The soul of Alan Watts have awakened inside me! :D

[WaveInTheOcean]

Oh boy.
This is it.
Everything. Imagination. Including Alan Watts. Including me as a person. Including you as a person.
Including "being asleep" -- including "being awake".
Death. Life. Two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, no difference.

Only the difference YOU imagine there is (as God).

Everything. Imagination. Nothing. Real. Unreal. Real. Everything.
Nowhere to get to. Everywhere to get to.
Sing. Dance. Play. Enjoy. Live. Let go. Love.

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"I have lived on the lip of insanity,

wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door ...

It opens - I've been knocking from the inside!" 
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Just like a meteor falling down from the sky and destroying your living room is:
- not your doing,
- nothing to do with you,
- out of your control,
- not your own free choice,

likewise is "insert-your-name" (with your body and with all your 'problems', inclinations, thoughts, feelings etc.) that coincidentally was born out of your mother's stomach (and ruined 'your peace')...:
- not your doing,
- noting to do with you,
- out of your control,
- not your own free choice.

((( However, one could also turn the above completely on its head and say that the metor impact WAS/IS my doing, and that my birth into (= out of) this world likewise WAS/IS a free choice that *I* took ☯️ ☯️ ☯️ )))

But if the above is true what are 'you' then?

'What am I?'

I/You are That/He/She which dreams , imagines:

- that a meteor (perhaps) fell down and ruined your house ??
- that "insert-your-name" was born and is currently xx years old, has an ugly/nice/normal/abnormal body, study/work with yyy and has zzz problems, hhh thoughts & worries & regrets, fff inclinations, sss dreams.

And what IS 'that' ???

I don't know. No one does. Because it cannot be known - as in "traditional knowledge" can be known. 
It can only be. You are IT - already! Always. One can never not be 'IT'; the only (imagined) difference is whether you're aware of 'IT' or not. Consciousness.

You could call it God, Love, The Eternal Dreamer, The Dao, The Absolute, Infinity, Eternity, Nothingness, Everythingness, Consciousness, Spaghetthi-Monster...

In some way, it really doesn't matter what we call/name 'Reality', since <words/thoughts/logic/concepts/rationality> naturally never can contain IT.
Sometimes it may even be wise to not try to call it anything!

What is Reality?
THIS: ................
*smashing a gong* ... and we won't give it a name!

Can you bite your own teeth?
Can eyes looking out ever see from where they are looking?
Can a fist grasp itself?

What a caterpillar calls the end of the world -- we call a butterfly!

Luckily we got music, dancing, embodiment/physical activites, sex (tantra), meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, art ....
that can in a much better way can contain ("show us") 'IT' than words/thoughts/science/logic/conceptualizing can!

THIS IS IT! THIS. HELLO! YES. THIS.
NO - NOT THAT. THIS! 
HA HA HA <3 <3 <3

The finger pointing to the moon ..... is NOT the moon.
You cannot eat the menu!
The map is not the terrotity.

It is a SILLY idea to try to live life in your head all the time!
(It can be very good and fine to think and reflect and contemplate a lot -- but you have to be practical about life too!)

Form, emptiness.
Emptiness, form.

Life, death.
Death, life.

Good, bad.
Evil, Good.

Implicit, explicit.
Outer, inner.

Internal, external.
External, internal.

Physical, mental.
Mental, physical.

Material world, Consciousness.
Consciousness, the outside world.

Being, Nothingness.
Nothingness, Everything.

Up, down.
Down, up.

Worse, better.
Better, worse.

Self, other.
Other, self.

Free will, determined/controlled.
Determined, free.

Illusion, real.
Real, dream.

The real unreal --- The unreal real.
Form is Emptiness --- Emptiness is Form.

Hell, Heaven.
Both here. Now.
What you see is solely determined by 'the inner game'; that is: how you look at the world; from where? From which point of view? Which perspective?

Believe in the story that gives you most inner joy. Anything else is a form of silly autism.

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The world -- existence, life -- will never be good unless you are willing to see its goodness. What you experience depends on how you look at things.

When you look with judgement -- either upon yourself, the world or both -- life seems twisted and empty.

When you begin to look with an open heart and mind, life becomes fascinating and full of both meaning and mystery.

When you realize the perfection, intelligence and beauty of everything in existence precisely as it is (without the filters of ego; yes, drop them - let go!), you see that every outcome is a good one. You start to live life fully without fear and regret. You learn and move on.

When you look with love instead of judgement, you see a whole different world.

Life isn't easy all the time. You're not alone.

For there to be joy, there has to be some pain. So instead of looking at the painful life-phases that you're undergoing as "bad", look at them as absolutely necessary and beneficial in the long run for your own growth and eventual happiness. Remember, nothing lasts forever, everything passes away at some point.

0. Knowledge is but a rumor until it lives in the body/bones.

1. Reality is non-dual. Non-duality means: Not one, not two. The question is: do you get it or not?

For example, let's take the extreme duality: good - bad . Obviously complete opposites. Right?

Well, not so fast. "Apply non-duality to it":

Reality is not: bad

Reality is not: good (either)

Reality is not: "good AND bad" (paradox).

