Alan Watts – Being in the Way – Ep. 30 – Flow: Symbolic Reality vs. Real Reality

In a lecture on symbolic reality versus real reality, Alan Watts explains the importance of total sensory awareness and looking at our motivations.

“Symbolic Reality vs. Real Reality” is part of Flow, a three-part session in the TAO for NOW series of talks that you can listen to in full over at the Alan Watts Streaming Channel

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.

“The point is to be wide, wide awake and aware of your total sensory input without confusing it with the symbolic world of words and concepts so that you experience life naked and directly. Experience YOU naked and directly, without having in your head the concept of who you are a role player, as a personality, as an ego.” – Alan Watts

This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts discusses:
  • Being aware of all sensory inputs while meditating
  • Allowing oneself ‘to be’ in a non-conceptual way
  • Confusing the world of symbols for reality
  • The limits to what we can enjoy in a material sense
  • The uselessness of guilt
  • Money, tithes, and western religion versus gurus
  • Why our motivation and intention matters
  • Experiencing life naked and directly
  • The Taoist approach to letting go of your body-mind
  • Using all five of our senses to witness our surroundings
This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.

“We go to concerts to improve our culture, to the theater, to the movies, in order to be able to say we have become more educated, we have improved. As a result of this kind of motivation, we don’t really do those things at all. If you go to the concert to become more cultured, you are not really listening.” – Alan Watts

Listen to more Alan Watts talks:
Being in the Way Ep. 1: Alan shares a dharma talk on Taoism, the interdependence of nature, and dropping out of karma
Alan Watt’s son, Mark, shares background on Alan’s early life, before introducing two of his father’s specially curated dharma talks focused on karma, in Being in the Way Ep. 2
Therapy, religion, mystical experiences, & Jesus: Being in the Way Ep. 6
The connections between Taoism and relativity, technology and human evolution, culture and separation: Being in the Way Ep. 3
Our place in the universe and how very natural it is to be human, in Being in the Way Ep. 4
The joyous cosmology that we are God playing the roles of ordinary people: Being in the Way Ep. 21
Alan Watts