@foghorn, I watched the video again trying to find a mention of evolution. Didn’t find it, but found some other quotes to work with.
But, first I don’t mean to belittle Alan Watts, interesting man. He’s the kind of guy that says a lot I can appreciate, worth reading even, now and then, I reckon. But all of it has an air of escapism if taken too seriously. The California Woo. I hope you find the following interesting. In the 1980s I watched the Power of Myth documentary. A couple times even and I’ll admit it and Campbell definitely made an impression and influenced my thinking and how I process all that came later. He was always much easier to take seriously that sweet Alan.
Then by and by, my daughter was born and I had a brief experience with eternity and all the daddy’s that came before me that blew me away. I hadn’t realize it until recently, but that rekindled an early curiosity into a passion for learning about evolution. Even to the point of making a timeline, 1mm = one million years. Fortunately, at the time I had access to two long banquet tables so I could leave it open while I marked off details in spare time. By and by I’ve developed an appreciation for evolution that apparently few possess. Then I found Solms. Talk about icing on the cake of learning. Oh, but how I digress.
I should have been doing other things this morning, but what can I say, this is the shit I to debate with all takes. As in, constructive debate where better understanding is the goal. Okay, here goes.
“Losing the Ego: The Awakening by Alan Watts | EGO DEATH - AJ Fortuna, July 12, 2017, YouTube”
0:45 AW “A far as I can see, the basic mistake is, that we invented this wonderful system of language and calculation and that it is at once too simple to deal with the complexity of the world and also that we are liable to confuse that system of symbols with the world itself.
1:39 … AW - what I understand as Allan Watts is a big act that is not really me. Because in the image of Allan Watts there are not my unconscious processes, psychological and physical. The construction of my brain is not contained in the concept of Allan Watts. The concept of Allan Watts does not contain inseparable relationship which I have with all the rest of the universe. All that concept is a fraud mistaken for the real me.”
The concept cannot do anything. The concept of ourselves does not exist.”
(4:00) Cc - He says our internal tension is worthless, but without the internal tension, you’d be a lump or a permanent couch potato. Tension is what drives us to confront the challenges of survival. Of course, some hippies and others think that life shouldn’t have any challenges, but that’s daydreaming and pretending we don’t live in a physical world that has certain expectations and demands you must meet or you die.
We feel cut off from universe, because we get lost within our mindscape and pay no attention to the physical world that created you and that will swallow us up when we are done.
I have an inner conception and relationship with the universe that is visceral and embraces my entire being. It would have been impossible without learning an awful lot about what scientists have discovered about our the universe’s evolution as well as Earth’s.
It’s wonderful emergent understanding that was driven by increasing understanding of physical facts about Earth, biology and us humans, who are quite literally children of the Earth. Actually, I even have a name for that emergent understanding* Earth Centrism. (By that I mean, it’s not something you choose. You must first seek and struggle, you will learn and every so often that accumulating learning blossoms (emerges) into deep visceral understanding (difference between postcard and being there).
4:25 AW. “The way we really are, an organism functioning in terms of the whole environment (That’s good.) instead of this funny little separate personality.
(Makes no sense, we are the whole of our bodies and psyche and it creates our personality, which presents that whole. Your’s is unique, as is mine. But they certainly are us, ‘body’ and ‘soul’ and ‘ego’.)
4:45 AW. “Ego doesn’t exist.” (That’s silly. How could you have survived infancy without an ego demanding this and that?)
5:30 Cc - Again explaining that we don’t exist. Yada, yada, yada, and an atom is mostly empty space and CO2 doesn’t drive global warming.
6:30 AW. ‘It’s not you. It’s you that’s happening.’
7:40 AW. “Happening as distinct from doing”
7:50 AW. “When you are looking at nature out there, you are looking at you”
Needing to get back to ourselves.
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Excellent point that last one. Guess my point is we can’t get back to ourselves, without learning about how we, our body, and our thinking process got here. That cannot be done lost in “energy” “universal spirituality” or any of that sort of looking outward exercise.
We need to look into ourselves, and by that I mean into the folds within folds of cumulative complexity that make up our physical body and how that created our human mind, with all its wonderful imaginings and creations.
But, to do that inward journey we need to journey up the cascade of deep-time, and really become familiar with Earth’s Evolution and the dance between biology and geology that created us.
As a practical tip, watch some Mark Solms and Antonio Damasio video. These are real scientists, among the best. You will be amazed, the stuff that’s been learned in the past couple decades and what that has to teach us about the real us.
