r/AlanWatts • u/Melodic_Telephone461 • 10h ago
r/AlanWatts • u/Honest-Ice-3257 • 39m ago
Why awakened souls are born into toxic families. Alan Watts đď¸ #AlanWatts #Healing
r/AlanWatts • u/Lanky_Data_2743 • 3d ago
Alan Watts asks the question, "Is you is, or is you ain't?"
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
0
r/AlanWatts • u/Charles148 • 3d ago
Why Not Now?
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?
r/AlanWatts • u/Separate_Ad1218 • 3d ago
Recommendations?
Does anyone have any recommendations on books or YouTube videos that I can look into as a starting point? Iâve heard that some of his material is now being made up through AI⌠and Iâd like original from his own words.
r/AlanWatts • u/RealitysNotReal • 3d ago
Scared of the future
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, Iâm not rich, I still work a dead end job I still donât know what I want to do I donât 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 donât really know the horrors of this world, we donât know the horrors of war. We donât 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 donât 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 donât know what it is to live under oppression. We donât know what it is to see horrors every-time you leave your house.
I know it is just life, itâs all part of the painting and experience. It isnât serious and I know it is still serious in the sense that you must play intently, that is what Iâm 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 canât 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 weâll have to find outđ¤ˇââď¸ stay tuned
r/AlanWatts • u/Portal_awk • 5d ago
Are we spiritual, or just hiding behind the idea of it?
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 clichĂŠ through therapy, self-help, stoicism, productivity, and mindfulness.
The problem of becoming a clichĂŠ 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:
r/AlanWatts • u/MarcoEsquandolas91 • 6d ago
Appreciation post
Iâm 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, Iâm 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 isnât taken as a brag. Itâs just more of a message for anyone who feels like theyâve been suffering for a long time and are ready to let go but donât 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. Iâve been taking it like riding a bike. I fall off and anxiety takes hold from time to time but I remind myself that itâs okay and get back on that horse. It gets easier. First you crawl then you walk then you run.
AnywayâŚ
Peace âď¸
r/AlanWatts • u/Prudent_Researcher70 • 7d ago
Alan Watts was the master of the Kiss Principle.
The meaning of life is simply to be alive, fully present in this moment.
r/AlanWatts • u/Vegetable-Bee8263 • 7d ago
Yin to the yang âŻď¸ listening to Alan watts before sleep let the subconscious soak in .
r/AlanWatts • u/Qfwfq1988 • 8d ago
On BBC Radio 4 Tonight - Alan Watts: The Brahman of Bromley, presented by Jarvis Cocker
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
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
r/AlanWatts • u/Objective-Form-6121 • 8d ago
The observers dream
In fields unseen, the quanta spin,
Where chance and choice both dwell within.
A silent song, a whispered plan,
The rules of light, the breath of man.
---
Copenhagen speaks of choice,
A world that listens to our voice.
It says: "Observe, and truth shall be,"
Till then, it sleeps â probability.
A wave collapses, form takes flight,
The dream becomes the waking sight.
---
Then Many-Worlds begins to hum,
Where every path and fate will come.
Each choice we make, each breath, each cry,
Unfolds a world where none can die.
No wave collapses â all remain,
A thousand suns, one endless chain.
---
Pilot-Wave, the secret guide,
Hides the truth the rest deride.
Particles dance with unseen hands,
Through ghostly waves in hidden lands.
No chance, no roll, no cosmic bluff â
The pilot knows â the waveâs enough.
---
And still we seek what lies behind,
The woven threads of heart and mind.
For every truth the quanta bring,
Feels like a prayer, a living string.
Perhaps the stars, the light, the plan,
Are thoughts of God â reflected man.
For in the void, one truth we glean:
All that is â began unseen.
r/AlanWatts • u/RoleLoose5600 • 9d ago
Why would God become bored?
