Greetings Steemit! My name is Adam, from Guelph, Canada, and I would like to briefly introduce everyone to a man who has radically changed my life and way of thinking-British writer, philosopher, theologian and teacher Alan Wilson Watts.
My intention is to bring to light, in a series of posts, the wisdom, spirit science and lucid study of consciousness that Alan brought to the world to share with you. I hope that you will find this series, at the very least, thought provoking and, at best, life changing.
Alan was born in 1915 and passed away into the unknown in 1973, but has left a great legacy of spiritual wisdom that can be applied to everyday life. He abhorred the term "guru" and the pretentiousness of modern western new age spiritualism, and despite being one of the primary people responsible for bridging the gap between Eastern philosophy and Western culture, he is largely unknown and underappreciated today.
As an introduction to Alan Watts, here is my favourite quote, about the nature of human existence.
..."I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream and you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip, say 75 years of subjective time into 8 hours of sleep. You would, I suppose, start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life – love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing, 75 years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you would move over to an adventurous dimension, where there was sudden dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers, and you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go on dangerous journeys, make wonderful explosions and blow them up. Eventually get into contest with enemies. And after you’ve done that for some time, you’d think up a new wrinkle. To forget that you were dreaming, so you’d think it was all for real, and to be anxious about it. Because it’d be so great when you woke up, and they you’d say, well, like children who dare each other on things, how far out could you get? What could you take? What dimension of being lost, of abandonment of your power, what dimension of that could you stand? You could ask yourself this ‘cos you know you’d eventually wake up. And after you’re gone on doing this, you see, for some time, you’d suddenly find yourself sitting around in this room, with all your personal involvements, problems, etc, talking with me. How do you know that’s not what you’re doing? Could be, because after all, what would you do if you were god? If you were, what there is, the self, and do you punish us – The basic text of Hinduism, one of them starts out saying in the beginning was the self, and looking around it said, I am. And thus it is that everyone to this day, when asked who is there, says that it is I. If you were god, and in this sense that you knew everything, you would be bored. Because, if looking at it from another way, we push technology to its furthest possible development, and we had instead of a dial telephone on one’s desk, a more complicated system of buttons, and one touch would give you anything you wanted, Aladdin’s lamp, you would eventually have to add a button labelled surprise, because all perfectly know futures are past. They have happened, virtually. It is only the true future that is a surprise.
So if you were god, you would say to yourself – man, get lost."
Here Alan proposes that the human experience is nothing more than a game played by infinite beings to see how "far out" the human adventure would take them!
I hope you have enjoyed this brief introduction to the teachings of Alan Watts.