Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Wh h.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
To die is to be afraid no longer. To die
is to fall into the arms of what you have
always been Alan Watts. Ah. Yes, death, the great punctuation
(02:01):
mark at the end of your sentence, or so you
think you see. Most people imagine death as disappearing, as vanishing.
But have you ever watched a wave disappear into the ocean?
Did it die? Or did it simply return to where
it began? You and I we are waves, temporary shapes
(02:23):
of a far larger thing. So when we speak of
the afterlife, we must not ask what happens to me
when I die? Rather, we must ask what was I
before I was born. The mistake, my dear listener, is
(02:44):
to believe that you are this little skin encapsulated ego,
this flickering, fragile bundle of anxieties and ambitions. But that
is not what you are. That is merely the costume.
Ask You are something that the whole universe is doing,
(03:06):
in the same way that a wave is something that
the whole ocean is doing, Alan Watts. And so when
you die, you do not stop. You do not go
into nothingness. You go into everything. Now many are quite
fond of the notion of a soul, this idea that
(03:28):
there's a little ghost inside your body, fluttering about, watching
your choices, like a silent passenger, and when you die,
it escapes, whoosh upward into the clouds or downward into
the flames, depending on how well you obeyed the rules.
But let me offer you something more curious. What if
(03:50):
the soul is not inside the body, but the body
is inside the soul. We do not come into this world,
We come out of it as leeves from a tree,
Alan Watts, You are not trapped in a meat machine.
(04:10):
You are not a spark lodged between your eyes. You
are not the whole tree. You're the whole forest. You
are the ground from which it grows. When the body dies,
the soul doesn't depart. It simply remembers that it was
never just one thing. Now let's talk about ghosts, shall
(04:31):
we ah, Yes, ghosts, apparitions, hauntings, the dead that linger.
You ask, are ghosts real, I would say, of course,
but not in the way that you think. A ghost
is not merely a dead person walking around in chains,
(04:51):
moaning in the hallway that is theater. A ghost is
something that refuses to change. It is the echo of
something thing that once was and that doesn't know it's gone.
The past and future are real illusions that they exist
in the present, which is what there is and all
(05:16):
there is, Alan Watts. So the ghost is not then,
it's now stuck now repeating now. Some ghosts are people,
some are houses. Some are just your own thoughts. You
haunt yourself. You know, every time you obsessed over who
(05:37):
you were, what you lost, what you fear, you are
a haunted house. You carry rooms inside you that no
one visits anymore, and yet those rooms still whisper. When
you die, you move beyond rooms, beyond time, beyond self.
(06:02):
But it's not frightening. No, The fright is in the clinging,
the desperation to hold on to the illusion of control.
Death is like falling asleep when you're very tired. At
first you resist, your mind chatters, but then something deeper
takes over and you finally let go, and in that
(06:27):
moment you return not to a place, but to a
being itself. Trying to define yourself as like trying to
bite your own teeth, Alan Watts. You cannot finally after
(06:47):
life by looking for it with the mind that fears it.
You must dissolve into it. You must become the silence. Now,
I imagine you might ask, but is their consciousness after death?
We'll let me ask you. This was there consciousness before
(07:10):
you were born. Do you remember the sixteen hundreds, the
twelve hundreds? Do you remember stars forming, galaxies dancing? Of
course not, And yet you were there in a way
deeper than memory. You were not the actor on the
(07:31):
stage yet, but the stage itself, the whole theater. You
are the universe experiencing itself, Alan Watts. So after death, yes,
(07:51):
there is consciousness, but not but not your consciousness, not
the me and mind and my favorite kind of sandwich.
That part dissolves like foam on a wave. But what
remains is presence, a still, fast, pulsing presence, neither light
(08:17):
nor dark, neither here nor there. It is what the
mystics call the void, and the physicists call quantum probability,
and the poets call God. You see, we fear death
because we fear the loss of story, of continuity. But
(08:42):
what if death is not the end of the story,
but the realization that you were never a character at all.
