Universita Of Life

Alan Watts: The Nature Of Consciousness

There’s no point just in sustaining bliss. 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 conceive. 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. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.” And you would dig that, and come out of that and say “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” And 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 godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not.

The Nature Of Consciousness

People go to the supermarket, and they get a whole cartload of goodies, and they drive it through, then the clerk fixes up the counter and this long tape comes out, and he’ll say Thirty dollars, please, and everybody feels depressed because they give away thirty dollars’ worth of paper. But they’ve got a cartload of goodies; they don’t think about that. They think they’ve just lost thirty dollars. But you’ve got the real wealth in the cart; all you’ve parted with was the paper. Because the paper—in our system—becomes more valuable than the wealth. It represents power; potentiality. Whereas the wealth—you think Oh well, that’s just necessary. You’ve got to eat. I mean, that’s to be really mixed up.

Alan Watts Explains Why There Are No “Wrong” Feelings.

According to Alan Watts, your feelings are not wrong. There may be wrong actions in the sense of actions contrary to the rules of human communication. But the way you feel towards other people: loving, hating, et cetera, et cetera; there aren’t any wrong feelings.

And so, to try and force one’s feelings to be other than what they are is absurd. And furthermore: dishonest.

Alan describes the ways in which we have concealed truth behind a veil of thoughts. He talks about how and why we mistake symbols for reality, argues that civilization may be a misguided experiment, offers observations about the way in which abstractions have become more powerful than the realities they are referencing, and explains how we can become “unbamboozled” from these ways of thinking.

An individual feels that his life amounts to something when he belongs and fits in with the execution of some group enterprise; he feels he belongs in a plan. And this too seems to give people a sense of great satisfaction, but we have to pursue that question further too. Why is it that a plan – why is it that fellowship with other people gives a sense of meaning? Does it come down perhaps to another sense of meaning that life is felt to be meaningful when one is fully satisfying one’s biological urges, including the sense of hunger, the sense of love, the sense of self-expression inactivity, and so on? But then again, we have to push that inquiry further. What do our biological urges really point towards? Are they just, however, things always projected towards a future? Are biology and its processes nothing but “going on towards going on towards going on”?

Nowadays, we are made to believe that we can, with a bit of luck, all have relatively pain and error-free lives. The reality is life is fundamentally catastrophic and tragic in structure. None of us will get through this life without some grave and searing reversals and that's okay. Going through those catastrophic times doesn't mean we've been cursed, we're just human - and we need to be prepared and have plenty of compassion for ourselves and others. Understanding and acknowledging that this happens and is actually essential to our personal growth helps us prepare and deal with them better.

The thought of death is often terrifying and rightly so. Ofcourse we don’t want to die, nobody wants to but thinking about it and accepting it will come hopefully later than sooner can help us live the life want to. We should use the thought of death as a motivation to go on living and achieving every dream and desire we always had.



The thought of death can do alot of good and should be embraced. Great message from Alain De Botton