5 Mind Blowing Alan Watts Quotes - 100th Birthday Edition

In light of Alan Watt's 100th Birthday (were he still alive) today, I thought I would share some of his wisdom with the world. This is my second Alan Watts Quotes post, so feel free to check out the previous article if you are still yearning for more. Enjoy!

1. "By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us."

2. "It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable--it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical" reasons of economics, politics, and technology.. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation."

3. "The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself."

4. "Everything is standing right out in the open, it's just a question of how you look at it. So you do discover when you realize this, the most extraordinary thing that I never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as you look around you. So far so good. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are look right at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having that you call ordinary everyday consciousness--pretending you're not it--that experience is exactly the same thing as IT. There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery. In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that all points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating a skinless drum, no light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything."

5. "Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. 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 on how to do it."

Rest in peace :)

One Cosmic Dance

Experience, the universe, is a unified process seen through a fragmented consciousness filter (ego). Each sense, each object, each person, each moment is put into a mental box. This labeling, however useful it may be, has put us under self-hypnosis creating a split world with separate objects. In reality, no one thing in and of itself exists. It is all relative. It is all one. 

Ten thousand things, one Tathata, one Suchness. 

And so there is the Observer and the Observed. We identify with the Observer and in-turn disconnect with the Observed. Without the Observed, there can be no Observer. The two are one. You are one. It is one. See the split, see the divided as one. Look. 

Every morning, 

before you begin the day, 

bring yourself back to the unity of experience. 

Every sentence needs a subject. The universe does not. This is why the Truth cannot be uttered. And too the Truth is always new, always fresh with the spontaneity of the moment. If something is thought, if something is said, like each word of a sentence, it goes on. Once thought, once said, it is now old. The Truth is always new.

All of experience is connected through awareness. 

Bring your awareness to the breath.

Let your awareness expand with each inhale and

sink in with each exhale.

Let it all fall in your breath.

Let each seemingly separate part of existence return to its origin: the Now. Not the abstract concept you have built up about the Now, but of what is. Time is not stacked vertically nor does it move forward or backward. What we call time is nothing but a memory (the reflection of yourself), and the mental conception of future events, all happening right now. What appears to be the movement of time is, in reality, direct felt experience morphing and shifting. Like a kaleidoscope spontaneously changing pattern. Creating a song, a dance. No matter how "awakened" or "asleep" one may appear to be, we are all apart of One Cosmic Dance.

Waking Up From The Dream of You

We are living in a haze, a drama, a dream-like state. We are trapped inside a personal narrative, a collection of thoughts that seem to be woven together somewhere in our heads, creating the story of "I". In this net of thought there are knots. In those knots you feel stuck, anxious, afraid. But in this fear there is freedom. Freedom from the very concept of you. Freedom from the known. 

With the acceptance and movement with the unknown (everyday ordinary existence) there is what some may call Nirvana. "You" don't have to do anything. In fact, "you" cannot. That is the frustration. We believe to be this central "I". The experiencer to experience, when all there is is experience. The two are not separate. You are not separate. "You" cannot do anything for there is no static "you" controlling the moment. This moment, this life, this is uncontrollable. See how it flows? Surrender to it. It is all one.

The "I" claims authority and ownership to events, or really, motions/vibrations that occur in the present moment. This creates a split world, an inside and an outside. You are seemingly inside, watching a foreign world whizzing by, but that is you. What you see/experience is who you are. And it is always here. You can never not be experiencing experience. And if there was no "experience" before birth or after death, you were not experiencing it. You have always been here and always will be. Nothing is or can be outside the realm of consciousness.

In this mental concept that you have built up of you and then its flip-side, the world you see around you, it makes this moment seem like a split-second, a sliver in the grand scheme of experience and time. Time is a tool, just like the mind. It only exists relative to an observer. Just like the sun appearing to rise and set from the perspective of being on Earth, if seen from outer-space, it is continuously shining. And so too "outside" the narrative of the self, there is no time passing. It is continuously there, condensed, unified into the present moment. But when the now becomes a blip in time, stuck somewhere in-between the past and the future, you are no longer with reality in totality. You are no longer with yourself.

There is a difference between deep thought and mindless thought. Most of the time, our minds are wandering sporadically, endlessly, without us even noticing. Become aware of these thoughts as they arrive and as they leave. Be fully aware of whatever arises in the field of consciousness, experience. Thought is not something you should avoid, or even can avoid. It is there, it is a feature, a script, but don't get lost in what it is presenting. 

Just like when dreaming, there is a story going on that you take part in, get lost in. However, there is the ability to "wake up" from this story when inside of the dream and become lucid. A fully conscious dream where you have the ability to do anything you wish. Right now, you have the opportunity to wake up from the dream of you and do anything you wish. 

This is our destiny, to awaken from the illusion of the self and to return to the Self. To what is. It is the hardest and easiest thing one can do. This is the blossoming of consciousness, it is happening inside us all. There is no time to wait, in fact, there is no time. All there is is now. And right now, you have the ability to have a radical revolution of the psyche. Transcendence of the ego is the next step in human evolution. The return to where you are. This is what the world needs. Societal change, yes, but it all starts from within. As above, so below. 

So stop trying to change the world and instead change yourself. The outer reflects the inner and the inner reflects the outer. Stop whatever you are doing and sit with yourself. Stop the distractions. Sit with the emptiness inside. Sit with the pain. Sit with the joy. Sit with whatever is. Sit and be still.

5 Mind Blowing Videos On What It Means To Be Alive Today

Here are five videos that may give you chills, cry, get angry, laugh, destroy your faith in humanity, restore your faith in humanity, and realize how strange it is to be anything at all.

1. Wanderers 

Link for those on mobile.

