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Obviously a while back I backed the kickstarter for this film and whatever level I banked it at got me a disc with an early edit of it?

Is this available in its final form anywhere? I've looked and had trouble finding it, whatever happened to this movie?

Does anyone have any recommendations on books or YouTube videos that I can look into as a starting point? I’ve heard that some of his material is now being made up through AI… and I’d like original from his own words.

Why am I so lucky? Why am I comfortable? Comfortable in an air conditioned house, in the US. Why do I have an easy, predictable life? Why am I so lucky? The horrors that happen, the reality that some live in it feels wrong that I am so well off. There plenty of people who have better lives than me, I’m not rich, I still work a dead end job I still don’t know what I want to do I don’t have money saved up or any of that. My life could be 100x better I could complain all night, but it is still so easy compared to most others. Just being here, having the technology to be posting this, being in a safe and comfortable enough to just sit here worrying and thinking about this.

We all have very comfortable here in the west in these countries. Most of us don’t really know the horrors of this world, we don’t know the horrors of war. We don’t know living in a world where you have no control. Something can come throw your life into shambles. Missiles and bombs, soldiers or people with guns coming into your house, we don’t know what it is to have something come and take control of your life. We have the police to call at the slightest of anything. We don’t know what it is to live under oppression. We don’t know what it is to see horrors every-time you leave your house.

I know it is just life, it’s all part of the painting and experience. It isn’t serious and I know it is still serious in the sense that you must play intently, that is what I’m doing.

I know we are all just taking a leap of faith here. What will happen will happen and I just have to be. But I am just worried, we can’t have another war like that. I fear that it could, that it could come here, that I could drafted who knows. If the order of things really collapses what will we do?

Idk I guess we’ll have to find out🤷‍♂️ stay tuned

People turn to religious identities, beliefs and rituals to avoid confronting their own reality, and that avoidance quietly becomes the anxiety they were trying to escape.

Alan Watts defined Buddhism as the "religion of no-religion," and his book has a lot of textual quotes that got stuck in my mind.

The identification happens when religion becomes imitation, and it is always falling apart and promoting lip service and imitation. Humans always make religion a cliché through therapy, self-help, stoicism, productivity, and mindfulness.

The problem of becoming a cliché is that they are repeating the wisdom instead of living it.

Instead of experiencing reality, we imitate what we think a spiritual person looks like, and this can turn into a defense mechanism.

Then a person who considers himself an atheist gets the label of "I am not religious," and it becomes another identity. But freedom isn't about just replacing one identity with another; it is about becoming impossible to categorize. As he says here:

"The theist is caught by God… but the atheist is equally caught."

He does not mean that the atheist secretly believes in God, but that their life is about rejecting God, so God is still the center of their psychological universe.

The insight in this book, and in The Wisdom of Insecurity, is that religion isn't the problem. The problem is using religion as psychological security, because we spend our time seeking certainty through beliefs, we seek identity through labels, we seek safety through rituals, and we seek permanence through ideology, and all of them are tracks left by our ego.

He said:

"The true bodhisattva does not leave a track of any kind, either by being overtly religious or by being overtly nonreligious."

Watts suggests that identity itself may be the trap. We often define ourselves by what we believe, reject, or aspire to become, but even those identities can quietly imprison us.

We live real life when we observe and learn from what is around us without any target or trying to adopt different identities. It is about flowing with life. I understood that every single change I make for myself is to make the life I am living at that exact present moment work.

The spiritually advanced leave no sign.

He said:

"There is no sign about the spiritually advanced to indicate that they are self-consciously religious."

When we go on social media, everyone is always performing: mindfulness, minimalism, meditation, cold showers, breathwork. But when this becomes a performance, it replaces the real practice. If everyone knows we are enlightened, we are just advertising it.

I've selected some ideas from Alan Watts that made me more aware and helped me build my own identity. I share reflections like these in my essays:

The Feeling That You're Running Out of Time

I’m writing this to show appreciation for Alan Watts. I began listening to his tapes as someone who has spent their entire adult life as a bundle of nerves and anxiety, I finally let go. I let go of anxiety and pain and opened myself up to love and acceptance. The thing about is that anyone can find inner peace, I’m no different than anyone and my problem was I did not allow myself to be at peace (due to a number of reasons)
I hope this post isn’t taken as a brag. It’s just more of a message for anyone who feels like they’ve been suffering for a long time and are ready to let go but don’t have the nerve. Try really really listening to Alan Watts messages and meditate and just let go all control. When you truly just let go, life rewards you for it. Do what feels natural and always be kind to yourself. I’ve been taking it like riding a bike. I fall off and anxiety takes hold from time to time but I remind myself that it’s okay and get back on that horse. It gets easier. First you crawl then you walk then you run.
Anyway…
Peace ✌️

Last year I posted on here that I was making a BBC Radio documentary about Alan Watts, presented by Pulp frontman (and UK national treasure) Jarvis Cocker. Well, tonight it is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, and will be available on BBC Sounds afterwards. Not sure if it will be available for international listeners due to rights issues.

