Alan Watts – Being in the Way – Ep. 35 – Dreaming the World

Diving into the cosmic drama of reality, Alan Watts describes the world as a divine dream which is poetic, playful, and only sometimes serious.

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This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts:
  • Exploring how we get caught in the cosmic game and drama of life
  • Seeing the universe as the playful expression of divine energy
  • Questioning identity: the tension between acting and simply being.
  • Confronting the spiritual taboo of realizing the self as God—tat tvam asi.
  • Indirect awareness of the networks and systems in the physical world
  • Music and the pure delight in complex orders of sound
  • Embracing the paradox of existence as poetic, musical, and playful, while still being serious.
  • Considering all of the senses as forms of one, larger sense of touch
  • The oneness of up and down, black and white, being and non-being
  • Complexities of human culture that arise out of duality

“The real taboo is ‘that art thou’. You, lurking behind the mask of being an impermanent human person, are really responsible for the whole thing. If anybody claims that in our culture, we put them straight away into an asylum. That is the very hallmark of insanity. But, in India, if someone suddenly wakes up one morning and says ‘My goodness, I’m God’, everybody says, instead of you’re crazy or blasphemous, they say ‘Congratulations, at last you’ve found out'”. – Alan Watts

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.

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