2. Sonder: The Realization That Everyone Has A Story

Link for those on mobile

3. Culture In Decline - Finale

Link for those on mobile

4. Louis CK 

On the Distraction From The Emptiness Inside Us All

Link for those on mobile

5. The Terence McKenna Documentary

The Transcendental Object At the End of Time

Link for those on mobile

The Devil Inside You - Transcending the Net of Thought

The devil is inside you. It is a thought, an illusory net, trying to pull you in and keep you caught in a mental loop of discontinuity with the present moment. Listen, watch it, see how it works within the idea of you, creating "you", and set it free. Right now, in this very moment, you have the opportunity to transcend this psychological bind you have put yourself in and have a radical revolution of the psyche. This is the destiny of all human beings on this planet: To transcend the individual ego and merge with the Whole.

"And what is yourself, the individual you? I think there is a difference between the human being and the individual. The individual is a local entity, living in a particular country, belonging to a particular culture, particular society, particular religion. The human being is not a local entity. He is everywhere. If the individual merely acts in a partiuclar corner of the vast field of life, then his action is totally unrelated to the whole. So one has to bear in mind that we are talking of the whole not the part, because in the greater the lesser is, but in the lesser the greater is not."

Jiddu Krishnamurti 

Language gives us the ability to communicate with one another, to share and collaborate for a better world. However, if the universe is seen only through the confined filter of the your internal dialog, a language that was given to you by external sources, it creates a fragmented world of illusion. 

We are all bound by our thoughts; hidden in a mask of fear from our true selves. The world you see out there is just as much a part of you as your lungs and yet we treat it as if it some foreign commodity we can exploit. Trapped in the net of thought, we have become aliens to ourselves and the world around us (although the two are one process). 

Liberation of the mind is the next evolutionary step of mankind. From the part to the whole. The real you does not live in one particular spot. Like space itself, there is no center. The real you is everywhere. All you have to do is re-member.

What the People and the Medicinal Plants of the Amazon Know That You Don't

Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist who was cured of an ailment by an Amazonian Shaman and has been fascinated by the medicinal plants of the Amazon ever since. In this TED talk he informs us on the knowledge that the tribes in the Amazon have on the forest and the medicinal plants within it. These tribes are slowly disappearing and with it, so too will the knowledge. Threats are coming from all sides: Trade and transport, illegal gold mining, commercial hunting and fishing, illegal logging, narcotrafficking, and many more. At the root of all these threats, as you can see, is profit. Profit is destroying our world and is a disease within the minds of the people. But what these plants tell us is that we are fundamentally connected with the Earth and each other and we have a duty to take care of both. 

These tribes are truly living in harmony with nature and are actually listening to what it has to say, something us Westerners lack greatly. We have a lot to learn, but so too do the tribes. Together, we can merge our ideas and technology to help better our world and by the use of modern technology help protect the contacted and uncontacted tribes of the Amazon who hold a wealth of knowledge that can lead us into a better and more harmonious world we all know is possible.  

Link for people on mobile:

5 Steps to Finding the Ground of Being

**Disclaimer: This should not be viewed as something you need to "achieve". It is simply your natural state of being and is truly only available through surrender.**

This process is a basic guideline to finding what mystics might call the Ground of Being, the Self, the Source, what have you. It is not a strict set of rules you need to follow in order to get there (here). It will not "work" if you think of it that way. Simply, if you let the moment you are currently having evolve on its own while being completely with your body and your extended-body (your environment), it will naturally do this on its own. So really, you don't have to do anything. This is, however, the natural and unintentional process I went through whilst meditating to do so.

Before you begin, I would like to add that for each step, be completely and totally present with your current thought-narrative going on "inside" you during the process. All you have to do is watch it, no need to toy with it. See how the thoughts you have and everything else in your present experience go together. See how there is no separation between the two. 

Let's begin...

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Step 1. Stop everything you are doing and begin slow rhythmic breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Repeat this until you are fully relaxed. Take as much time as needed.

Step 2. Slowly, bring your awareness to relatively the middle part of your brain, near the pineal gland (or what some would call the third-eye). Keep breathing while doing so and focus all of your energy in this particular area of the body. This may take a while. Eventually, you will begin to feel a tingling sensation coming from this area.

Step 3. Hone in on the feeling you are experiencing. Intensify it as best as you can simply by observing/feeling it. Try to find out every little detail about it through your direct felt presence. See how it ripples and flows like some watery energy.

Remember... take your time. Don't rush anything.

Step 4. When the sensation has intensified to a certain point, keep your awareness focused on it, and slowly open up that awareness to your heart. It should almost feel like an energetic sphere inside you with focal points at the heart and the pineal gland. Keep doing this until you feel "it". Once again, this could take a long time. 

Step 5: Let it naturally connect with the rest of your body and follow the sensation deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, into the deepest levels of your consciousness. Do not imagine this, just feel it. It will go deeper on its own the more awareness you place upon it. Surrender to the Void that is you. Eventually, you will feel it. This cannot truly be described but you will be at the fundamental Self, the Void, the Ground of Being, the Source; whatever you want to call it. And if not, do it longer. My first time it took me around two hours of deep meditation. 

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What is felt is indescribable, as is any (the) moment, however I will do my best to share what I experienced. I saw/felt a still pond that was at the "bottom" (although there in no bottom) of what I'll call my inner self (the thing below the surface realm of existence). This pond was a source, the Source that was connected with the sensation I was referring to earlier. This "pond" that encompassed everything would occasionally ripple from the production of "my" thoughts. Although, they were no longer "mine" for there was no "I" or person to claim them. For a duration of time I was no longer identified with anything. I was for the first time in my life free. Everything in the Universe, everything in my direct felt experience rippled from this source. And I realized I have always been here, and so have you, we are just lost in the ripples.

(The use of an entheogen is recommend but not needed for this process)