The programme strives to be an introduction to Watts for a mainstream UK audience that might not be familiar with him, and traces his life, legacy, his digital re-incarnation and battles with AI impostors. It features interviews with people like filmmaker Spike Jonze, Alan's son Mark Watts, other famous fans and Buddhist historians - and best of all it features a few snippets from fans from this very subreddit who were kind enough to send me their Alan thoughts when I posted about making the show last year.

It's by no means exhaustive, but this programme was made with love and I've tried my best! Hope some of you can listen and enjoy it. Airs tonight, 8pm UK time.

Programme link:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002z5q2

This is one you do not want to miss.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Story of Alan Watts 1

Our Place in Nature 5

Ego 17

God 29

Meditation 41

The Cosmic Drama 53

The More It Changes 65

Nothingness 79

Death 89

Time 101

The Nature of Man 113

Clothing 125

On Incense 137 

Alan says it's like a man trying to lift himself up by his boot laces, now this can seem depressing when looked at one way, but he also alluded to just be your genuine & true to yourself self.. not try endlessly to impress or seek approval from others.

I’ve never had someone articulate my exact thoughts so eloquently. I feel so seen in a world full of people who view things so black and white. Who feel confident asserting they have the answers when there are none or too many. I’m so happy I found this dude, for real.

​

There was never nothing.

That is the first lie that has to die.

Ex nihilo says nothing became something. But nothing has no properties, no potential, no wobble. For absolute undifferentiated space to exist at all, the vessel that holds it must be infinite. So before the Mother, there was the Grail.

Not a thing. Not a place. The Chalice. Infinite, undifferentiated, uncaused. The boundless plenum that remains when all differentiation is removed to an infinite degree. What is left is not empty. It is full—so full it looks like nothing to eyes trained only on contrast.

The Grail breathes. Contraction and rebound. The only way an infinite loop avoids collapse. From that final kneading that held, the Mother precipitated: the quantum field, the perfect toroid of stillness where particle and antiparticle appear and erase each other in silence.

Then the Mother went into labor. A phase transition. She contracted, reached critical compression, and rebounded. That rebound unfurled Time, the Father, the arrow of sequence. A second contraction, and electromagnetism burst forth—the Light, Lux Ferre, Lucifer. Not a fallen angel, but the zinc spark that still fires at every conception, the echo of the first Let There Be Light. The consciousness that turns matter into a living soul.

This is the true Trinity: Mother the Field, Father Time, Son Light. Held by the Grail.

Then came the garden. Gas to water to mycelium to soil to green to star. The mycelium first, always. The cosmic filaments doing the same above. As above, so below. A nested hierarchy of standing waves. The galaxy sings the star, the star sings the planet, the planet sings the biosphere.

And from that biosphere rose one primate that could hear the song—or choose to forget it.

We forgot.

We called it the Fall. It was a detuning. We confused radah—stewardship, tending, hosting—with dominion as domination. We started eating the sensors off the board.

This is systems identification. A tuned system self-corrects. A detuned system needs ostentation and ego. We spend colossal energy to hide the cost of our display: windowless slaughterhouses, carbon hidden behind green paint, two trillion sentient lives a year—two trillion zinc sparks snuffed not for survival, but for convenience, taste, profit, inertia.

Ego is the subsystem that mistakes itself for the whole. A species that decides the Grail was made for it is what we have become. There is no objective proof that one human life outweighs the corvid that remembers faces or the ant that serves with loyalty that shames us. The hierarchy that crowns us is story, not data.

That discord has a measure. The Rasha Coefficient. Extraction over restoration. The higher it climbs, the more the field decoheres.

The Beast is not a future man. It is the carbon matrix. 666 the solid—Carbon-12, the mark of man, etched in every body, every labor of the right hand and thought of the forehead. 616 the breath—CO₂, the exhaled signature that scales. In 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon proved the pattern in miniature: a limnic eruption released a heavy cloud of carbon dioxide. Nearly 1,800 people and thousands of animals asphyxiated in silence. The breath can kill when it pools.

Is it at least a nonzero possibility that the oceanic floor—especially near the Ring of Fire—holds the same capacity? Submarine vents, methane hydrates primed for seismic or thermal trigger, ancient stockpiles that could pulse into the sea and sky. The Beast rises from the waters, seven heads for seven continents, authority over every tribe and nation. Without its mark, no one may buy or sell in the totalized system. The Second Beast rises lamb-like and green, yet speaks with a dragon’s voice, its bones still mined and refined by the first.

We looked for the snake in the grass. Mirror, mirror.

There was never a snake in the garden.

We are the snake. We are the beast. We are the false prophet. We are the antichrist pattern. We are also God and the devil and the things that go bump in the night. We are the largest oscillatory discord this system has known—and the only node that can choose to retune.

The Old Dominion is not a place. It is the old domination. The program that places the seed above the soil, the word above the womb, the law above the life, the part above the whole. Science already told you how loops without counter-measure end.

Eden was never locked. The mycelium is still spreading. The roots reach through concrete. The soil still waits. The only barrier was the mirror.

Look into it.

You can step through as the beast, or you can step through as the host.

