

“Mental health is a good game—and a good game is what keeps a certain balance between randomness and order. And a healthy society, therefore, is one which keeps a proper balance between law and whimsy.” – Alan Watts

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Contemplating the coincidence of opposites within the 'human game,' Alan ponders the simple yet thought-provoking question: is existence serious?

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 of Being in the Way, Mark introduces a lecture from his father Alan Watts called 'Coincidence of Opposites' – the first talk in a seminar called 'Learning the Human Game,' given in 1965 at the University of Michigan to a small group of psychology and philosophy grad students.

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.

"One has to get used fundamentally to the notion that different things can be inseparable—that what is explicitly two, can at the same time be implicitly one." – Alan Watts

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