Amazingly powerful video.. The real you - Alan Watts

Beautiful clip. I've heard the audio track before, but it's got a new set of (astonishing) visuals.

I'd post hundreds of clips of Alan Watts on here, if I could. He was FAR ahead of his time, especially when it came to ecological thinking (or, in terms of the broad, deeply interconnected web/network of life). The man also had a way of making concepts strikingly clear. His full lectures deserve to be listened to, but I'll just post a few short (roughly 5 minutes or less) favorites:

Life Is A Dance


Organism-Environment, the transactional nature


A wiggly world


Farmer story





And, two full (roughly hour-long) lectures:

Man in nature


Not What Should Be But What Is (or, What Do You Mean When You Use the Word "I"?)


I have a playlist of his on the Youtubes that has most of his best talks - from short clips to full lectures:

www.youtube.com...

Thanks so much for the thread.

That was tough to watch. There was little to no point in what he was saying. He was just talking in circles.
Further more, it was difficult to even hear what he was saying as the music was too loud.

reply to post by Lightbringer38


I love the Light you bring forth Op!

Mr. Watts is also a light bringer and he speaks beautifully to the soul who does remember, who is awake always within each expression of experience.

Thank you...

I don't really have much other to say, this was absolutely incredible.

Beautiful video.

I don't think we fear death as much as we might fear no longer being alive.

Of course some might fear judgement ( if one has religious beliefs) but this video is aimed at dismissing those thoughts.

Maybe it is just one long dream and we aren't aware we are dead. Who knows.
This guy watts certainly doesn't know either.

I enjoyed the video but was more stimulated by the visuals, his narrative did nothing for me. I will play it again with just the audio, so I'm not distracted by the visuals.

Thank you for posting.

Originally posted by MrPlow
That was tough to watch. There was little to no point in what he was saying. He was just talking in circles.
Further more, it was difficult to even hear what he was saying as the music was too loud.

Ahh........One of the Dark ones finally shows up to pollute the good will. May I suggest two fish oils, a cold shower and a very long walk? I think it would do you some good. Well, maybe anyway. Certainly worth a try.

OP, Thank you for posting that video. It was very powerful. I am gonna check out more of Mr. Watts work. ~$heopleNation

S&F to the OP, that was a very stirring video and yes I have heard the name Alan Watts, in regards to meditation. I enjoyed one spun around the notion of waves being all of the ocean and not just a part of the whole, as we are all of the universe not just an tiny part, insignificant and isolated.

I do believe that we all contain lives that have be recycled, if you will, that each of us carry a portion of who we were in the past. That may explain why learning languages come easier to some and not to others. Or that we know or understand things that we may never have heard of before.

Thanks for planting the seed to delve more into this man's world. I have just reserved two books from our library, hoping to pick them up tomorrow. They are:

The spirit of Zen:a way of life, work and art in the Far East.
Still the mind :an introduction to meditation

Welcome anyone's comments on either of these titles.

Namaste,
YogaGinns

reply to post by YogaGinns


Still the Mind was spectacular, but it's been awhile since I read it so I can't remember specific details. If I recall, it's a collection of essays and edited transcriptions of various talks. I'm not sure if I've read the other one. Some of my favorite books of his are:


The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Nature, Man & Woman
Myth and Religion
The Way of Liberation


He writes as well as he speaks - so if you enjoyed the clip, you'll enjoy the book. The insights are pretty densely packed, sometimes on a sentence-to-sentence basis. You could easily take a week to digest/mull over a single paragraph.

The majority of his talks (in audio form) are a real treat. I posted some above on this page. When it comes to meditation in particular, I have a digital copy of this lecture that I often listen to on long car rides:

Meditation

reply to post by SheopleNation


Great post.

In terms of exploring Watts's work, you might enjoy some of the videos I posted above. A greater selection can be found in the playlist I linked to. There are various short clips (with and without music) and full lectures (which are excellent and the time just breezes by). Here's one more of my favorites (a short one):

What Is It To See?

Spread the message people, we can make a better world. We can.

It starts by you, as an individual, you start the change. So do I, and others, and together we will.

reply to post by Lightbringer38


That was a beautiful movie short.

reply to post by SamLuv

"your doing all this, and you never had been educated on how to do it"

Sounds like junk DNA to me ?

I've been feeling for some time now that what I'm experiencing with my five senses is only the most minute part of what we actually are. The very particles we're made of have been traveling through space for billions of years. My body is literally billions of years old. I feel a strong connection with everything that exists. I also feel like my perception of reality is a veil covering my eyes. I feel that at any moment I could grab the fabric of space-time in front of me and just tear away this "reality" I'm feeling and witness the true magnificence of the totality of existence.

reply to post by Dystopiaphiliac


To quote Mr. Watts from elsewhere:

"People say there was a primoridial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space. Well let's take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.

It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?

So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting.

But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curly-cue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself.

You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."
(this speech is in the "Wiggly World" clip I embedded above - or, if you prefer it with music, here)


I also recommend William Blake, who spoke of how "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern" (referring to the five senses as the "narrow chinks") and how "if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is - infinite".

There's also Aldous Huxley, who - among many other things - wrote:

"What we ordinarily call 'reality' is merely that slice of total fact which our biological equipment, our linguistic heritage and our social conventions of thought and feeling make it possible for use to apprehend."

Originally posted by violet
Beautiful video.

I don't think we fear death as much as we might fear no longer being alive.

Of course some might fear judgement ( if one has religious beliefs) but this video is aimed at dismissing those thoughts.

Maybe it is just one long dream and we aren't aware we are dead. Who knows.
This guy watts certainly doesn't know either.

I enjoyed the video but was more stimulated by the visuals, his narrative did nothing for me. I will play it again with just the audio, so I'm not distracted by the visuals.

Thank you for posting.

Eh? Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the video is based on the narrative, one means nothing without the other surely.

I've listened to all his lectures at least 5 times and read several of his books. He got into Taoism toward the end of his life and wrote a good introductory book about it. Here's another one of my favorite Watts videos -



Oh yeah and if you don't use file sharing, you can subscribe to the Alan Watts Podcast RSS feed for weekly lectures.

Wow this has really taken off!

best alan watts video ever

i have been a fan for some time but this one gets me every time
its very important to watch part two as well, it gets to some very very deep and interesting reflections




i've frequently caught myself quoting alan watts while chatting with friends, one of my favorites that is deep from many angles is that the main difference between buddha and jesus is that jesus was born of a carpenter and buddha from a prince

reply to post by deometer


I think it was Aldous Huxley that said our brains are basically reducing valves allowing only a trickle of information to pass through.

Originally posted by ErgoTheConclusion
reply to post by Lightbringer38

 

Alan Watts is one of my favorite variations of myself I've been.

edit on 25-8-2012 by ErgoTheConclusion because: (no reason given)

you said it.