The Resilient Mind - You Are Not Your Mind: Returning to the Power of Now - Alan Watts

Episode Date: April 21, 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/@tradgedyandhope Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to You Are Not Your Mind, Returning to the Power of Now with Alan Watts. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. If you talk all the time, you'll never hear what anybody else has to say. Therefore, all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull.

Now, if you do that all the time, you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking. And just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking, you become into immediate contact with what Koshimski called so delightfully, the unspeakable world, the non-verbal world. Some people would call it the physical world, but these words physical, non-verbal, material are all conceptual and is not a concept. So when you are awake to that world, you suddenly find that all the so-called differences between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain,

are all conceptual, and they're not there. They don't exist at all. When the old master, Yakujo, was asked, what is then? He said, when hungry eat, when tired sleep. But they said, well, isn't that what everybody does? Aren't you just like ordinary people? Oh, he said, no, they don't do anything of the kind. When they're hungry, they don't just eat.

They think of all sorts of things. When they're tired, they don't just sleep, but dream all sorts of dreams. We have been running around far too much. It's all right. We've been active and our action has achieved a lot of good things. But as Aristotle pointed out long ago, and this is one of the good things about Aristotle, he said the goal of action is contemplation. In other words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what's it all about?

Especially when people are busy because they think they're going somewhere and they're going to get something and attain something. There's quite a good deal of point to action if you know you're not going anywhere. If you act like you dance or like you sing or play music, then you're not going anywhere. You're just doing pure action. But if you act with the thought in mind that as a result of action, you are eventually going to arrive at some place where everything will be all right, then you are on a squirrel cage,

hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call samsahara, the round or rat race of birth and death. Because you think you're going to get someone. You're already there. But the point is that one cannot act creatively, except on the basis of stillness of having a mind that is from time to time capable of stopping thinking.

And so, This practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first. Because if you sit in the Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners start to fidget. They find it very boring to sit for a long time. But the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time. and as a matter of fact, far from being boring,

the world, when looked at without chatter, becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells. The texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things without being named and saying, that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot. When you don't name things any longer,

you start seeing them. You see, if you, if you, force sound into five tones. You force color into five colors. You're blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only through stopping, fixing conceptions on the world of color and sound that you really begin to hear it and see it. So this, shall I be so bold as to use the word discipline of meditation or zazen, lies behind the extraordinary capacity of Zen people who develop such great arts

as the gardens, the tea ceremony, the calligraphy and the grand painting of the Sun Dynasty and of the Japanese Asumi tradition. They found in the very simplest things of everyday life, magic, in the words of the poet, Hokkoji, marvelous power and supernatural activity. Drawing water, carrying wood. The easiest way to stop thinking is first of all to think about something that doesn't have any meaning.

Or listening to a sound that has no meaning. Because that stops you thinking because you become fascinated in the sound. Comes a point when the sound is taken away and you're wide open. Now at that point, there will be a kind of preliminary so-called sattori, and you will think, wow, wow, e, that's it. You'll be so happy, you'll be walking on air. When Suzuki-Daisetz was asked, what is it like to have sattori, he said, well, it's like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.

From the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The Bodhisattva, you see, who doesn't go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it too, he doesn't come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious can't. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as Buddhas. He sees them

to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton's but now a great thing in the street seems any human nod where move in strange democracy the million masks of God the world as seen in an ordinary everyday state of consciousness to find out that that is

really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy because here is the light that brilliant blazing energy brighter than a thousand suns which is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine your seed.

Vivid, vivid light so bright. It's beyond light. It's so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges like a great star that becomes a rim of red. And beyond that a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigene. gold, violet. You see this great mandala appearing, this great sun.

And beyond the violet, there's black, black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black as the yang comes from the inn, Moride. Going, going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. there's a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep, thundering bass,

which is so vibrant that in turn it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time you've been watching a kind of thing radiating out. But it says, you know, this isn't all I can do. And the rays start going y'oi, yoee, y'ee, y'ee, dancing like this. And naturally the sound starts going waving to as it comes out. And then the textures start varying themselves. And they say, well, you've been looking at this thing as I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension.

Let's add a third dimension. It's going to come right at you. now, see, this way. And meanwhile, it says it's not just that we're going to go ewee, you, you, ee, like this, we're going to do little curly cues. We're going to go like this. And then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense that all kinds of little subfigures are contained within what you thought were originally the main figure.

