It Will Give You Goosebumps - Alan Watts On The Secrets Of God

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 you believe prophets and things like that well prophecy is simply contaminating the future with the past because if you know the future there's no surprise for you a completely known future is past you've had it [Music] has to come uh it seems to be there isn't anything there there is no now really you know how can we exist there's no now

the past and the future come right together where is that place in between how long is it there are two answers to that question this is a real fun question i love it he's saying really there is no now there is the future and the past come together the future turns into the past and he goes in no time at all the future has become past and so we get this frantic feeling where would it where did it go let's take the small view first of all the now is infinitely short and yet it's the

only thing that is in that case this whole world is an illusion it doesn't really exist now the other side of the matter is this that this short now is an illusion of the clock we make our second marks on clocks as thin as is consistent with visibility and therefore we always think of the present as crossing the hairline that's too long see how short can you get see but really the present isn't like that at all there is nowhere else but now everything that happens is happening now well it's like your field of vision

your field of vision isn't just a point of light your field of vision is an oval it isn't fuzzy at the edges it just ceases to be at the edges but there's plenty of room in it to see something move across so now is a big sloppy thing but it comes out of nothing [Music] no there is no need to seek for a meaning [Music] if we ask life to have a meaning we look for something other than life to be that meaning i see the process of life as an essentially musical process which has

no meaning except itself it is going round in circles like we love to spin in circles when we are dancing like children love to spin around in circles till they get dizzy that's fun and so the articulation of wonderful patterns is the meaning of life i feel that instead of getting into these infinite regressions of what is beneath what is behind look it's right out in front of you now [Music] what do i propose nothing [Music] how did you really believe that there would be no effort whether it's doing something or thinking something we definitely

are not just feeling that we're going to sit and let everything happen to us why did i come here [Music] yeah but i mean look here when you ask always why did you come i repeat that is a barren question why did you do it why did this happen a question that peter's out so this is this is not important what is important surely is is is this immediate now not why are we here but what are we here [Music] yes aren't there really two different ways to conserve something the second one almost isn't a

search there's a way of intellectually trying to figure it out and plan it and there's the way of experiencing it even and part of your experience would be taking in what would happen in the future and that second way isn't a bad search it's just really being yeah so isn't there a type that's the type of searching for meaning that would be okay that would be fulfilling well [Music] yes there is a the searching in a spirit that the search is more fun than the finding when you're traveling for example going somewhere is the real

joy of it often that's the fallacy of the jet plane that it abolishes distances between places and all places which have a distance abolished between them become the same place so there's no point going to tokyo if it's already los angeles i mean this is the thing the chinese word for the way is dao tao and the path is what we're looking for in the chinese sense you see the tao is the works baby that is the witch than which there is no witcher and that's like uh when the chinese poet is wandering in the

forest and he looks at the clouds and he says where are they going no one knows where does this path lead no one cares i'm wandering on and on in a great forest without thought of return that is poetic feeling it's the mysterious going nowhereness of things the wandering spirit seeking is uh different from anxiety to get something in the future which you don't have now what is your criteria for heaven now now are you beauty as opposed to ugliness yes at least you see i know when i'm confronted with the beautiful or when i

pass into the beautiful as i know when i pass into the ugly the problem is not to know what is beautiful but to know how to put it into linear language [Music] though you didn't say yes that's a different matter now look uh one of the most interesting meditations is to think about death and imagine what it would be like to go unconscious and never become conscious again [Music] it teases you out of thought and while you think of that you get a mirror image thought which is about your birth my goodness you came to

without ever having gone unconsciously that's pretty weird and it seems to me that if that happened once it can happen again when you die boing there's a blank and the next thing you know is where this is you did it before because every i that comes into this world is i it's me it's you but yet i is always central everyone feels he's the center of the universe and on the surface of a sphere any point may be the center here it is every time it happens it's me what is love love is not a

part love is the energy of the world [Music] and nobody can say what that is if anybody were to say what god is or what the energy of the world is he would be talking nonsense now there are times when it is important to talk nonsense because we can discover the energy of the universe through nonsense when you take a sound that really doesn't mean anything much like oh that's the energy of the universe going dig it see as you listen to sound that's why music is a marvelous support for meditation just listening to that

hum [Music] there goes the energy of the we universe for the sake of the meditation not because if i meditate as something today something may or may not happen then if you do that it isn't meditation meditation is centered in the here and now done for some other reason it isn't meditation it stops dead right there what is satori satori is any kind of aha eureka phenomenon only specifically applied to discovering who and what you are the clear light is that you say i saw the light it doesn't necessarily mean that there was the physical

hallucination of a flash it may mean suddenly everything becomes transparent it's just as the problem vanishes and you stop asking the question what do you mean risk it the thing the problem is no risk being gone the risk is being human [Music] [Music] [Music] you