Excerpts from Alan Watts lectures

The real you

If you're ready to wake up you going to wake up and if you're not ready you're gonna stay pretending that your just a poor little me. And sine your all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture, I assume that you're all on the process of waking up. Or else your teasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation with waking up which your not serious about. But I assume maybe you are not serious but sincere that you are ready to wake up. So then when your in the way of waking up and finding out who you really are, what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something with the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing. The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe. So then, when you die, your not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence, because that's not an experience. Lot of people are afraid that when they die they're gonna be locked up in a dark room forever, and sort of undergo that. But one of the most interesting things in the world- this is a yoga, this is a way of realization try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children think about that. It's one of the great wonders of life. What would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You will find out among other things, that it will pose the next question to you. What was is like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see you can't have an experience of nothing; nature abhors a vacuum. So after your dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience when you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after people die, other people are born. And they're all you, only you can experience it one at a time. Everybody is I, you all know you're you, and wherever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference. You are all of them. And when they come into being, that's you coming into being. You know that very well only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland, or whatever else it is in your organism. You don't have to know how to shine the sun. You just do it, like you breath. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are a fantastically complex thing, and that your doing all this and you never had any education in how to do it?