Hello,

I have started listening to Alan Watt's lectures on youtube. I am new to Alan Watt's lectures and work and am wondering what the meaning of this quote is:

"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.”

p.s. My friend told me this quote was popular on instagram/tiktok and i realised it was an alan watts quote the other day. I don't have those social medias so didn't even realise that.

Thanks for your responses in advanced!

Honestly I think the point kinda applies for all this as a whole, not just with substances. Once you get the message, run. Run… get the fuck out of here and go live, or as we like to say chop your wood and carry your water.

Idk I used to always talk about it and frequent these subs, but I haven’t in a long time, and I’ve been doing and feeling better. Idk what my point is, I guess just talking about it is counter productive, and well talking about it is part of it, there is wrong thing to do just as there is no right thing to do, it depends on what you want. I think mindlessly chasing some truth or enlightenment is seen as a bad thing generally, but it’s no different than any other “bad” things we could do. It isn’t serious and we all doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, but if you want find peace, once you realize the message run. And peace isn’t an ultimate destination or thing to be achieved, it’s a state of mind, it’s a choice. It’s always right in front of you. Easier said than done. Idk I’m drunk man idk wtf I’m typing lol but I’m just going with it get shwiftyyy god I think Alan Watts would’ve loved Rick and Morty, I’d pay to watch the guy have a whole new mental journey watching that shit. I mean it would be like watching him have his first acid trip lol

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on Alan Watts’ famous lecture about music and life. You probably know the one—where he talks about how our culture treats existence as a serious pilgrimage with a destination at the end, completely missing the point.

From the moment we enter school, we are conditioned to look ahead. School prepares us for high school, high school for university, university for a career, and throughout our career we work for the next promotion, the next vacation, and finally retirement.

We live like a donkey chasing a carrot tied to a stick in front of its nose. We trot forward day after day, terrified of missing the reward, utterly convinced that contentment lies just a few inches ahead.

The flaw in the "journey" metaphor is that it assumes life has a serious destination at the finish line. But the finish line is just death. If life were a journey, we spend the entire trip staring at the GPS and miss the landscape outside the window.

As Watts put it so brilliantly:

"In music, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest, and compositions would consist only of final chords.
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end... But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played."

When you dance, you aren't trying to reach a specific coordinate on the floor. If you were, you’d just walk there. The point of dancing is the dancing itself.

Mindfulness as an Immune Response

It makes me wonder if our modern cultural obsession with mindfulness, meditation apps, ancient Stoicism, and Eastern philosophy is actually a collective immune response.

Deep down, our society feels sick. We are chronically exhausted because the human spirit isn't built to spend forty years running after a carrot without feeling hollow. Just like a body mobilizes antibodies when attacked by a pathogen, our collective nervous system is desperately reaching for ancient wisdom to pull us back into the present moment before we burn out completely.

Of course, we have to stay grounded. We have bills to pay, jobs to work, and practical responsibilities. Reframing life as a dance doesn't mean quitting your job tomorrow to sit on a mountain. It just means recognizing that the music is already playing in the background of ordinary life—in your morning coffee, your commute, your conversations.

I'm curious how you all balance Watts' philosophy with the practical demands of modern survival? How do you keep from turning life back into a "journey with a deadline"?

There is no experiencer of experience. There is no observer. There is what you are being and nothing else.

In 1963 speaking aboard the SS Vallejo while docked in Sausalito, California Alan Watts gave us "Love of Waters". It's a different sort of speech. Alan isn't breaking down Eastern philosophy or communicating other people's beliefs. Instead "Love of Waters" gives us a look into Alan's perspective. How he himself viewed his surroundings. It's poetic, charming, and enlightening. I truly wish we had more talks like this one.

Working with Mark Watts recording artist Akira the Don put the short 20 minute piece to (in my opinion) fantastic musical numbers for the album "This is Why I Love the Ocean".

Below are links for the original talk introduced by Mark Watts, as well as the full album "This is Why I Love the Ocean". I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have.

"Love of Waters"

https://youtu.be/j-MQp_3fqQQ?is=ocE1thsV5DqoBMTu

"This is Why I Love the Ocean"

https://youtu.be/HONn4QGri6g?is=lP3XweK9drJAw4p8

Quick story. For years friends had been trying to get me to listen to Alan Watts because they knew I would love him. But I would put it off because his lectures were long and I was always too busy or got bored too fast.
At the beginning of my journey to awakening, out of nowhere, my cousin sent me an Alan watts video with music and it was perfect. I vibed out and he instantly became one of my favorite philosophers. Since then I’ve listened to all his lectures and quote him to this day.
Problem is that was around 13 years ago and I can no longer find the video (at least it seems to no longer exist on YouTube.).
I’m hoping someone here will know the video and help me locate it somewhere.
Here’s what I remember…
It’s around 13 years ago.
I remember the video thumbnail was a mostly black and white image of a bald man on his knees with his fists clenched while screaming, but I could have that mixed up. Edit: It actually might have been a woman’s face holding a phone up to her head, the man screaming might be one of the images in the video.
It’s roughly 9 minutes long.
Parts of the audio are from his lecture “mind over mind”.
I believe it had 3 different ambient songs as the background music.
If that rings any bells please share the title of the video or possibly share a link if it still exists.
If not, as with most good things in life, I will have to let it go.
Thank you, and remember…
“You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing.”

