The Resilient Mind - Who Are You? – The Power of Letting Go of Who You’re Not - Alan Watts

Episode Date: July 14, 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 Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with T & H: https://www.youtube.com/@tradgedyandhopeSpeech licensed from https://mindsetdrm.comMusic written by Barry Gilbey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Who Are You? With Alan Watts. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. You can think intellectually in a no-think way. That's the art. It doesn't mean not to have any thoughts at all.

It means not to be fooled by thoughts, not to be hypnotized by the form of, of speech and images that we have for the world, not to be hypnotized by them into thinking that that is the way the world really is. Don't let words limit the possibilities of luck. Anybody who says that he knows what Zen is is a fraud. Nobody knows. Just like you don't know who you are.

All this business about your name and your accomplishments, your certificates, what your friends say about you. You know very well, that's not you. But the problem to know who you are is the problem of smelling your own nose. But a person who thinks that in order to be awakened, you have to be heartless to have no emotion, no feelings, that you couldn't possibly lose your temper or get angry or feel annoyed or depressed. Those people haven't got the right idea at all. Your real mind, while all those emotions are going on, is imperturbable.

To be pure-minded in the Zen way or clear-minded is a better way of translating it, is not to have no thoughts. It is purity, clarity, in the sense that your mind isn't sticky. You don't harbor grievances. You don't be attached to the past. You go with it with life. Life is flowing all the time. That is the Tao, the flow of light.

You can swim against the stream, but you'll still be moved along by it, and all you'll do is wear yourself out in futility. But if you swim with the stream, the whole strength of the stream is yours. But suddenly, as it goes, all the past vanishes, future has not yet arrived, and there is only one place to be, which is here. And now, a master who was once asked, what is the Tao, the way, replied, walk on. Actually, go. And it is this aspect of Zen, which is what is truly understood

by detachment, or having a mind that isn't sticky and that isn't stopped at any point in its whole working. To be stopped at a certain point is what is called having a doubt, trying to find the right solution for the circumstances by thinking it out

in a situation where there really is no time to think it out. In other words, you are about to strike a nail and you wonder as you are about to hit it, is this the right place to put it? And so you probably hit your thumbnail instead of the nail because you don't go right through with hitting that nail. This is not saying, let me mark this again, It is not saying that there should be no criticism of thought, but if you criticize thought

while thinking, as if there were a critic thinker standing aside from the stream of thought, then you get all balled up. And that is exactly what happens in the process of attachment, or what are called in Buddhist that cletia, which mean disturbing confusions of the mind. You see, thinking is silent language, and I mean language in the most intensive sense of the word, not only words, but also images and numbers, notation. Just because then we can talk about anything,

we can talk about talking, we can talk about thinking, we can talk about ourselves, all we are actually doing. is making a second thought or thought stream, which comments on the one that went before, and then pretending that the second stream is a different stream than the first. If you believe that there is no really lower self,

there is only the higher self, but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through, the very fact that you think that it has to try to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self. If you think you have a lower self or an ego to get rid of, and then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that. The true self, either you know it or you don't.

If you do know it, then you know it's the only one, and the other so-called lower self just ceases to be a problem. But if you were brought up to believe yourself split, I remember my mother used to say to me when I did naughty things, she said, Alan, that's not like you. So I had, you know, some conception of what was like me in my better moments, that is to say, in the moments when I remembered what my mother would like me to do.

And so that split is implanted in us all. And because of our being split-minded, we are always dithering. Is the choice that I am about to make of the higher self or of the lower self? Is it of the spirit or is it of the flesh? Is the word that I have received of the Lord or is it of the devil? And nobody can decide. Because if you knew how to choose, you wouldn't have to. There is an expression in Chinese which means the flow of thoughts are what we call in literary criticism,

stream of consciousness. And so you will notice that thought, follows thought, follows thought. And those thoughts arise and go like waves on the water all the time. They come and go. And when they go, they are as if they had never been here. So actually this shows your mind doesn't stick.

Really. You could get the illusion of it sticking. by, for example, cycling the same succession of thoughts over and over again. And that gives a sense of permanence in the same way as when you revolve a cigarette butt in the dark, you get the illusion of there being a solid circle, although there is only the single point of fire. And it is from this connecting of thoughts that we get the sensation that behind our thoughts there is a thinker who controls them and experiences them. Although the notion that there is a thinker is just one member in the stream of thoughts.

But you know, in your stream of thought and experience, I am an object and a very sleeting and passing one. And also in my stream of experience, you also are people who will come and go. We are all, you see, living in the same world. We think there is me and there is an external world around me, but I am in your external world and you are in my external world. And if you think about that, you see we are all in one world going along together. There isn't really the internal and the external. There is simply the process.

