Alan Watts on Life...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cm361A7...

16:13 onwards is important to understand. Most don't and it's obvious all over the place.

He got righteous there. "There's something else" and " the ineffable mystery which underlies our existence" is terrific ... and bullshyt god stories ... "are not the only way of being religious" (this last something greatly overlooked by both theists and atheists).

“There’s nothing you can do about life. There’s nothing you can not do about life.”

It is innately human to be able to choose your passions/desires/design/outlooks on life. It’s a fact that the things we choose to love the most will most likely at different points in our lives also greatly upset us.

So, these things we love so much are also our greatest prisons, in a way. We get to choose. I guess you just need to find the most pleasurable negatives to deal with.

We all get one life and it’s important to enjoy living it.

I liked his mention of Faith as an attitude associated with Trust as opposed to the standard "belief without evidence" trumpeted by atheists. I also liked his "beyond all imagination" view which is what I'm getting at with, "As soon as you start talking about God, you're talking about something else". His "Intelligence as the ground of being" is nice. But it's still the sound of grunts made by a clever ape. Which, of course, is also the case with this post.

PairTheBoard

When all I knew was theism, discovering Richard Dawkins at age about age 16 was like a godsend.
When all I knew was atheism, discovering Alan Watts was a godsend.

Admittedly, I now look at both theists and atheists types as though I am more advanced. Not as some sort of ego inflation but coming from I wish you realised that there is another way.
Hence, I don't look in the religion forum here. I'm afraid I could argue both sides for them.

When someone asks - Do you believe in God?
"Which God are you talking about" is a confused response I used answer as an atheist.

Now, in my opinion, both are confused, probably.
As Alan Watts said: "No matter which side you take , you don't really belong."

ref: We as organism ( IIRC.)

A natural religion -- one based on nature and the nature of human consciousness instead of ancient supernatural myths -- seems to be the solution to this dilemma. There is a lot of material along those lines, which both fundamentalist theists and fundamentalist atheists seem either oblivious or spectacularly resistant to.

Yes. Advaita Vedanta. The 'Hindu kind of a God' Alan Watts refers to - Brahman, ground of being etc. Most modern hindus are not followers of Advaita Vedanta.

Pierce Morgan asks his guests whether they believe in God, and everyone has that father figure in the clouds image in their heads.
Michael Shermer, answered by asking which God? In other words Specify which man in the clouds, as it's same idea.

Watts - it depends which kind of a God you are referring to. The upanshadic god is an altogether very different idea. Not that I'd argue there's any more evidence for it..it makes sense to me:

Why associate truth with the story that makes the most sense?

Have you considered that perhaps truth should be associated with the best story, and isn’t a great story unexpected and unpredictable?

My experience of ultimate reality is that it is miraculous and makes almost no sense. Still, it is good and worth pursuing.

My experience of ultimate reality is that it is miraculous and makes almost no sense. Still, it is good and worth pursuing.[/QUOTE]

Experience is always appearing to a subject.

Ultimate reality is that which makes the experience possible, not itself an object of experience.

If it is experienced is not ultimate.

YOU are the truth.

'You' being the 'witness consciousness.' Not the body, not the mind or anything that objects to consciousness. But that which is always present, never-changing when you negate all objects
That which is witnessed cannot be the witness.

It took the Greeks another four centuries to make subject-object central to knowledge.
Then kant another 2000 years to circle back to the upanishads only to stop short of final conclusion that atman is brahman.

I am the witness, but what am I witnessing?

I am witnessing the hero navigate through the hero’s journey.

Why?

Because I identify with the hero and with the witness.

This is the difference between the Christian story and the Eastern religions.

If I only identify with the witness and not with the hero, then what am I witnessing? Nothingness? Meaninglessness?

The witness is a central character but is only fulfilled in combination with the hero.

Maya....to be frank.
Just To clarify though, how the witness consciousness remains the only one unchanged. They considered the everyday examples of the three known conscious states : the waking world, the dreaming , and deep sleep.

If you wake from a dream like slaying dragons, sat up on your bed, and thought - Wait...Is this true or was that true... the only common denominator between both states is the witness consciousness. e.g Everything that is here wasn't there and everything there isn't here, but you were present in bothÂ…

In deep sleep, nothing at all is going on. Which is where it gets trickier but interesting...leading to the question of after we die perhaps but i digress..

I won't pretend to know enough to address your concern but i feel i suspect it may work both ways, in that you have nothing to lose, shouldn't fear death...

It’s important to notice the insights you are sharing, which I affirm, are from the perspective of the soul.

-The soul need not fear death and is loved unconditionally regardless of the decision to participate in the mission or not
-The soul can remain pure by being one step removed from the messiness of the hero’s journey (through the witness)

These same truths don’t apply to the self however.

Unlike the soul, the self does not continue unchanged after experiencing the fullness of death. Rather, this version of the self is lost forever.

The self is stuck in the conditional love story.

In Christ, the self is valued just as much as the soul and is called a brother and friend to the soul.

