It Will Give You Goosebumps - Alan Watts On The Breakthrough

Transcript

nobody seems to want to be in charge of themselves because they feel they can't do it because trying to improve yourself is like trying to lift yourself up into the air by tugging at your own bootstraps well what is all this religious stuff about them why don't we just forget it you can try by all means just go away don't go to gurus don't go to church

don't enter philosophical discussions forget it but supposing instead of that seeing that there isn't really anything we can do to improve ourselves or to improve the world if we realize that that is so it gives us a breather in the course of which we may simply watch what is going on watch what happens nobody ever does this you know therefore it sounds terribly simple it sounds so

simple that is almost looks as if it isn't worth doing but ever just watched watch what's happening and watch what you are doing by way of reaction to it just watch it happen and don't be in a hurry to think you know what it is in other words people look at the say oh that's the external world oh how do you know this real world is not

spiritual it is not material the real world is simply so could we look at things in that way without as it were fixing labels and names and gradations and judgments on everything but watch what happened when you i are in this way freed from busybodiness and being out to improve everything that your own nature will begin to take care of itself because you're not getting in the

way of yourself all the time you will begin to find out that the great things that you do are really happenings no great genius can explain how he does it the fellow does something we can't understand he surprises us but you see just in the same way we cannot understand our own brains neurology knows relatively little about the brain which is only to say that the brain

is a lot smarter than neurology and all growth you see is fundamentally something that happens but for it to happen two things are important and the first is as i said you must have the technical ability to express what happens and secondly you must get out of your own way but right at the bottom of the whole problem of control is how am i to get out

of my own way and if i showed you a system let's all practice getting out of our own way when you see in other words that doing something about your situation is not going to help you when you see equally that trying not to do anything about it is not going to help you where are you where do you stand you're non-plussed and you are simply reduced

to watching you do not know where your decisions come from they pop up like hiccups and when you make a decision people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions we're always worrying did i think this over long enough did i take enough data into consideration and if you think it through you find you never could take enough data into consideration the data for a decision

in any given situation is infinite and so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way doing the right thing and so on and so forth and lack a certain kind of self-confidence and if you see you lack self-confidence you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling if you do have self-confidence you may carry get away with doing entirely the

wrong thing because you see choice in this sense is not quite the same thing as decision now in this way we think about thinking we worry about worrying and then when that really gets bad you worry because you worry about worrying the human mind is a feedback system feedback has a peculiar susceptibility to nervousness choice means dithering you know there are some people who before they start

to write something down they they wiggle their pens a little pen divers over the paper and then they start to write and so in the same way a lot of people in the constantly in the life situation they dither because that dithering is anxiety doing as you will isn't a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and stay from now on i'm going to go

around doing as i will you have to realize first that that's what you've always been doing so then you get in the state of liberated or mystical consciousness you very often feel that a hill is lifting you up as you walk up it the ground seems to heave beneath your feet and up you go and you get this strange feeling of lightness of effortlessness walking on air

never a care you know this uh wonderful sense that there are no obstructions anywhere there's nothing as if we're banging you and making you do that it all flows together that's a very common sense that's you are actually uh in that state of consciousness you are perceiving the goings-on the tao the course of nature in the way it's happening but in the ordinary way you've been conditioned

to resist it to fight it and to use those sensations of resistance to create a sensory basis for what you describe as the ego you have to regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh because you see clouds never make mistakes did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen do you ever see a badly designed wave [Music] no they always do the right thing now so

as a matter of fact do we because we are natural beings just like clouds and waves only uh we we that we have complicated games which cause us to doubt ourselves but if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave and realize that you can't make a mistake whatever you do because even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous it'll

all come out in the wash somehow or other then through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence and through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition to take the risk of doing what we want which will work to the extent that we realize that what i want basically what i really want is what you want and i don't know what you want

surprise me you

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