Alan Watts - YOU Don't Exist (and why that's actually pretty joyous and exciting ! )
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Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962). Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."
Comments
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I'm pretty sure I exist.
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I suffer from brain fog, that's probably why I don't get it.
But when he says "YOU don't exist" he means our personality, that we created? We are a breathing, seeing, hearing, feeling organism, that's all we are, but our personality (i) doesn't exist? -
I'm so glad we don't mean nothing, individually lol.
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Alan Watts is so brilliant on so many levels...
I really wish our (Western) society would take a few notes from the East...
We could really use it... (in more ways than one)
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"the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts." The brain has evolved to be able to "double check" its actions, like putting a mirror on itself. there are obvious evolutionary benefits to this. It thinks about the thoughts it just thought. Once you do this, there is an image of self, contrasting from the rest of the environment. BUT, this "double checking" feature can be turned off through different means. There is no requirement to have the added thought of feeling separate from anything else around you. This is an evolved feature.
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What are we then ?
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Alan's voice sounds deeper and throatier here. Can a process start a thing, if not the other way around? And if so, aren't both then real? The cat pictured looks a lot like my consort Nipper, whom I'll now ask for his input....
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the personal-identity is a mind made illusion, its not real.
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anyone here know which lecture this wee bit is from?
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Damn Alan watts there's a point when you loose it
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If I can't sleep I listen to Alan watts it's great
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Lol dude you played good with that thumbnail bait
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Speeding up the folly. I get what he's saying here, but I feel like meditation has helped me with some of my anxiety issues and also helped me a lot stay more organized and focused in my professional and personal life.
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so can someone help me out here: I've spent years with a whole load of dumb behaviours, basically all approval seeking, identity with past events, negative beliefs. And I've got to a point through observation that it's all madness, it's like a cloud I carry with me in a posture... And that thing certainly doesn't exist, but I never viewed it as "i" anyway. Now without that i'm left with something that feels like me, authentic and genuine wanting to come through, I've finally accepted who I am. But this confuses me, because I've wanted to be this thing I see as myself for ages, and now I'm told it doesn't exist? It's a mature feeling, kind and wise, not caught up in childishness, But that isn't real? Stuff like this confuses me... you can't just say YOU don't exist, what if you're already operating from the liberated non existent thing? I just want to be my true mature self now.... And there definitely is a sense of "i"ness to that, it's just a more connected sense, and one that is entirely different to the childish behaviours and conditioning of youth. help.
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there is a you
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its too bad that the islamic judao and christian traditions have fallen cymaticly and sintatically.. islamic art shows to me that these people once were in harmony with tao.
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why did you slow down the audio? its stupid and sounds retarded
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eat A DICK ALAN YOU DONT EXIST EITHER NOR DOES YOUR ARROGANT ADVICE. GIVE ME SOME ICE AND I WILL LISTEN.
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Sounds and looks like Gandalf...
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Nothing is quite as relaxing as Alan Watts, get it?! Haha love it, hear him every night. Anyone talking bad about him, just know it's ok to be jealous of such a brilliant mind.
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