The Library of Consciousness – Alan Watts
organism.earth
organism.earth
To be able to search for specific topics or phrases in Ram Dass' talks, I built this little search engine that finds the search phrase in the subtitles and gives you the context and a link to Youtube: https://ramdass-search.net/
I really enjoy Watts' lectures and found they gave me a lot of peace about death, life, my place in the universe, etc. I particularly like the remixes by Akira the Don like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9nyWg7obj4 (this is _not_ an endorsement of other work by the same creator, it gets a bit manosphere-ey for me, but I still like the Alan Watts and Charlie Chaplin remixes)
> These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves, with ourselves.
How much truer this excerpt of one of Watts' lectures [0] has become in the age where even our selves have become almost fully digitized. Many of the people you interact with will now never meet you in the flesh, only as symbols on a screen.
I am just saying what I am saying: that Watts quotes are now a signifier for me.
Talk about confusing images and ideas of selves, with the people themselves. Quite judgmental, and dare I say, biased, or even prejudiced.
For what it's worth I follow none of those people, so perhaps you ought to revisit your biases and correct some of your priors. Moreover, I began listening to Alan Watts over 10 years ago, when I was into Eckhart Tolle's "Power of Now" and all of that jazz.
But thank you for exposing your innate biases and revealing your priors. It's very illuminating.