Alan Watts | mastery.fm

Little Onion

When you can really allow yourself to be afraid and you don’t resist the experience of fear, you are truly beginning to master fear. But when you refuse to be afraid, you are resisting fear, and that simply sets up a vicious circle of being afraid of fear, and being afraid of being afraid of fear, and so on.

And that’s what we call worry. Worry is simply a chronic condition, and people who worry are going to worry no matter what happens.

Because when one possible threat is exterminated, they will immediately discover another… because worry is an infinitely skinned onion. And you can go on and on and on, because the moment, you see, you reduce the size of the onion and you get your worry down to about this, suddenly your whole sense of distance and size changes.

And because you’re looking so intently at this little onion, it fills your whole field of vision and is once again a big onion. You start peeling that down. But as you get another one about this size, then it enlarges itself in your judgment and your sense of values. And once more, it’s colossal.

So if you are disposed to worry, there is always plenty to worry about.

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You Are the Big Bang

Alan Watts:

Astronomers say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space. Well, let’s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.

It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?

So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting.

But so we define ourselves as being only that.

If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time.

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself.

You are actually — if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning — you’re not something that is a result of the big bang, on the end of the process. You are still the process! You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

(…)

But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, but just something out on the end of it.

(…)

And so what I would call a basic problem we’ve got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things — that is to say separate things, or separate events.

So the world doesn’t come thinged; it doesn’t come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And as the wave, I wave at you and say ‘Yoo-hoo!’ — the world is waving at me with you and saying ‘Hi! I’m here!’

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Freedom from Your Past Self

Alan Watts:

You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

Steve Pavlina:

I have the freedom to create a present moment that is disloyal to my past in a purely linear sense. I do not have to identify myself based on my history if I see that it no longer serves me to do so.

And:

You’re perfectly capable of defining, creating, and then holding a vibe that’s completely out of sync with your current physical reality. This is precisely what conscious growth is.

Many people seem to believe they can’t do this, but they can. You do it whenever you change the channel on the TV or switch to a different website. It’s as easy as pushing a button. You simply shift your attention from one experience to another.

This is how you shift from scarcity to abundance. Commit to leaving the whole scarcity movie behind. Ignore it completely. Change your attention channel to abundance.

When you walk out, feel free to make a stink about it: “Scarcity, you suck! Worst movie I’ve ever seen. So repetitive and boring. I want a refund. Zero stars!”

And:

Stop putting your attention on what you don’t want, and put your attention on what you do want. Acknowledge the reality you want to create more than the one you wish to leave behind.

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