It's very important to get rid of that illusion of duality between the sinker and the thoughts. So find out who is the thinker behind the thoughts. Who is the real genuine you? Jwangza, so far as we know, lived about 300 BC, maybe a little earlier than that.

His book is quite unique in the whole history of philosophy because he's almost the only philosopher from the whole of antiquity who has real humor. and therefore he's an immensely encouraging person to read. But part of his humor is the art of exaggeration. As in a group of people who are enthusiasts for something, but have humor,

who very often find that when they're talking among themselves, they carry their own ideas to ludicrous extreme, and raw with laughter about it. And Zhuangza does that. He has a great deal to say about the value of the useless life. When a Dawa sage is wandering through the forest, he isn't going anywhere. He's just wandering.

When he watches the cloud, he loves them because they have no special destination. He watches birds moving around. He watches the waves lapping on the shore. And just because all this is not busy in the way that human being are busy because it serves no end other than being what it is now. It is for that reason that he admires it, and it is for that reason that you'll get the peculiar styles of Chinese painting in the Tang Song and later dynasties where nature in its wayward

wandering nature is the main subject. When we say that something is without purpose, that's a put-down praise. Say, well, it's no future in it. What's the use? No, we say, what's the use? We need very much to realize that that question reflects our insanity. What's the future in it? What's the youth?

The joy for the Taoist is that things have no use, and the future is not important. Now you can exaggerate this, and Juanza does in a very humorous way, by describing the ideal useless man. He's a hunchback. And he's so deformed that his chin rests on his navel. But he says now this man is very admirable. He's found the secret of life because when the social service workers come around, he's the first to get a free handout.

And when the military officers come around to conscript people for the army, he's the first to be rejected. Therefore, he lives long. Juanza is here pulling our legs. He is not exactly asking us to take all that literally, but this is his way of doing things. Then also he describes the behavior of the high form of man, and he says, the man of character lives at home without exercising his mind and performs actions without worry. The notions of right and wrong, and the praise and blame of others, do not disturb him. When within the Four Seas, all people can enjoy themselves, that is happiness for him.

When all people are well provided, that is peace for him. Sorrowful in countenance, he looks like a baby who has lost its mother. Appearing stupid, he goes about like one who has lost his way. He has plenty of money to spend and does not know where it comes from. He drinks and eats just enough. and does not know where the food comes from. This is the demeanor of the man of character. Then by contrast, the hypocrites are those people

who regard as good whatever the world acclaims as good and regard as right of whatever the world acclaims us right. When you tell them that they are men of Tao, then their countenances change with satisfaction. When you call them hypocrites, then they look displeased. All their lives they call themselves men of Tao, and all their lives they remain hypocrites. They know how to good speech and tell appropriate anecdotes in order to attract the crowd.

But from the very beginning to the very end, they do not know what it's all about. They put on the proper garb and dress in the proper colors and put on a decorative appearance in order to make themselves popular, but refuse to admit that they're hypocrites. Tom, there is about, you see, the character of the Taoist sage as depicted by Jwanza. Something of the fool. because the fool is the person who doesn't know enough coming out of the rain, who doesn't compete,

everybody else gets before him to the prizes, the material prizes of life, and even to the spiritual prizes. The fool is, you see, the person who isn't going anywhere. He sits by the road and go... The fool is like a Mongolian idiot child. who isn't interested in survival, who will take a plate of food and run his finger round in it

and make a wonderful slosh with the stew, and then watch it drip from the tip of his finger. He won't eat for quite a while, and then he'll play with it in all sorts of ways, then his attention will be distracted by something else and he'll chase after that, you see? But he, if so long as you don't cross him, he remains the most wonderfully friendly,

winging kind of a cat, but he has no ambition. He doesn't fight for himself, and nobody can ever get him to. So the fool has always been used as a kind of analog of the sage. There's a Hindu verse which says sometimes naked, sometimes mad. Now as a scholar, now as a fool, thus they appear on earth, the premen. And if you read the biographies of the early life of Sri Ramakrishna or Sri Ramanah Mahashi, they are absolutely wild. Now, not all of this, you see again, just as in reading Jwansa, you mustn't take it too literally.

These things are said by way of a kind of overstress to correct another kind of overstress in the opposite direction. Basically, Juanza's philosophy is a philosophy of relativity. He makes a great deal of the point that there is no absolute standard of great or small, of important or unimportant. But, one, sir, you must get the point of view that small things are as big as big things can be, and big things are as small as small things can be. Everything can be looked at as great or small things. more important and unimportant, and all the steps between, because his conception of the world

is essentially cyclic. So in the same way, where does the circle start, the circle of life, the cycle of life, the interdependence of the bees and the flowers, the interdependence of long and short, you see, it's all circular. And so there is nowhere and there is everywhere that it can begin. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.