And the sound starts going all different, amazing, complexities of sound all over the place. And this thing's going, going, going, and you think you're going to go out of your mind, and suddenly it turns into why us sitting around here. When we say to ourselves, you must go up, the reason is, you see, that we are not living in the eternal now, where reality is.

We are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later. Don't kid yourself. Only suckers put hope in the future. There isn't much of a future. You're going to die. So, therefore, this hope for the future is a hoax. It's a perfect hoax.

Because you're not fully alive now, you think maybe someday you will be. Look, supposing I ask you, what did you do yesterday? Most people will say, well, I got up at 7.30 and I brushed my teeth. And I read the newspaper over a cup of coffee. And then I looked at the sock and dress and got in the car and drove downtown and did this and that in the office and so on. And you go on and on and on. And you suddenly discover that what you've described has absolutely nothing to do with what happened. You've described a fleshless list of abstractions.

Whereas if you were actually aware of what went on. You could never describe it. Because nature is multidimensional. Language is linear. Language is scrawny. And therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the way the world is described, it's as if you were trying to eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. Or eat numbers. A lot of people eat numbers.

Play the stock market. We're doing nothing but eating numbers. numbers. They're always unhappy, absolutely miserable, because they never get anything. So therefore, they always hope more is coming. Because they believe that if they eat enough dollar bills, eventually something satisfactory will happen. So eating the abstractions all the time, we want more, more, more time.

very wisely said, a man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening because when you understand you don't put your hope in time. Time won't solve a thing. And the Christian word for sinning in Greek is amatani

which means to miss the point. And the point is eternal life which is here and not. But until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand eternal life, that is to say, eternal now. When you are fully aware and not thinking, you will notice some amazing absences.

There is no past. Can you hear anything past, incidentally? Can you hear anything to future? They're just not there to the plain sense of one's ears. Well, I remember in the sermon on the Mount that Jesus said that a lot of things about this. Consider the lilies of the field how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin,

and yet Suleiman in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. And if God so clothe the grass of the field Which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven Shall he not much more clothe you, faithless ones? Wow. So do not worry about tomorrow saying what shall we eat, What shall we drink, or how shall we clothe ourselves Or the rabble seeks after these things.

Sufficient to the day is the worry of it. Nobody ever preaches a sermon on that text. Never, I've heard lots of sermons and never one on them because people say That's all very well Because Jesus was the boss's son And he knew, you see, that he was really

in charge of the universe and he had nothing to worry about But we have to be practical Oh What do you suppose the gospel was? The good news Do you know it never got out? You too are the boss's son.

That was the gospel. Lots of people in India know that perfectly well. When you get to be a certain age and after you studied long enough with a certain guru, then and then only may you realize this. If you've put in the time, they finally let you in. Here you have to wait until you're dead. The only place to begin is now, because here's where we are. So why put it off?

A lot of people say, well, I'm not ready. What do you mean you're not ready? What do you have to be to be ready? I'm not good enough. I'm perhaps not old enough, not mature enough, still am frightened of pain. I'm still dependent on material things. I have to eat a lot and drink a lot. I better get all that under control first.

Oh, you want to be able to congratulate yourself for having gone through the discipline, which is rewarded with realization. That is trying to quench fire with fire. Wouldn't it be great to have no fear, no attachments, no hang-ups, to be as free as the air? Then it be crazy to have that courage. You look at it to yourself, honest, you find it inside. you're actually a quaking mess of sensitivity,

running away from the quaking mess, escaping. You never can. There's nothing you can actually do to transform your own nature into unattached selflessness because you have a selfish reason for wanting to do it. What does it mean that you can't do anything about? singing loud and clear. The reason you can't do anything about it is that you don't exist.

You, as you conceive yourself to be, that is, your ego, your image of yourself, isn't there. It doesn't exist. It's an abstraction. Well, when you understand that, you're liberated. There is the happening, the suchness, yes, but it's not pushing you around because there's no you to be pushed around. This illusion of the persecuted ego who is pushed around. by fate, it is not altogether disappeared. And so, in likewise, the illusion of the ego who pushes fate around has also disappeared.

There's a happening. By dying to yourself, by having become completely incompetent, and found that you don't exist, you're reborn. You become everything. In the words of Sir Edwin Arnold, foregoing self, the universe grows by. Thank you for. in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.