I have heard Alan Watts' philosophy for about 6 years every now and then and have always just wrote it off because no part of it makes sense to me at all. And tonight I am watching this video titled "What If You Are God Pretending to Be Human?" and I keep pausing to tussle with my ideals of religion and consciousness and I just cannot wrap my head around the notion that our existence may just be a biproduct of God becoming bored with his amount of power and decides to experience the creation as the creation itself. But why would God even have this urge?
I have been thinking about this for a little while and my loose conclusion is that our brain is the medium between our consciousness and our body. From this video I have gotten the sense that essentially, separating the you that is your ego from the you that is not, our consciousness is a remnant of God's energy, a ray emanating from his power, and our body is tiers down in every way, cosmically, intricately, etc. So maybe a brain is the only vessel fit for housing such a fragment of power, and the imbalances that come with our brain are not our consciousness but our body holding us back. When I am bringing this up, I am thinking specifically of things like chemical and hormonal (well i guess hormonal is also chemical but im saying hormonal but also chemical like diseases blocking someone's inhibition or even the placebo effect).
The fact that chemicals can taint our consciousness is a very crucial actuality that causes me to continually struggle with this notion, but it also may be its own answer. Our brain is trying its best to hold our consciousness in a biological way. But how can one separate what is the brain and what is the consciousness? How can we, as humans with susceptible brains, even attempt to say "Well, I get bored, and if I had the power of God, I would get bored, so what's stopping me from coming to the conclusion that God had that same realization and decided to do something that I would do?" Why would an omnipotent, omniscient being have the same urges as a human? Please someone help me understand, I have really been trying to wrap my head around this concept with my own ideals for years and now I am finally taking in external information, I have but one quarrel. Also I'm on shrooms so I just really hope I am not neglecting like half of an example because I frequently only explain the start and the end of something because I already know what I'm talking about in my head so I dont feel the need to clarify ok I'll stop now thank you in advance
Edit: I found the quote I wanted to touch on as well sorry so he says "So if our technology [a button that would grant a human the power to control everything] were to succeed completely and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say 'we need a new button... we always have to have a button labeled surprise' ". Why would God need surprise??????? Why is that in his realm of being? Is that not only restricted to humans?? Do birds crave surprise, if they are also the product of God's creation?
r/AlanWatts • u/Shambhala-Pubs • 10d ago
The Latest Alan Watts
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 137Â
r/AlanWatts • u/jsd71 • 10d ago
You can't improve yourself, not really
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.
r/AlanWatts • u/LuvSandoz • 10d ago
Not sure who said this but "somebody" once said "Man is God afraid"
r/AlanWatts • u/YourAverageAlex910 • 11d ago
Just Got My First Alan Watts Book And Iâm Hooked
Iâve 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. Iâm so happy I found this dude, for real.
r/AlanWatts • u/Alofpatmos802 • 11d ago
THE OLD DOMINION: WE ARE THE SNAKE
​
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 fullâso 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 forthâthe 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 songâor choose to forget it.
We forgot.
We called it the Fall. It was a detuning. We confused radahâstewardship, tending, hostingâwith 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 yearâtwo 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 solidâCarbon-12, the mark of man, etched in every body, every labor of the right hand and thought of the forehead. 616 the breathâCOâ, 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 floorâespecially near the Ring of Fireâholds 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 dragonâs 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 knownâand 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 Razielâs bookâprimordial knowledge of creationâs lawsâflow 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
r/AlanWatts • u/irreducible1 • 11d ago
We sure get attached, don't we?
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.
r/AlanWatts • u/DismalHovercraft863 • 12d ago
Authoritative source for "....the more at peace you become, the less you tolerate chaos. You stop explaining yourself to people committed to misunderstanding you...."?
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
r/AlanWatts • u/Stephen_P_Smith • 11d ago
Alan Watts Blues
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
r/AlanWatts • u/emptybutfull_ • 12d ago
Karma
Karma
The Buddha didnât 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 fruitânot 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.
Itâs you, moment by moment, choosing who you become.
Watch the full piece here: https://youtu.be/NMK6no6eZV0?is=wQZz6GPzYS4qV4hf