Not what should be but what is alan watts

And therefore, one of the most sacred missions to be imposed upon those who would be liberated from this culture is that they shall love material, that they shall love color, that they shall dress beautifully, that they shall cook well, that they shall live in lovely houses, and that they shall preserve the face of nature. And all of your friends and relations and teachers are busy telling you who you are and what your role in life is.

Mike Colagrossi. Share Alan Watts quotes that will change your perspective on life on Twitter. Share Alan Watts quotes that will change your perspective on life on LinkedIn. Here are some of the best Alan Watts quotes. In this article. High Culture. The German thinker wrote both treatises and songs. He approached each form of expression with the same level of interest.

Many have argued that free will is in illusion, but science does not support that. Our social instincts can lead us to adopt models of desire that might not serve our interests.

We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it. We stimulate our sense organs until they become insensitive, so that if pleasure is to continue they must have stronger and stronger stimulants. In self-defence the body gets ill from the strain, but the body wants to go on and on.

The brain is in pursuit of happiness, and because the brain is much more concerned about the future than the present it conceives happiness as the guarantee of an indefinitely long future of pleasures. Yet the brain also knows that it does not have an indefinitely long future, so that, to be happy, it must try to crowd all of the pleasures of paradise and eternity into the span of a few years. The root of this frustration is that we live for the future. Yet the future is never, as we move forward it becomes the present.

Now ourselves in this case is the whole psycho physical organism conscious and unconscious, plus its environment. Your real self. In other words, is the universe as centered on your organis. Let me just clarify that a little for one reason. What you do is also a doing of your environment. We could say it is transactional. You are not a puppet which your environment pushes around. Nor is the environment a puppet which you push around.

They go together they act together. In the same way for example if I have a wheel one side of it going down is the same as the other side of it going up. When you handle the steering wheel of a car, are you pulling it or are you pushing it? When you pull it down the side you are pushing it up that side. We are only rarely aware of this as when in curious alterations of consciousness which we call mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, an individual gets the feeling that everything that is happening is his own doing.

You can feel it either way. And you can describe it as if you were omnipotent like God or as if it were completely deterministic and you hardly existed at all.

But remember both points of view are right. What we feel instead is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves or I would rather say with our image of ourselves? Or the ego. You play a role, you identify with that role. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts, if necessary. But I find this one is better for making a living. The idea of my being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the world just breaks me up. Because I know me.

In the ordinary sense. And, when you are a little child and you begin to learn a role and your parents and your peers approve of your be. In that they know who you are. Or to stay Johnny. Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your nervous system. It contains no information about your blood chemistry it contains almost no information about the subtle influences of society upon your behavior. It does not include the basic assumptions of your culture which are all taken for granted and unconscious.

And that there is such a thing as a past. Which is pure hokum. But there are nevertheless all these things that are unconscious in us and they are not included in our image of ourselves, nor of course included in our image of ourselves is there any information about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe. So this is a very impoverished image. But realize at once that this history leaves out most of what happened. And they were men and the women a lot of them were young and some of them were old.

So therefore in thinking of ourselves in this way what I did yesterday what I did the day before in terms of this stringing mangy account all I have is a caricature of myself. But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events.

We often say that you can only think of one thing at a time. The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects.

The person, from the Latin persona , was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through per which the sound sonus came.

While the oft-cited metaphor of the rider and the elephant might explain the dual processing of the brain, it is also a dangerous dichotomy that only perpetuates our sense of being separate from and within ourselves.

The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body — a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions.

Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it. Thus for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Returning to our inability to grasp intervals as the basic fabric of world and integrate foreground with background, content with context, Watts considers how the very language with which we name things and events — our notation system for what our attention notices — reflects this basic bias towards separateness:. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it.

If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment.

For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head onto a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently.

In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is — rather literally — to be spellbound. So how are we to wake up from the trance and dissolve the paradox of the ego?

It all comes down to the fundamental anxiety of existence, our inability to embrace uncertainty and reconcile death. The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond.

Traditionally, humanity has handled this paradox in two ways, either by withdrawing into the depths of consciousness, as monks and hermits do in their attempt to honor the impermanence of the world, or servitude for the sake of some future reward, as many religions encourage. Both of these, Watts argues, are self-defeating strategies:.

Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it — as if it were quite other than himself — and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

But a third response is possible. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.