Reality is:   ________________      (Or you 'could' say: "bad-good").

2. To let go of power is to gain power.

3. To let go of control is to gain control.

Life is about all the contrasts!
As a wise man said:

- The heavenly highs, one is capable of reaching, are directly proportional with the unknown depths, one has the courage to dive down into.

- The apparent seperation / division / fragmentation, paradoxes, opposites ... only exist in the divided mind, based on subject-object-relations ...

((( that is how the illusionary, separate self -- the ego -- survives; or we could say that 'opposites/duality creates the illusion of ego'; a kind of 'strange loop' that is almost impossible to 'get out of' (impossible because 1. it is imaginary, 2. you imagined it yourself and deep down want to stay in it, 3. in a sense there is nothing to get out of; you *trying* to get out (becoming awakened / enlightened) is what keeps you in 'it' (= asleep, ego) ... - It is "possible" though, just like it is possible for a larva through 'rebirth' to become a butterfly; the larva is in a beautiful away ALREADY the butterfluy, just like an acorn contains the whole tree ... )))

... - but from the Level of Unity (The Heavenly Self's Consciousness; God's point-of-view) all these 'apparent' opposites/paradoxes -- all fragmentation, division, seperation -- are dissolved & melted 'back into' what they truly are & have always been: Your Imagination - Oneness. One. Zero.

Unity. Harmony. Oneness. Lila. Divine play.
Game. Theater play. An Eternal Dance. Musical Music.
The Bottomless Bottom. The Gateless Gate.
The Ground of Being. The Groundless Ground.
God. Unconditional Love. Nothingness.
The Eternal Dao That Cannot Be Spoken.
Buddha Nature. Christ Consciousness.
Pure Awareness. Infinity. Source. The Absolute.
Goodness with a capital G. 

Just Love.

☯️?????❤️??

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"The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known.

We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth," in this second sense, is not to be taken literally just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water.

Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.

Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds:

"Where did the world come from?"  "Why did God make the world?"
"Where was I before I was born?"  "Where do people go when they die?"

Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this:

<<< There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive.

God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world. >>>

This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating."

- Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.
The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.
You find the jewel, and it draws you off.
In loving the spiritual, you cannot despise the earthly."

- J. Campbell.

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“This is IT! So you don’t need to do anything at all… It’s just the way it is. What’s required is a sort of act of super relaxation.. It’s not just letting go. It’s being with yourself as you are without altering anything.”

 ~ Alan Watts

“When you look for your own mind, that is to say, your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else, you won’t be able to find it. But the only way you’ll know it isn’t there is if you look for it hard enough, to find out that it isn’t there.

And so everybody says ‘All right, know yourself, look within, find out who you are.’ Because the harder you look, you won’t be able to find it, and then you’ll realize it isn’t there at all. There isn’t a separate you. You’re mind is what there is. Everything. But the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible….

So if a person believes that the Earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that. He knows it’s flat. Look out the window and see; it’s obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him it isn’t is to say ‘Well let’s go and find the edge.’ And in order to find the edge, you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles, you’ll never find it that way.

So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the world is round. That’s the only way that will teach him. Because people can’t be talked out of illusions.

There is another possibility, however. But this is more difficult to describe. Let’s say we take as the basic supposition–which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it–that this now moment in which I’m talking and you’re listening, is eternity.

That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we’re sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed.

This is IT! So you don’t need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn’t try and not do anything, because that’s doing something. It’s just the way it is. In other words, what’s required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it’s not ordinary relaxation.

It’s not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you’re heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It’s not like that. It’s being with yourself as you are without altering anything.

And how to explain that? Because there’s nothing to explain. It is the way it is now. See? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up!”

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Life is not a problem to solve, but an experience to be had. However, sure - you can imagine all kinds of problems that "should" be solved (in order for you & the world ? to be at peace ?️), but that is just it: imagination, fantasy, a dramatic good movie, a theater play, a book, a game... play ???.

Life is what you choose to experience. The ultimate meaning of life is very simple: it's life itself! Of course! But this is so obvious that almost no one seems to buy into it, and everyone runs around in great panic and try desperately to achieve something beyond themselves.

There isn't anything wrong with trying to achieve something beyond oneself, as long as one remembers it's just a cute game.

But of course: We should all strive to make it a good game, a good dream, a good book, a good play, a good film... with total redemption for all the dream-characters in the end ??❤️?.

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https://youtu.be/wU0PYcCsL6o

There’s aren’t enough words to describe how powerful this video is for me. It’s in my iPod and every single morning before I lift I listen to this speech. It’s absolutely stunning. Inspirational. Motivating. It’s everything to me. I would like for you to watch it and tell me what you think.

We all should dream big.

Without going after our dream, we cannot possibly live our best life. It is there for a reason. It’s necessary that we follow it…not just an option:

"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 am 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 am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, 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 have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."

And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are 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 is 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 are all that, only you are pretending you are not."   -   Watts up, Alan?

Love ya all <3

Edited May 28, 2021 by WaveInTheOcean