In Christ, the soul is called on (after realizing the truth of unconditional love) to willingly enter into the conditional love story and rescue his brother.

Every religion shares the common idea that we are not the body.

We say, “I have a body,” but we don’t say, “I am my body.”

The ego, or sense of self, dies when the body does, but it was never truly real to begin with.

I don’t know what I will experience after I die. I think it’s an assumption to claim that one won’t experience anything.

This belief is tied to the same faulty logic that assumes we are our physical bodies.

The question people might want to begin with is, “Who am I? because you are not your name, your title, or any label you’ve written in your bio.

I am pure consciousness...
When I die, I will merge with the same non-dual reality from which I came. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. It may not be scientific.

Remember, no one has yet shown, scientifically, how consciousness arises from physical matter.

To be anti self is to be anti human. The ego is not the self. The ego is anti self.

The ego wants you to believe your social persona is you because the ego is anti self and doesn’t want you to identify with the self.

If you want to say the social persona isn’t the real you, then I agree.

But I reject any diminishment of the self because I’m pro human.

The first part of this is true regardless of any religion, and is true of humanism, is simply true of human life. We are the witness and the archetype of the hero's journey exists in human consciousness as innate and passed down through culture and history. Witness as central character of one's life journeying toward fulfillment of mission needs no supernatural/mythological despot ruling over it upon threat of annihilation.

Really liking this train of thought. There is so much spirituality available outside of the supernatural religions, and it's a shame both theists and atheists so often whiff on this. That beginning question, "Who am I?" can be even more effective as, "What am I?" This is because "Who am I?" is so naturally loaded with ideas of identity, personality, ego, self-image, etc. that one tends to still remain trapped within them. But "What am I?" gets outside of this trap instantly.

On the matter of the "hard problem" of consciousness, there is an avant garde theory by Mark Solms undercutting the whole idea that consciousness arises from intelligence, and is indeed more akin to spin, charge, mass, that is, has always been there right along with all of it. Self-consciousness is merely an elaboration on this fundamental aspect, it is an evolution of the primal consciousness (which is merely interacting with the environment in a discriminating way, demonstrated by no-brain amoeba, and probably particles). So with Solms theory, consciousness is grounded in feelings, in sensing, and the more elaborate forms of consciousness demonstrated in brains is simply an evolution of that. Hard problem disappears. Righteous. The same mystery applies to where consciousness comes from that applies to where spin and charge come from. We don't know. They are forms of energy. Energy is eternal, fundamental. We don't need a creator and don't need consciousness to arise from matter or from intelligence. It's in the same bag with the fundamental particles ... was just there and we don't know why or from what.

The egoic self I meant - is not the truth.. I've been preaching about the higher Self (soul, atman, buddha nature, ground of being ) before that.

Rather than Hinduism / Buddhism / New Age, the original Star Wars trilogy provides a much better example of how to view the self, the higher self, the soul, the inflamed ego, and the role each plays in the hero’s journey toward paradise.

Luke Skywalker represents the self. At the end of the first movie, when Han Solo risks danger to help save Luke, this represents the soul saving the self.

Darth Vader represents the inflamed ego. Anakin Skywalker represents the higher self.

Just like in the films, the son (self, Luke) is betrayed and abandoned by the father, but the son stands firm in his faith in the father (higher self) and the promises of the father (as revealed in the Bible).

Looking to the original Star Wars trilogy + Christianity + myself >>>>>>> looking to the Eastern religions or New Age

"Everyone who chooses their truth over escape is on the hero's journey. And that is a profoundly spiritual tack."

With this path, we don't need any formalized, mythological, dogmatic, supernatural doctrines or religion per se. This is the religion -- the path of no escape, the path of self-knowledge and self-realization. As to the grand mystery of what is beyond that, it is what it is, and we don't know what it is. We aren't in service of our spirituality by bluffing like we do know those answers in any of the thousands of forms of that bluff.

There is a Great Mystery. Within that mystery we have a life to live. We do it honor and respect by connecting to the reality of what we are -- as opposed to say dodging with addiction, dissociation, self-rejection and alienation -- and then we are playing our role within the awesome mystery. Chances are that none of the thousands of competing religious clubs, by virtue of their very existence, have any monopoly on this. Instead, the gnostic individual path is the way of wisdom.

"The path is a spiral toward our core, leading to ever clearer seeing, ever more authentic being ... all less and less clouded by toxic wounds overlaying the true Self. And realizing and claiming our self-worth is a vital part of this journey."

"The coming of a tragedy
... eyes that lost their soul
Leaving one's own person
... exacts a savage toll."

That is a thoughtful distinction experience versus the ground that allows experience to arise.
Framing truth as the subject rather than the object is a powerful way to look at it.

Those lines feel heavy and haunting like a quiet warning of loss and inner collapse.
They really capture how tragedy can strip something essential from within.

Interest analogy using Star Wars as a symbolic map of self ego and higher self actually works surprisingly well.
It is a compelling way to frame inner transformation without leaning on Eastern or New Age language.