When you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you are not ready you are gonna stay pretending that you are just a little, poor little me. And, uh, since you are all here, engaged in this sort of enquiry listening to this sort of lecture, I assume that all of you are on the process of waking up, or else you are teasing yourself with some kind of flirtation of waking up, which you are not serious about. But I assume that you are not serious but sincere. That you are ready to wake up.
So then, when you are in the way of waking up and finding out who your really are, what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something that the whole Universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. The real you, is not a puppet that life pushes around. The real you, the deep down you, is the whole universe. So then, when you die, you won't have to put up with ever lasting non-existence, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they are gonna be locked in a dark room forever.
But one of the most interesting things in the world, try and imagine what it feels like to go to sleep and never wake up. What would happen if you go to sleep and would 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 propose the next question to you: "What it would be like to wake up after never going to sleep?". That's when you were born.
You see? You can't have an experience of nothing. So after your death, the only thing that can happen, is the same thing that, or the same sort of experiences when you were born. In other words, we all know that after people die, people are born. And they are all you. But you can only experience it one at the time. Everybody is 'I', we all know you are 'You'. And where so ever beings exist, we are all galaxies. It doesn't make any difference. You are all up. And when them come into being, that's you coming to be, 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 in prior time. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it. Like you breath.
And doesn't it really astonishes you that you are a fantastic complex thing, and you are doing all of this and you never had any 'education' how to do it?
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| Alan Watts in his study. |
@ lecture The Real You
