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The source of Resistance, to my mind, is the clash between the ego and the Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the ego Like Rabbi Finley and those hard-thinking mystics from the sixteenth century, . a constant battle but in order to achieve our true SELF, we must fight this war.
Table of contents

Again and again, he returns to the notion of figure and ground, of a cohesive whole that masquerades as separate parts under the lens of our conditioned eye for separateness:. Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation.

A still more cogent example of existence as relationship is the production of a rainbow. For a rainbow appears only when there is a certain triangular relationship between three components: the sun, moisture in the atmosphere, and an observer. It can be verified by any number of observers, though each will see it in a slightly different position. Like the rainbow, all phenomena are interactions of elements of the whole, and the relationship between them always implies and reinforces that wholeness:. Just as science overcame its purely atomistic and mechanical view of the world through more science, the ego-trick must be overcome through intensified self-consciousness.

In considering how an organism might realize this sense of implying the universe and how we might shake the ego-illusion in favor of a deeper sense of belonging, Watts expresses a certain skepticism for practices like yoga and meditation when driven by striving rather than total acceptance — a skepticism all the more poignant amidst our age of ubiquitous yoga studios and meditation retreats, brimming with competitive yogis and meditators:.

Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process — like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling.


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But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is. There is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily.

Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

The Soul Quotes (94 quotes)

Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that — in this sense — self is other and here is there. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside.

Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities—to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own.

Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it. Once you have seen this you can return to the world of practical affairs with a new spirit. You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Watts ends with a wonderful verse by the infinitely inspiring James Broughton :. No words can describe just how profoundly perspective-shifting The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are is in its entirety, and with what exquisite stickiness it stays with you for a lifetime.

Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price. Privacy policy. By Maria Popova During the s and s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose.

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In fact, Watts begins by pulling into question how well-equipped traditional religions might be to answer those questions: The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are — as now practiced — like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. Watts considers the singular anxiety of the age, perhaps even more resonant today, half a century and a manic increase of pace later: There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out.

At the heart of the human condition, Watts argues, is a core illusion that fuels our deep-seated sense of loneliness the more we subscribe to the myth of the sole ego, one reflected in the most basic language we use to make sense of the world: We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Watts writes: Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. In a sentiment that Alan Lightman would come to echo more than half a century later in his remarkable meditation on science and what faith really means , Watts adds: Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world.

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He illustrates this with a beautiful analogy: All your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense—something like touch. And yet: Solids and spaces go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Watts writes: The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body — a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Returning to our inability to grasp intervals as the basic fabric of world and integrate foreground with background, content with context, Watts considers how the very language with which we name things and events — our notation system for what our attention notices — reflects this basic bias towards separateness: Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it.

Watts writes: The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

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Watts writes: Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. It's truly a take it or leave it kind of deal. If the court orders you to go to AA and you feel you're rights are being violated then you might be better served taking that up with the court then blaming AA. There are three facts that are not legitimately debatable: 1 Many people have gone to AA, got sober and remain that way. I'm sober since , with AA and by the grace of my Higher Power. No religion for me.

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Meetings, sponsor, litterature and 12 steps every day if possible. I live a wonderful life, quiet and stable.

My only enemy is my ego. He often try to bring me back to the "Old Me" And I'm there for them. The rest is just BS. But some people like BS, it makes them feel. No my case anymore. Wish you the best. A lot of people get wrapped up in abusing psychoactive substances that make them feel good. Physical and psychological dependence ensue. Both states of withdrawal may ensue. There are people who just need motivation and life change to get away from their addiction. There is another class of people who cannot stop.

100. "I don't have friends. I got family."

The steps are being attacked because they can't do anything for you. You have to use the steps for them to help you. I have the disease, nothing else could help me. When a service is offered especially in a crisis , that service is expected to work. In the case of the addict, simply providing 'treatment' cannot be viewed the same way as other services.

Substance abuse detox that transitions to the step program requires a level of immersion on the end of the user. Sorry,I did not give my email which is Vampires Yahoo. I am appalled that a book written by two extremely disturbed privileged white males who lived in s Jim Crow era America is still the "treatment " standard for addiction. AA has been ruled a religious organization by several federal circuit courts, and it is impossible to work the program without a belief in a God who magically answers prayers for the addict who prays hard enough.