#spiritualawakening #spiritualtiktok #spiritualenlightenment #alanwatts #changeyourmindset #alanwattsphilosophy

If you really knew the way you are, things would be sane. But you see, you can't do that. You can't make that discovery, because you're in your own way. You can't control your thoughts. You can't control your feelings, because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings, and they're running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go. You're still breathing, aren't you? Still growing your hair? Still seeing and hearing? Are you doing that? I mean, is breathing something that you do? Do you see? I mean, do you organize the operations of your eyes? Do you know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It's a happening. It happens. So you can feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening. You're hearing. You're seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The sun is happening, shining. There it is. All this happening. And may I introduce you? This is yourself. This begins to be a vision of who you really are, and that's the way you function. You function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence. And this is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach it to you, because the minute you start thinking, I should understand that, this is the stupid notion again of I should bring it about, when there is no you to bring it about. See, that's why I'm not preaching. You can only preach to egos. So long as you think, I'm I. So long as that hallucination blocks it, and the hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility. When at last you see, you can't do it. You cannot make yourself over. You cannot really control your own mind. See, when we try to control the mind, you get concentrated. So when you see that that's nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. And seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no control. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings, which was that chronic muscular strain, is just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just part of the experience. So there isn't any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings, we get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects. We always insist that there is this subject called the knower, and without a knower there can't be knowing. Well that's just a grammatical rule, it isn't a rule of nature. In nature there's just knowing, like you're feeling it. And I have to say you are feeling it, as if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say I am feeling, what I mean is, there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling, I mean there is feeling there. Well anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing, that the play of thought, of feeling, etc. just goes on by itself as a habit, then you are in a state which we will call meditation. And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal symbolic chatter going on in the skull, don't try and get rid of it, because that will again produce the illusion that there is a controller. Just it goes on, it goes on, it goes on, and finally it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there is a silence. And this is a deeper level of meditation. And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is. And you don't see any past, and you don't see any future. You don't see any difference between yourself and the rest of it, that's just an idea. You can't put your hand on the difference between myself and you, you know, you can't blow it, you can't bounce it, you can't pull it, it's just an idea. You can't find any material body, because material body is an idea, so is spiritual body. This is somebody's philosophical notions. See reality isn't material, that's an idea. Reality isn't spiritual, that's an idea. Reality is... So we find, if I've got to put it back into words, that we live in an eternal now. You've got all the time in the world, because you've got all the time there is, which is now. And you are this universe. And then we get this strange feeling that we have never had to see in our lives, except occasionally by accident some people get a glimpse, that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe, and you are creating it at every moment, because you see it starts now.