Alan Watts on Life After Death

it's like people thinking about death you can't imagine death and so they onto this void one projects all sorts of things people are afraid of death uh they think um oh what's it going to be like to go to sleep and never wake up they imagine themselves being shut up in the dark forever and get get bugged by it but on the other hand when you start thinking about what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up Suddenly occurs to you that when you were born you woke up without ever having gone to sleep it's rather funny and of course if it happened once it can happen again and that begins to get you real puzzled about what you mean by you everybody feels his eye everybody has this sensation of being in the middle of everything turn around and see more or less equally in all directions and you feel that you're in the center everybody feels in the center just as much as I do in fact insects feel they're in the center and I'm quite sure they feel that they're they're people we don't of course don't bother to notice them in any great detail therefore they all look the same and therefore we say Well they're not people they're all alike there are some sort of mechanisms well they look at us in just the same way and they can't make any sense out of what we're doing so we're some sort of funny mechanisms going around so far as they're concerned but so there's a lot of mystery hidden in this self that we have well of course you see we're worried about it we see the organism vanishes we're always defending our personalities and somebody accuses our personality of falling apart and say now you're not being consistent you're not fulfilling what you said you would do you're not playing the role you're supposed to play everybody feels that they're coming apart because they're not acting right as on the stage so we are constantly on the defensive and also we're a prey to anxiety anxiety is a trembling motion to be or not to be that is the question because the minute you know you're alive and really become aware of being alive you realize that you might also be dead because to be implies not to be and not to be although we don't really think about that implies to be so we're always wondering now if I do this will I survive or would I better do that we're never quite sure cuz you think when you get a really important decision you got to make it you wonder did I take everything into consideration did I make a sensible judgment well you never know because in the best thought out plan always chancy things occur you don't know whether you're going to slip on a banana skin or whether you're going to get sick it's all very unpredictable and therefore we we tremble now when it occurs to us of course it doesn't in the ordinary way that there is no choice between to be and not to be just as there's no choice between front and back space implies solid just as much as solid implies space but conscious attention ignores that It suffers from ignorance we notice the figure and ignore the background we notice the solid and ignore the space we notice the relatively moving in smaller object but we ignore the relatively stationary background that's with Consciousness with noticing and so you see we don't notice that in order to be present you must also be absent because life is an energy system and energy is something that vibrates and whatever vibrates goes on and off if I sit next to a girl in the movies and she attracts me and I put my hand on her knee and just leave it there she will in due CA cease to notice it because it's a constant stimulus but if I gently stroke her or Pat her on the knee she will keep noticing it cuz it goes on and off now all energy systems go on and off you can't know you're on unless you're off too so we get waking and sleeping we get every kind of Rhythm and there are tiny rhythms that go d d so far like a a beam of light that you don't notice the spaces because your retina doesn't react uh quickly enough it reacts to the stimulus of the on uh but it before it can go off there's a new on see so you get what appears to be a constant stimulus the table appears to be hard it's vibrating so fast I can't put my finger through it same way as an airplane propeller appears to be a solid or an electric fan but it's all going on and off now there are these very fast vibrations have on and off and there are very slow ones like life and death now you see it now you don't that's what the world is but because of the focusing of conscious attention which regards on as real and off as unreal because it you ignore it regard solid as real and space as unreal it's like trying to have trying to think of waves as a series of crests without any troughs but a wave is a is a Crest trough on off so off is as important as on you can't have anything happening without both and although they are explicitly different on and off they're implicitly one we call it energy so if these neglected and ignored features of the world came to our attention or in some way could impinge Upon Our Consciousness we should feel very differently than we ordinarily do feel how would you feel well I can roughly describe it to you it's a very odd feeling indeed at first you feel that what you are doing and what happens to you are the same you can say of everything that happens to you I'm doing it and if everything that you are doing is that it happens to me for example when you're steering a car are you pulling the wheel or pushing it it's Push Pull isn't it both although the words push and pull are formally logically opposed to each other but that's what you're doing when you're steering you're push pulling so in exactly the same way when you are uh acting what your environment does and what you do are the same process so when you feel that it's very odd you feel as you walk up a hill the hill is lifting you that uh a lot of people go crazy with this because they suddenly say well I'm God I'm doing everything and if then they start to tell everybody that they're God and people object and say well you it's absolutely Preposterous that you should say you're personally in charge of the whole universe therefore should be bowed down to and given Divine honors you must be mad or a person may take entirely the opposite point of view and say I do nothing I'm just a little puppet on the end of strings and everything I do is controlled by something else in other words becomes a complete fatalist what he doesn't see is that both points of view are right but of course this won't fit in with an idea of God which is based on the ancient monarchies of the near East that is to say it won't do with an idea of God conceived as the cosmic boss the boss the chief that's a political image and it just doesn't work too well for the godhead it leads to all sorts of trouble and as I often say for Americans you'd believe don't you as American citizens that the Republic is the best form of government how can you square that with thinking of Heaven as a monarchy If Heaven is a monarchy monarchy is the best form of government what about democracy in the Kingdom of Heaven how about that [Music] now so [Music] uh you have to you have to conceive God in accordance with some different kind of image or maybe wait a moment maybe we shouldn't do that at all images of God are idolatry aren't they but are no image because every image is an idol and Idols that are made of imagination and thought are much more dangerous than Idols made of wood or stone nobody takes a wooden Idol seriously you merely regard it as a symbol and it's such an obvious symbol but a concept that's seems so spiritual so abstract but it's the most dangerous kind of idol as we shall see when we come to the study of Buddhism how it gets rid of all the conceptual idols

Channel: Motivation Madness

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Id: SY1LzlFWZI8

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2023