Alan Watts was a well-known British philosopher, writer and speaker, best known for his interpretation of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. Alan Watts left behind more than 25 books and an audio library of nearly 400 talks, which are still in great demand. Alan Watts’s life advices will leave you speechless when taken seriously. We hope this motivation from Alan Watts will help you in your life.
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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 um let’s have a surprise let’s have a dream which isn’t under control well something is going to happen to me that i don’t know what it’s going to be and uh you 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 were 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 so in this idea then everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality not god in a politically kingly sense but god in the sense of being the self the deep down basic whatever there is and you’re all that only you’re pretending you’re not so then when you’re in the way of waking up and finding out who you really are if you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white self implies other life implies death or shall i say death implies life you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world not as something here on probation not as something that has arrived here by fluke but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental i’m not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it i want you to play with it i want you to think of its possibilities i’m not trying to prove it i’m just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing the real you is not a puppet which life pushes around the real deep down you is the whole universe so then when you die you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence because that’s not an experience a lot of people are afraid that when they die they’re going to be locked up in a dark room forever and sort of undergo that but one of the most interesting things in the world this is a yoga this is a way of realization try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up think about that children think about it it’s one of the great wonders of life what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up and if you think long enough about that something will happen to you you will find out among other things that uh it’ll pose a next question to you what was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep that was when you were born you can’t have an experience of nothing nature reports a vacuum so after you’re dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born in other words we all know very well that after people die other people are born and they’re all you only you can only experience it one at a time everybody is i you all know you’re you and wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn’t make 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 or whatever else it is in your organism you don’t have to know how to shine the sun you just do it like you breathe isn’t it 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 in how to do it what is a mind in the grip of vicious circles well one of the most obvious instances that we all know is the phenomenon of worry the doctor tells you that you have to have an operation and that has been set up so that automatically everybody worries about it but since worrying takes away your appetite and your sleep it’s not good for you but you can’t stop worrying and therefore you get additionally worried that you are worrying and then furthermore because that is quite absurd and you are mad at yourself because you do it you are worried because you worry because you won that is a vicious circle so now can you allow your mind to be quiet isn’t it difficult because the mind seems to be like a monkey jumping up and down and jabbering all the time once you’ve learned to think you can’t stop and an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence when you’re alone nobody’s saying anything there’s nothing to do with this worry this uh lack of distraction i’m left alone with myself and i want to get away from myself i’m always wanting to get away from myself that’s why i go to the movies that’s why i read mystery stories that’s why i go after the girls or anything that you do or get drunk or whatever i don’t want to be with myself i feel queer so why do you want to run away from yourself what’s so bad about it why do you want to forget this why do you want to become absorbed because you are addicted to thoughts this is a drug a little dangerous compulsive thinking going on and on and on and on it’s a habit so there’s a difficulty about stopping that activity and you really have to stop it if you want to be sane because if i talk all the time i don’t hear what anyone else has to say then i’ll end up in the situation of having nothing to talk about but my own talking you’re so in exactly the same way if i think all the time i won’t have anything to think about except thoughts so in order to have something to think about there are times when you simply must stop thinking well how do you do that the first rule is don’t try to because if you do you will be like someone trying to make rough water smooth with a flat iron and all that will do will stir it up so in the same way as a muddy turbulent pool quiets itself when left alone you have to know how to leave your mind alone it will quiet itself
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