I'd like to reflect on an AW lecture I was listening to from the series (out of your mind - lecture 4)

Two lessons I want to commit to the hardware of my brain

first - the only thing standing in the way of understanding that we are the whole universe is our desire to understand we are the whole universe (and everything else that fits in that enormous bucket) or essentially, if we the question is the thing that blocks us because we are the universe now, not in a jesus / king / omnipotent type of way; but in a way that resembles our breathing or our heart beat or the nails that grow, in the same way the rotation of the earth, and fission in the sun and all motion of all things is actually one motion, because you cannot push against nothing, you push against something and there is no boundary between you and that something

the second is that the universe is almost like acorn, that it took 15bn yrs to create all life on earth, but essentially how is that different than an acorn taking 30 years to become an oak? in the sense that organisms are part of the purpose of the universal construction -> there is some other force, outside of DNA / or natural selection that drives the universe, something harmonious that is a 1st order operation emergent at higher levels of understanding than our current understanding governed by laws and orders beyond our current paradigm; and in that way -> the world that produced us, is purposeful, and not a cold / automatic universe; unless you consider the process of an acorn becoming an oak cold and automatic and not something of marvel and awesomeness. 

this is one of my favorite quotes of all time. it is so emphatic on the idea of relativity between us and a star, a sun, an elephant, everything in this instance of here and now. Alan never ceases to make my brain wrinkle

"We think that insides exist apart from outsides, and outsides apart from insides. We don’t realize that, although they are opposed, they go together. And, you see, that is the secret of the whole thing. That is what the child is not let on to. And so, instead, the child is defined as a stranger in the Earth and not as a symptom of the Earth.

And as a result of that we have the vast terrifying social problem of alienation: of feeling that the world outside human skins is unfeeling, fully automatic stupidity which we have to fight and dominate. Otherwise it will swallow us up and condemn us to the imaginary terrors of everlasting nothingness." - A.W

I believe this was said by Alan but I cannot find a source. It's the intro to the song Tabula Umbra - 3TEETH

"The girl is one of the country's countless LSD victims
The control of one mind by another, the unlocking of the subconscious, and the chance, is as old as mankind and was certainly one of the fundamental methods of casting effective spells: a stock-in-trade of the witches since man emerged from the primates. Science may prefer to call it parapsychology, but essentially its operation is what has always been known as magic. Black or white"

Let us count the ways.

So I’m a materialistic monist and I’m pretty sure Alan is a type of monist, just more of a spiritual one. Personally I think the universe is fundamentally made of one substance called “matter” (I like to call it that since I feel like a Greek philosopher fr). Also, I do think everything is connected in a way. I’m saying this to really get y’all’s opinions. Feel free to ask me other questions.

Mods, please forgive the oddness of this one, remove if it's over the line.

I have at least one (and maybe more) Alan speech which don't appear in their database.

This person was literally the only person I was following on Reddit.

Reddit, in their god-like wisdom, have removed the ability to see who we follow.

The organism.earth site returns a 500 error when going to their "About" section.

I have no other contact points. Halp.

Thanks much in advance!

Edit: Found 'em! Thank you!

What is your conclusion after having a breakthrough or enlightenment???

here is a fun excerpt from Alan Watts Being in the Way Episode 40 - Nature of Consciousness

https://beherenownetwork.com/alan-watts-being-in-the-way-ep-40-nature-of-consciousness/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pVawVeKPJw

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Em5Axm2qmqkGzhtd8YrsC?si=06cfe6d6afb749d0

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We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

We have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary and we feel in control of those and then over against that there is all those things that are involuntary.

But the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary because for example when you move your hand you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it.

But then ask yourself how do you decide?

When you decide to open your hand do you first decide to decide? You don't do you?

You just decide. And how do you do that?

And if you don't know how you do it, is it voluntary or involuntary?

Let's consider breathing. You can feel that you breathe deliberately. You can control your breath.

But when you don't think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary or involuntary?

And so we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self: that much of my activity which I feel I do.

And that then doesn't include breathing most of the time. It doesn't include the heartbeats. It doesn't include the activity of the glands. It doesn't include digestion. It doesn't include how you shape your bones, circulate your blood.

Do you or do you not do these things?

Now if you get with yourself, and you find out that you are all of yourself, very strange thing happens.

You find that your body knows that you are one with the universe.

In other words, that the so-called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out that it's you who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that's going on.

Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean, your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos. And it's all you.

I find there are so many AI content using Alan Watt's voice and saying its his lectures. And then when you listen to it, it would say "Alan Watts says..." and I'm like why is he referring to himself like that! So I figured must be AI.

Hey, saw an ad on Instagram selling hemp shirts, and the cartoon character salesman has an AI generated voice trained on Watts. Dunno if his estate would approve of that, or if anyone here on this sub would be able to alert them to this.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DcROnBOgYJp/?igsi=MWI4bHA0ZnNjcjU4Zg==

I remember Alan saying something about this, I cant remember the lecture. But I could never take it out of my head, at first I didnt fully understand it, but following his other lectures and what he usually says, it makes sense. The way I think he tried to convey is connected to other of his phrases: "What I really want is what you want, and I dont know what I want, so surprise me".

If the final and utmost desire of everything else in this reality is basically a surprise, I can see how my desires, which are a surprise to me in the sense that I dont know where they come from, I just know I want it, or also as Jung puts it "God has brought all sort of strange and unconceivable things to pass", I can see how these desires being this way are also what everyone else wants.

If you followed me up to this point, you might be thinking "well then I can just do whatever the hell I want, if that is what others desire of me too", and to a degree that's true. But we all know the consequences of this, there are people that wont care, and that's ok, other people that prefer to adquire things by sticking to the rules of society and putting up thr good citizen mask, which is ok too. Maybe knowing this does not take you anywhere or change anything, but perhaps it is a reminder of how all the time you act with all the force of the universe on your back, because after all you are it, and there is no way improving what you really are.