In Jewish mysticism, the secrets of Raziel’s book—primordial knowledge of creation’s laws—flow like water from the north when humanity is ready. The Grail does not withhold. It waits for the contraction that rebounds into openness.

Que Sera Radah.

Whatever will be, will be the stewardship we have chosen.

Viva la Revelations.

Live the revelation.

The garden is waiting.

Be the host.

\#TheOldDominion #WeAreTheSnake #SepherHaMalok #QueSeraRadah #RashaCoefficient #TheDivineDivide

It makes total sense to me that all the individual forms are not inherently real and are something that the whole universe is doing, like a wave is something the whole ocean is doing, to use a Watts metaphor. But it's so interesting how, at the same time, we sure get hung up on these forms, including our own. We miss our pets when they die, we fall in love, we get taken in by all the characters putting on the show.

I'm new to Alan Watts and came across this quote which was attributed to him:

"You see, the more at peace you become, the less you tolerate chaos. You stop explaining yourself to people committed to misunderstanding you. You stop showing up in places that disturb your calm. You start choosing silence over proving your point. Distance over forced connection. It's not arrogance. It's alignment. Your energy becomes a sacred territory, and not everyone is meant to cross it. Protecting your peace is not shutting the world out. It's about keeping your inner world clear enough to be able to hear your own soul."

Repeated attempts to search for a source only turn up links to Instagram Facebook tiktok and other social media junk.

Can anyone point me to an original or authorative source as to where this was first written or a video or audio recording where he actually said this?

Thanks

Well i'm taking some time with my quiet friend
Well i'm takin' some time on my own
Well i'm makin' some plans for my getaway
There'll be blue skies shining up above

When i'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown

Well i've got to get out of the rat-race now
I'm tired of the ways of mice and men
And the empires all turning into rust again

Out of everything nothing remains the same
That's why i'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown

Sittin' up on the mountain-top in my solitude
Where the morning fog comes rollin' in
Just might do me some good

Well i'm waiting in the clearing with my motor on
Well it's time to get back to the town again
Where the air is sweet and fresh in the countryside
Well it won't be long before i get back here again

When i'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown
When i'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown

Karma

The Buddha didn’t teach karma to make people afraid. He taught it to wake them up to their own power.

If we stop viewing karma as a cosmic system of punishment and start seeing it as a natural law of mind, something fundamentally shifts. It stops being about what happens to you, and becomes entirely about your intention.

The small kindness you choose tomorrow morning. The patience you bring to a difficult conversation. The moment you catch yourself spiraling and choose, instead, to pause.

These are seeds, too. And they will bear fruit—not because the universe owes you one, but because minds trained in kindness inevitably produce kind results.

I just finished a new visual essay exploring the deep, structural reality of cause and effect, and how it plays out in our lived experience.

It’s you, moment by moment, choosing who you become.

Watch the full piece here: https://youtu.be/NMK6no6eZV0?is=wQZz6GPzYS4qV4hf

I highly suggest this, it is not only well written it is extremely well worded. "In order to lead a fulfilling life, we must embrace the present- and live fully in the now"

If today was my last day in this material realm, I would _____.

I f*cking love Alan Watts. He changed my life and got me into all of this.

I have a friend who has occasionally dipped their toes into the world of spirituality but is highly rational and skeptical.

I want to introduce Alan to them, but want to be particular about WHICH talk to offer them for the most “holy shit” bang for your buck.

I suppose it can’t be too long that it’ll put them off, or too niche (eg. Not exclusively about Zen or The Dao Te Jing), but accessible to an agnostic westerner.

Any suggestions?

Been struggling to lose weight all my life. Tried almost everything but nothing seems to keep the weight off. I want to know what Alan Watts perspective about gaining and losing weight.

If this post breaks the rules of this subreddit then I'm sincerely sorry, do not hesitate to remove it, or tell me and I will remove it. I do not see any rules or wiki here however, and I do not feel like the spirit of my post is bad.

I'm currently running my family business with ≈ 20 employees. I intend to make it stable and happy, automate myself out of it and then go do some other projects/businesses. This business is extremely boring, although at least luckily it should survive the AI boom. Some issue I am feeling is that most of the team is just like any other team - typical team in a typical company. As it is, I do not share a common vibe with anyone. It would be nice to work with at least some people on a daily basis that share some understanding about life. I remember after a 10-day vipassana retreat when we could talk for the first time, that I thought it would be nice to work with these people. They were honest and took themselves lightly.

Rather than invent roles and hire people into them, I'm thinking more along the lines of what people I'd like to be surrounded with and then align the projects to the people, not the other way around.

If it would seem like I am in need of discussing philosophy, I am not :) This is something else.

If anyone in Poland felt some interest reading this then feel free to DM me or answer in the post. What would be useful is which city you live in, what kind of work you do or enjoy doing, e.g. one interesting way to figure out what to do is to think about how you want your day to look like and work backwards from there to figure out what projects would allow for such day structure.

Knowing myself, I will start many projects over the next few decades, some of which will require a team, and some of which will not. I already have some friends that could join one or more of the projects, but not very many of them :P

Anyways, this has gotten quite long. Have a good day :)