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Alan Watts Unlocks the Hidden Mysteries of Life · Motivation Mindset Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: When life gets busy, pause, take a deep breath, download mindset,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: and listen to your favorite inspirational speeches to unlock your
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: fool potential.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, that
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: the most fascinating problem in the world is who am I?
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: What do you feel when you say the word I?
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  Speaker 2: I myself? I don't think there can be any more
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  Speaker 2: fascinating preoccupation than that, because it's so mysterious, it's so elusive,
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  Speaker 2: because what you are, in your inmost being, escapes your
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: examination in rather the same way that you can't look
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  Speaker 2: directly into your own eyes without using a mirror. And
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: that's why there's always an element of profound mystery in
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: the problem of who we are. This problem has fascinated
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: me for many years, and I've made many inquiries what
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: do you mean by the word I? And there is
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  Speaker 2: a certain consensus about this, a certain agreement. Most of
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: us feel, I ego myself, my source of consciousness, to
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  Speaker 2: be a center of awareness and of a source of
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: action that resides in the middle of a bag of skin.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: And so we have what I have called the conception
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  Speaker 2: of ourselves as a skin en capsule. Lady eager. Now,
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  Speaker 2: it's very funny how we use the word I. If
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  Speaker 2: we just refer to common speech. We are not accustomed
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  Speaker 2: to say I am a body. We rather say I
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  Speaker 2: have a body. We don't say I beat my heart
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  Speaker 2: in the same way as we say I walk, I think,
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  Speaker 2: I talk. We feel that our heart beats itself, and
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  Speaker 2: that has nothing very much to do with I. In
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  Speaker 2: other words, we don't regard I myself as identical with
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  Speaker 2: our whole physical organist. We regard it as something inside it.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: And most Western people locate their ego inside their heads.
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  Speaker 2: It is not so in other cultures. When they're Chinese
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  Speaker 2: or Japanese, person wants to locate the center of himself
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  Speaker 2: here to what Japanese call the cokool on the Chinese
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  Speaker 2: called shin the heart mind. This I have concluded is
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  Speaker 2: the ordinary average conception of what is one's self. And
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  Speaker 2: look at the way children, influenced by our cultural environment
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  Speaker 2: ask questions, Mummy, who would I have been if my
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: father had been someone else? You see, the child gets
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  Speaker 2: the idea from our culture that the father and mother
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  Speaker 2: gave him a body into which he was popped at
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  Speaker 2: some moment, whether it was conception or whether it was
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  Speaker 2: parturition is a little bit vague. But there is in
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  Speaker 2: our whole way of thinking the idea that we are
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  Speaker 2: a soul, a spiritual essence of some kind, imprisoned inside
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  Speaker 2: a body, and that we look out upon a world
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  Speaker 2: that is foreign. Now, actually, it is absolutely absurd to
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  Speaker 2: say that we came into this world. We came out
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  Speaker 2: with them. What do you think you are supposing this
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  Speaker 2: world is a tree? Are you leaves on its branches?
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  Speaker 2: Or are you a bunch of birds that settled on
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  Speaker 2: a dead old tree from somewhere else. Surely everything that
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  Speaker 2: we know about living organisms from the standpoint of the
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  Speaker 2: sciences shows us that we grow out of this world.
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  Speaker 2: That we, each one of us, are what you might
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  Speaker 2: call symptoms of the state of the universe as a whole.
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  Speaker 2: But you see that is not part of our common sense.
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  Speaker 2: Western Man has for many centuries been under the influence
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  Speaker 2: two great myths. When I use the word myth, I
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  Speaker 2: don't necessarily mean falsehood. To me. The word myth signifies
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  Speaker 2: a great idea in terms of which man tries to
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  Speaker 2: make sense of the world. Now, the two images which
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  Speaker 2: have most profoundly influenced Western Man are number one the
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  Speaker 2: image of the world as an artifact, like a carpenter's
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  Speaker 2: table or a jar made by a potter. Things, all events,
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  Speaker 2: all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all are grasshoppers,
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  Speaker 2: all worms, everything are artifacts. And it is therefore natural
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  Speaker 2: for a Western child to say to its mother, how
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  Speaker 2: was I made? That would be quite an unnatural question
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  Speaker 2: for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do not think
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  Speaker 2: of nature as something made. They look upon it as
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  Speaker 2: something that grows. And the two processes are quite different.
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  Speaker 2: When you make something, you put it together, you assemble parts.
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  Speaker 2: You can an image out of wood or stone, working
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  Speaker 2: from the outside to the inside. But when you watch
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  Speaker 2: something grow, it works in an entirely different way. It
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  Speaker 2: doesn't assemble parts. It expands from within and gradually complicates itself,
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  Speaker 2: expanding outwards like a bud blossoming, like a seed turning
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  Speaker 2: into a plant. We got another myth, the myth of
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  Speaker 2: the purely mechanical universe. This was invented at the end
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  Speaker 2: of the eighteenth century, became increasingly fashionable throughout the course
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  Speaker 2: of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century,
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  Speaker 2: so that it is today's common sense. Very few people
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  Speaker 2: today really believe in God. So instead it has become fashionable,
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  Speaker 2: and it is nothing more than a fashion to believe
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  Speaker 2: that the universe is done stupid, that intelligence, values, love,
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  Speaker 2: and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the
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  Speaker 2: human epidermis, and that outside that the thing is simply
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  Speaker 2: a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces. Now,
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  Speaker 2: these ideas don't make any sense, because you cannot get
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  Speaker 2: an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of
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  Speaker 2: an unintelligent universe. The saying in the New Testament that
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  Speaker 2: figs do not grow on thistles, nor grapes on forms
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  Speaker 2: applies equally to the world. Look, here is a tree
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  Speaker 2: in the garden, and every summer it produces apples, and
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  Speaker 2: we call it an apple tree because the tree apples.
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  Speaker 2: All right. Now here is a solar system inside a galaxy.
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  Speaker 2: And one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that,
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  Speaker 2: at least on the planet Earth, the thing peoples. Because
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  Speaker 2: you see, we grow out of this world in exactly
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  Speaker 2: the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.
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  Speaker 2: We've been hoodwinked into the feeling that we exist only
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  Speaker 2: inside our skins. We need to experien riots ourselves in
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  Speaker 2: such a way that we could say that our real
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  Speaker 2: body is not just what's inside the skin, but our
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  Speaker 2: whole total external environment.