he makes comparasions between life and death/hide and seek/waking and dreaming. By doing so, he reveals the methodolgy behind being god. How we fool ourselves, trick ourselves into thinking there is no god. We dare oursleves as god to forget we are god, to go further away from the essesence of our existence. God at play, you could call it. Acting as god, trying on various roles.
“Let’s forget it’s a dream,” we say as god.
After listening to his last podcast “Image of Man #2” I am slowly becoming convinced of all these things.
If you disagree, I’ll understand, because you are me in a sense, and it is you job suggest the trickery. I am explaining something to you for my own clarification. I am telling you something you already know.
That is why I am excited to be eternal. thanks for letting me share.
if all we do is trick ourselves into thinking we’re not gods, then certainly there should have been any number of people who were able to subdue this trickery and subvert nature and do miraculous supernatural thigns by now, no?
Hmm for the record, Alan Watts died some time ago, it sounded to me like you were under the impression the podcasts were current. You can actually, if you have no opposition to such things, hunt down a giant 1.something gig file via bittorrent that has a great deal of his many lectures and seminars from over the years. Wonderful listening indeed.
Though I will say, don’t forget that he was a Zen Buddhist practitioner and teacher in addition to being a philosopher. When you start to broach the core of his spiritual teachings, and Zen in general, logic (which philosophy is heavily indebted to) becomes a moot concept. The heart of Zen spiritual teaching is something to be experienced rather than conceptualized in words and ideas, a statement which a great many of famous Zen teachers have professed.
I love Watts and Spinoza. These get as close to my own personalized pantheism as any philosophies can get. However, I believe I’m eternal only in the eternal conservation of energy, not necessarily in my own individual sense of awareness. And that’s fine with me.
Ierellus, you seem like a cool dude, with some similar ideas as mine. Is your avatar a picture of you root tooting on the harmonica? Anyway, keep up the coolness.
Thanks, kev,
Really, I’m too old to be cool. Watts got me through the 1960s. Spinoza speaks to me now. I see extensions of personality after death as a matter of ego. I’ve lost a lot of ego in the mind wars that life includes. Keep searching, young man. The search is the answer. It’s the vitality. It’s what being alive is all about. Much better to read philosophers who find you included in all that is (Spinoza) than those who would pit your natural and beautiful being against mythologies of cosmic corruptions.
The only “eternal” about us is our recurrence(if you are in to that sort of thing) and our physical existance as matter and energy. If only we could continue to track our existance after death, what an entertaining movie that would be.
DO,
My “eternal” existence as energy, so long as this world continues to exist, is positive for me now in realizing that I can be fuel for life that is to come. For me that’s beautiful. It means that regardless of what an asshole I may have been in this life, my parts will be used after my death as needed elsewhere.
kev,
Yep, that’s me on the harmonica frustrating the laws of physics.
Watts got me through the 1960s. Spinoza speaks to me now. I see extensions of personality after death as a matter of ego. I’ve lost a lot of ego in the mind wars that life includes. Keep searching, young man. The search is the answer. It’s the vitality. It’s what being alive is all about. Much better to read philosophers who find you included in all that is (Spinoza) than those who would pit your natural and beautiful being against mythologies of cosmic corruptions.