Alan Watts Speak
t r a n s c r i b e d

NOTE: The following are transcriptions of the RealAudio files in Alan Watts Speak, which are presented as "answers" to invented questions. To fully appreciate these statements one must hear them spoken by the author. However this presents some difficulty for people with hearing impairments or lacking audio hardware. So read if you must, but if possible please listen.

Why must everyone experience their divinity?
or, What's so important about Entheogenesis?

   To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it.

   You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever that is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing your hearing your talking your thinking your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.

And if you don't know that,
if you don't feel that,
well naturally you feel alien,
you feel a stranger in the world.

   And if you feel a stranger you feel hostile, and therefore you start to bulldoze things about, to beat it up and to try to make the world submit to your will, and you become a real troublemaker.

What's the problem?

   This whole sensation that we're brought up to have,
of being an island of consciousness locked up in a bag of skin,
facing outside us a world that is profoundly alien to us
in the sense that what is outside me is not me,
this sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement
between ourselves and the so-called "external world"

How would you describe the universe?

   The universe is fundamentally a system which creeps up on itself and then says BOO! and then it laughs at itself for jumping and you see everytime it does it it forgets that it did it before so it never becomes a bore.

Are we just going around in circles???

   Yes, we are going around in circles. But you see, going around in circles--as you may have observed by looking at the sky--is what the universe is doing!

Why are alternative states of consciousness so taboo these days?

   In general, different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness. And therefore official and institutional Psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially-approved experience of reality. And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak monday morning in this official doctrine, i might even say dogma, of what reality is.

The GARDEN of ID and Original SICK

   Every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick. As Jung once suggested, "Life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis, it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death!" And I submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous. For I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.

Ex nihilo nihil fit?

   If space is essential to solid it's prefectly obvious then that nothing is essential to something. If you can't have something without nothing it means nothing is pretty powerful stuff, because something comes out of it, blpppp, like that. It's a dogma of Western thought expressed in the Latin phrase "ex nihilo nihil fit," "out of nothing comes nothing." But that's not so! Out of nothing comes something!! Now you would say, "Well if something comes out of nothing there must be some kind of mystery inside nothing, it must have a secret structure of some kind. I mean, there must be sort of electrical goings-on." That's the trouble they have about cosmology. How could this world generate, could it just be out of free-floating hydrogen? No, it's a much simpler idea than that: it comes out of real, solid nothing. It's so simple! Look, if you listen, and you live in a world where there's only sound for a moment, you'll hear every sound coming out of silence. Where do these sounds come from? They come out of silence. Suddenly...BOING! And you can accustom yourself to seeing light doing the same thing. You can open your eyes and see all this world emerging out of nothing, BOING!...like that, and fading off into the past. And that's why the future is unknown because the future is zero.

Permanent Brain Damage

   When you are told from childhood that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily, you remain permanently mixed up. That, if anything, is permanent brain damage.

What about evil?

   You see, how it was done was this prohibition not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That was the one sure way of getting it eaten. But of course when the Lord God accused Adam and said, "You've been eating of that tree I told you not to eat," and he passed the buck to Eve and said, "this woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me and I did eat." And He looked at Eve and [said] "now what about it?" She said, "well, it was the serpent." And He looked at the serpent--the serpent didn't say anything, because he knew too much and he wasn't going to give away the show. Who is it that sits at the left hand of God? We know who sits at the right hand. It's hushed up, because that's the side where the district attorney sits, and in the Book of Job of course you know Satan is the district attorney at the court of Heaven. He's the prosecutor, he's a faithful servant of the court. Because, you see, the whole problem is, it would be very bad indeed if God were the author of evil and we were his victims. That is to say, if we keep the model of the King of the Universe, and the creatures are all subjects of the king, then a God who is responsible for evil is being very unkind to other people. But in this theory God is not "an-other" person, there are no "victims" of God. He is never anything but His own victim. You are resonsible, and if you want to stay in the state of illusion, stay in it, but you can always wake up.

I'm really really trying but...

   You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are, and therefore you try to know and dominate the future, and you believe prophets and things like that. Well, prophecy is simply contaminating the future with the past, projecting what we know upon the unknown. And that's why, really, things like Astrology, although interesting, are rather ridiculous. Because if you know the future there's no surprise for you. A completely known future is past, you've had it.

Alan Watts Speak
Alan Watts Lectures and Essays
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