Explaining the delicate balance of religiousness, Alan Watts lectures on the principle of leaving no trace.
“Religion of No Religion” is part of the Japan Tour 1965 series of talks that you can listen to in full over at the Alan Watts Streaming Channel
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“The completely Boddhisatva type of person doesn’t leave any track either by being religious overtly or by being non-religious overtly. How will you be neither religious or non-religious? See that’s the great test. How will you avoid that trap of being one or the other?” – Alan Watts
In this episode, Alan Watts explains:
- How the highest kind of a Buddha is like an ordinary person
- Imitation and how all religious comments about life become cliches
- The way of the enlightened man as the track of a bird in the sky
- Zen Buddhism and the dance between metaphysical and ordinary
- Balance and compatibility between universality and the particulars
- The problem with being too spiritual or too worldly
- The connection of all events in the universe, past, present, and future
- How everything in the universe depends upon each other
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.
“All religion, all religious comments about life, eventually become cliches. That’s why religion always is falling apart and becoming a certain kind of going through the motions, a kind of imitation of attitudes.” – Alan Watts
About Alan Watts:
A prolific author and speaker, Alan Watts was one of the first to interpret Eastern wisdom for a Western audience. Born outside London in 1915, he discovered the nearby Buddhist Lodge at a young age. After moving to the United States in 1938, Alan became an Episcopal priest for a time, and then relocated to Millbrook, New York, where he wrote his pivotal book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. In 1951 he moved to San Francisco where he began teaching Buddhist studies, and in 1956 began his popular radio show, “Way Beyond the West.” By the early sixties, Alan’s radio talks aired nationally and the counterculture movement adopted him as a spiritual spokesperson. He wrote and regularly traveled until his passing in 1973.