The Resilient Mind - When You Can't Let Go - Alan Watts

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Alan Watts was a British-American philosopher and speaker known for bringing Eastern wisdom into the heart of Western culture. With a poetic yet playful style, he made complex ideas from Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism feel beautifully human and deeply accessible.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet.Speech licensed from https://mindsetdrm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to when you can't let go with Alan Watts. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. The general title of these talks that I'm giving here is mind over mind. And I'm going into all the various problems which have to do with the control of the mind. and so I might introduce what I'm going to say by saying it from different points of view. For example, if you're interested in communications, it will be the problem of feedback. Or if I may put it in theological terms, how does man follow the will of God if the will of man is perverse? The theologians say, you cannot do this without having divine grace or the power to follow the will of God.

How then do you get grace? Why is grace given to some and not to others? If I cannot follow the will of God by my own effort because my will is selfish, how will my will which is selfish be transformed into an unselfish will? If I cannot do it because I am already the selfish will, then grace must do it. If grace has not already done it, why not? Because I didn't accept it, but by definition I had no power to accept it because my will was selfish. Must I then become a Calvinist and say that only those people who are predestined to receive grace will be able to live the good life.

Then we come back to the inadmissible position that people who live evil lives and do not get grace because they are not predestined to it out of the infinite wisdom of the Godhead, then God himself must be held responsible for their evil deeds. And so that is a nice little tangle. If I put this in the language of oriental philosophy and religion, it would be something like this. The Buddha said that wisdom must come only from the abandonment of selfish craving or desire.

One who abandons that desire attains nirvana, which is supreme peace, liberation. Nirvana means in Sanskrit blow out, that is, exhale the breath. The opposite desire is to breathe in. Now if you breathe in and hold it, you lose your breath. But if you breathe out, it comes back to you. So the principle here is, if you want life, don't cling to it. Let go. But the problem is, if I desire not to desire, is that not already desire?

How can I desire not to desire? How can I surrender myself when myself is precisely an urge to hold on, to cling, to cling to life, to continue to survive? I can see rationally that by clinging to myself I may strangle myself. I may be like a person who has a bad habit as a result of which he is committing suicide. And he knows that but can't give it up because the means of death are so sweet. So it all comes down to this basic question that human beings have for a long, long time, concerned about transforming their minds.

Is there any way in which one's mind can be transformed? Or is it simply a process which is nothing more than a vicious circle? I could ask, why have you come here this afternoon? What were you looking for? Would it be too presumptuous of me to say that you were looking for help? That you hoped you would hear somebody who had something to say that would be a little

that would be of help and relevance to you as members of a world which is running into the most intense difficulty. A world beset by a complex of problems, any one of which would be bad enough. But when you add together all the great political, social and ecological problems with which we are faced, they are appalling. And one naturally says the reason why we are in such a mess is not simply that we have wrong systems for doing things, whether they be technological, political or religious, but we have the wrong people. The systems may be all right, but they are in the wrong hands because we are all in various ways, self-seeking, lacking in wisdom, lacking in courage, afraid of death, afraid of pain, unwilling really to cooperate with others, unwilling to be open to others.

And we all think that's too bad. It's me that's wrong. And if only, I could be the right person. Is this man going to tell me something that will help me to change myself so that I will be so that I will be a more creative and cooperative member of the human race. I would like to improve. So in so many people's minds and from so many different angles, there is this urgent feeling that I must improve me. And this is critically important,

because it's obvious, that, at least it's superficially obvious, that the way things are, we are going to hell first, Now in this question, can I improve me? There is the obvious difficulty that if I am in need of improvement, the person who's going to do the improving is the one who needs to be improved. And there immediately we have a vicious circle. All right. You want grace? Well, ask God, maybe you'll give it to you.

And the theologian will tell you, yes, God gives his grace freely. grace freely. He gives it to all because he loves all. It's here like the air. All you have to do is receive it. Or a more orthodox, a Catholic Christian would say, all you have to do is to be baptized to take the Holy Sacrament of the altar, the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, and there is the grace right there. And it's given by these simple physical means so that it's very easily and readily available. Well, a lot of people got baptized and it doesn't always take. People fall from grace. Why do that? You see, we're just talking about the same old problem, but we've put it to step up, but it's the same problem. How can I improve myself? Was the first problem, the second problem is,

how can I accept grace? They're both the same problem, because you've got to make a move, which will put yourself out of your own control, into the control of a better. If you don't believe in the Christian kind of a God, you can believe in the Hindu kind of a God, who is your inner self. You see, you've got a lower self, which you can call your ego. That's that little scoundreless fellow, that's always out for me.

But behind the ego, there is the Atman, the inner self, the inward light, as Quakers would call it, the real self. real self, the spirit, which is substantially identical with God. So you've got to meditate in such a way that you identify with your higher self. Now, how do you do that? Well, you start by watching all your thoughts very carefully, watching your feelings, watching your emotions, so that you begin to build up a sense of separation between the watcher and what is watched so that you are, as it were, no longer carried away by your own stream of consciousness. You remain the witness impassively, impartially, suspending judgment and watching it all go on. That seems to be something like progress. At least you're taking an objective view of what is going on.

You are beginning to be in a position to control it, but just wait a minute, who is this self behind the self, the watching self? Can you watch that one? It's interesting if you do. Because you find out, of course, that this is, just as the problem of grace is nothing more than a transposition of the first problem, how am I to be unselfish by my own power? It becomes how am I to get grace by my own power. So in the same way we find that the watching self or the observing self behind all our thoughts and feelings is itself a thought. That is to say, when the police enter a house in which there are thieves, the thieves go up from the ground floor to the first floor. When the police arrive on the first

floor, the thieves have gone up to the second. And so to the third and finally out to the roof. And so when the ego is about to be unmasked, it immediately identifies with the higher self. it goes up a level because the religious game is simply a refined and high-brow version of the ordinary game. How can I outwit me? Thank you for tuning in.

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