We're not Hamlet, You're not Ophelia. You are Shakespeare, and
you will write again. The meaning of life is just
to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious
(09:03):
and so simple, and yet everybody rushes around in a
great panic, as if it were necessary to achieve something
beyond themselves. Alan wants there is nothing to achieve after death,
because death is not the end of the game. It
is waking up from it. Now I feel the veil thinning,
(09:38):
So let me leave you with this. If you truly
wish to know what comes after death, then sit still,
close your eyes, breathe deeply, and notice the space between
your thoughts that ga app that silence. That is the afterlife,
(10:07):
and it has always been with you. Is not a
place you go, It is a place you are when
you are no longer pretending to be anything else. You
are the big Bang, the original force of the universe,
(10:29):
coming on as whoever you are, Alan Watts. So go on,
live fully, die gracefully, and remember there is no journey,
only unfolding, And you, dear listener, are the unfolding itself.
(10:56):
You've just heard Alan Watts on the Afterlife, a meditation
on death, ghosts, and eternity through the voice of a
philosopher from beyond. Next time we dive into deeper into
the haunted spaces between reality and myth. Until then, keep
(11:18):
your eyes open. Something is always watching. I really wanted
to do this episode in preparation for next week so
I can be ahead of the game. But I really
(11:51):
thought that Alan Watts would be a a good subject
to go over. And if you never listen to the
(12:17):
stuff he says, or listen to any of his tapes
things like that, you really should, cause he does give
you a lot to think about. So who was Alan Watts?
(12:40):
Alan Watts was a British born philosopher, writer, and speaker,
best known for translating the ancient wisdom of Eastern philosophy
to the language that is the Western world could actually hear,
not just understand, but fear, but feel. Born in nineteen
fifteen died in nineteen seventy three, Watts became a kind
(13:01):
of bridge between worlds, not just between East and West,
but between the physical and the metaphysical. He wasn't a
guru or a saint or a mystic in the traditional sense.
He was a performer of ideas, a cosmic storyteller, a
man who asked the biggest questions, then laughed at how
(13:24):
seriously we took the answers We explored Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity, psychedelics, ego, death,
and the illusion of self not from an ivory tower,
but from a place of wonder. You and I are
(13:50):
all as much continuous with the physical universe as a
wave is continuous with the ocean. Alan Watts. Watts didn't
offer salvation heftive. He reminded us that life and death
are not problems to be solved, but dances to be enjoyed.
Everything comes in balance, the ying and the yang. Everything
(14:16):
is light and dark. I think a lot of people
get really really confused about this. And what I mean
is everybody wants to get rid of all the bad,
get rid of all the dark in this world, because
(14:38):
no one wants to see horrible things happening. Nobody wants
to have horrible things happening to them or their family members.
And that's understandable, But unfortunately, I don't believe that we
live in a reality where that actually works that way.
I believe that our reality has to have both of
(15:02):
those coinciding with each other at all times in order
for us to maintain perfect balance as where we have
a lot of crazy things going on in the world,
a lot of hate going on in the world. On
the reverse side of that coin, I'm seeing that we
(15:25):
have a lot more love for each other in different aspects,
especially around the you know, and around the world that
weren't necessarily there before. More accepting, more I'm here for
(15:46):
my fellow man kind of love and a lot of
people opening up spiritually. But any ways, so tonight in
this episode we let Alan speak again, not as he was,
(16:09):
but as he might be on the other side.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Of the river.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And I'm also just sitting here trying to do a
few things. I haven't even opened my Red Bull yet. Well,
my next section is loading up for me here sponsored
by Red Bull. Just kidding. I wish they did, ah
(16:52):
look ASMR for you. So before we drift into the afterlife,
let's spend a moment with the man who, in many
(17:12):
ways never left it again. Alan Watts was born in
nineteen fifteen just outside London in a small village called Chiselhurst.
Even as a child, he was different. While other kids
played games, he was drawn to the strange, the sacred,
the silent. He read Eastern texts before he could fully
(17:33):
understand them, drawn instinctively to Zen and Taoism and the
mystics of old Bias twinnings. He had crossed an ocean
and was living in the United States and became an
angelic and priest briefly. But Watts was never meant to
meant for pulpits or pews. He wanted more than doctrine.
