Alan Watts - 'Pain'

duhkha : duh = disagreeable/painful/bitter, kha = condition (duhkha ~ "chronic frustration")
sukha : su = sweet
ánanda : (the 'objective' of Buddhishm) ectacy, above sukha and duhka.

Look upon the pains of death as natural tensions, is this possible? why not.
We fear death we have a negative attitude of death largely because of social condition. It's what we've been taught.

Vomiting: regarded as disgusting (as children, vomiting, our mothers went "aaahugh")
It's rather the same with death. After all, death is benevolent.

We're afraid of going into very undignified motions (such as pain, crying). We're taught it's not manly to give in to pain.
Consider a cat. When the cat drops off the tree, does it say; "I'm gonna be a real tough cat. I'm gonna be all rigid and stiff"? No. Because it would become a bag of bones.

Lao Tze: Be like water. Nothing is softer. Yet nothing is harder to wear away rocks. Yet get a knife, and try to cut it. It yields completely. Strike it as hard as you like, you will never create a wound. The water triumphs over the hardness of the knife.

Fever boils out the disease. A steel bridge, when built completely, utterly rigid - it would break.

Be worried. And you will not be worried about being worried.
Be afraid. And you will not be afraid about being afraid.

Dish washing. the immense pile of dishes of the past. The immense pile of dishes of the future. But, you will only wash one dish. You can not wash more than one dish. You will only, in your whole life, wash this one dish.

Past and future are illusions.

Alan W. Watts - "This is it - become what you are"

(again that floating Zen sound! I think it is a test, and I just failed again.)

There is a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides. That is, that they appear to be different, but deep down they are the same.

spot-light consciousness: talking to the person next to you in the car
flood-light consciousness: driving the road.

Particularly Western civilisation focuses on spot-light conscious.

Those who fully experience their flood-light conscious, they have a mystical experience.

Alan W. Watts - "God Complex"

Western beliefs install dogmas.
Eastern beliefs try to change your mental attitude (constituency?)

Jesus didn't say: I am the son of God.
He said: I am a son of God.
He said he was divine.
As we are all.


wonderful talk, though that silly music could really have been left out. Words like this don't need musical annotation or nice views of the world. Let the words just be themselves, let them be words, and that is enough.

Alan W. Watts - "Nothingness"

Ex nihilo, nihil fit - out of Nothing, Nothing comes

I can see the fallacy, as Alan Watts calls it, for without nothing there isn't anything. (yet saying that the basic constant of everything is contrast, would quite likely not be approved)

I don't like this short documentary. It's a fast edited - for this subject - selection of what he says. But too concise, too incoherent in its compactness.

Alan W. Watts - "On Being Vague"

search on youtube. Amazing description on how to view the need for description, for exact analysis, and how the Eastern philosophers thought about it.

To analyse it, is to kill it, basically: "After all, playing the violin is just stroking cat's entrails with horse hair. Stars are just radioactive, burning stones."