It Will Give You Goosebumps - Alan Watts on Finding Your True Path

supposing that i say to you each one of you is really the great self and you say well all you've said up to now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually but i don't really feel it what must i do to feel it really my answer to you is this you ask me that question because you don't want to feel it really you're frightened of it and therefore what you're going to do is you're going to get a method of practice so that you can put it off so that i can say well i can be a long time on the way getting this thing and uh then maybe i'll be worthy of it after i have suffered enough see because we are brought up in a social scheme whereby we have to deserve what we get and the price that one pays for all good things is suffering but all of that is precisely postponement because one is afraid here and now to see it if you had the nerve you know real nerve you would see it right away only that would be you know when one feels you you you shouldn't have nerve like that why that would be awful that would be that that that that wouldn't do at all because after all i'm supposed to be poor little me and uh i'm not really much of a muchness and i'm playing the role of being poor little me and therefore in order to be something great like a buddha or a jeevan mukta one liberated in this life i ought to suffer for it so you can suffer for it there are all kinds of ways invented for you to do this and you can discipline yourself and you can gain control of your mind and you can uh do all sorts of extraordinary things i mean you can drink water in through your rectum and do the most fantastic things but that's just like being able to run the hundred yards in nine seconds or any other kind of accomplishment you want to engage in is absolutely nothing to do with the realization of the self the realization of the self fundamentally depends on coming off it you know the sort of when we say to people who put on some kind of an act we say i'll come off it and some people can come off it they laugh and say they suddenly realize you know they were making fools of themselves and they laugh at themselves and they come off it so in exactly the same way the guru the teacher is trying to make you come off it now if he finds he can't make you come off it he's going to put you through all these exercises so that you at the last time when you got enough discipline enough suffering and enough frustration you'll give it all up and realize you were there for the beginning and there was nothing to realize so this tremendous schizophrenia in human beings of thinking that they are rider and horse soul in command of body or will in command of passions wrestling with them all that kind of split thinking simply aggravates the problem and we get more and more split and so we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict which they will never never resolve because the true self either you know it or you don't if you do know it then you know it's the only one and the other so-called lower self just ceases to be a problem it becomes something like a mirage and you don't go around hitting at mirages with a stick or trying to put reins on them you just know that their mirages and walk straight through them and so that split is implanted in us all and because of our being split-minded we are always dithering is the choice that i am about to make of the higher self or of the lower self is it of the spirit or is it of the flesh is the word that i have received of the lord or is it of the devil and nobody can decide because if you knew how to choose you wouldn't have to in the so-called moral rearmament movement you test your messages that you get from god in your quiet time by comparing them with standards of absolute honesty absolute purity absolute love and so on but of course if you knew what those things were you wouldn't have to test you would know immediately and do you know what those things are the more one thinks about the question what would absolute love be supposing i could set myself the ideal of being absolutely loving to everybody what would that imply in terms of conduct well you can think about that till all is blue because you could never get to the answer the problems of life are so subtle that to try to solve them with vague principles as if those vague principles were specific instructions is completely impossible it is important to overcome split-mindedness but what is the way where can you start from if you're already split a taoist saying is that when the wrong man uses the right means the right means work in the wrong way so what are you to do how can you get off it and get moving if i say to you good morning you say good morning nice day isn't it yes or if i hit you you know boom you say ouch and you don't stop to hesitate to give these answers and these responses you don't think about it when i say good morning so in exactly the same way that kind of response which doesn't have to be a deliberate response a response of a no deliberating mind is a response of a buddha mind or an unattached mind but you must not imagine that this is necessarily a quick response because if you get hung up on the idea of responding quickly the idea of quickness will be itself a form of obstruction when you are perfectly free to feel stuck or not stuck then you're unstuck because actually nothing can stick on the real mind and you will find this out if you watch the flow of your thoughts and those thoughts arise and go like waves on the water all the time they come and go and when they go they are as if they had never been here there is process there is the flow of thought the flow of thought doesn't have to happen to anyone experience does not have to beat upon an experiencer there is all the time simply the one stream going on and we are convinced that we stand aside from it and observe it because we've been brought up that way it's very important to get rid of that illusion of duality between the thinker and the thought so find out who is the thinker behind the thoughts who is the real genuine you you

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Id: GjZ0hmoPme0

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021