He wanted experience, belief clings. But faith, let's go, Alan Watts.
(18:03):
So he let go of the church, of the traditional
Western idea of God, and what he found instead was
something much more profound. Watts became one of the first
Westerners who speak fluently in both language and spirit about
Eastern philosophy. He didn't just translate words, he translated feelings,
(18:23):
Zen coons, Taoist paradoxes, Hindu cosmology, and made them sing
to Western years, not as distant curiosities, but as tools
for waking up. Alan One was was one of the
earliest public thinkers to embrace what he might now call
(18:46):
the psychedelic path. In nineteen fifties to sixties, long before
the hippie wave crashed onto American shores, Watts was experimenting
with LSD and mescaline not for escape, but for insight.
He wasn't interested in getting high. He was interested in
getting out of getting out of the way of the ego,
of the illusion of separateness. The more a thing tends
(19:12):
to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
Alan Watts. He gave hundreds of lectures, many of them recorded,
some of them now reborn as viral soundbites over ambient beats.
But what people often forget is that Alan was also
deeply human. He drank, he smoked, He struggled with relationships.
(19:36):
He was no saint, he never claimed to be, but
that is what made him real. He didn't offer enlightenment
from a mountaintop. He offered it with a glass of
whiskey in one hand and a laugh in the other.
When Alan Watts died in nineteen seventy three at the
age of fifty eight, some thought that he had gone
too soon. But if you listen to his work closely,
(19:56):
you'll realize something strange. He spent his whole life preparing
for death, not with fear, but with fascination. He described
death not as an end, but as a return, a
falling away of identity, a melting of the mask. He
believed that we call I what we call I is
(20:19):
merely a ripple, brief, beautiful, and destined to rejoin the
vast ocean of being. Trying to hold on to life
is like trying to hold your breath. You kill yourself
doing it. Alan wants He taught us not to fight
the current, but to flow, to trust the flow, because
(20:43):
the end of the road is not a wall, it's
a door, a shift, a transformation. And tonight, in this episode,
we open that door. We let Alan Watts return, not
in flesh, but in spirit. We channel his voice, not
through sainance our superstition, but through the living ghost of
his own words. So dind the lights, still the mind,
and listen, because the philosopher is waiting just behind the veil.
(21:11):
And with that being said, you should really go and
listen to some of the things that that he has said.
Go find some of them videos with bineural beats and
his voice laid over top of everything. It's it's pretty cool.
(21:33):
It's pretty cool. It's very enjoyable, very relaxing, very good
for meditation. But I think I am going to be
calling it right here for now, and I'm glad that
(21:53):
you guys could come with me again on another Wednesday
and listen to this episode. Like I said, we're gonna
be doing this, and we're gonna be doing this weekly.
This puts me way ahead of the game right now.
(22:15):
And I could even go ahead and do another one
here this week and then make me three weeks fucking ready.
So like, just keep staying to you guys, we got
more shit like this coming and we ain't stopping again.
Thank you all for coming and enjoying this with me.
I appreciate it. Make sure that you hit the likes
the five stars. If you are new to this, you
(22:39):
can find me on all the social media places. Come
hit me up. If there's a topic that you want
to hear specifically or about a specific philosopher or person
or whatever it is, let me know. I want to
see what you think in the comments if you if
you like this and you think the more people should
(23:01):
hear me, then I want you to send it to
you know, your friends, to your family members, Uh, send
it to whoever that you know that would simply enjoy
the show. Okay, So anyways, love you all and stay
fucking weird, y'all.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
My nest to me, you don't mind mine, say much hone,
(24:03):
sinking all the things I never told you. I'll make
you mind until the.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Son goes down. The son goes dou moldes, oh real.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Lie make I may have the most day.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
I met, so sweet praise.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
I'll make you mind until the son goes tull, the
son goes do.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
World realize me, baby, have been love for me?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
I gainst some brace, reel and races. I'll make your
mind until the son goes down. The sock goes down,
the world hands
Speaker 1 (25:38):
M