Ep. 35 – Dreaming the World
Alan Watts Being in the Way
Be Here Now Network / Love Serve Remember Foundation
4.9 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Diving into the cosmic drama of reality, Alan Watts describes the world as a divine dream which is poetic, playful, and only sometimes serious.
Being in the Way is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.
On this episode of Being in the Way, Alan Watts:
- Exploring how we get caught in the cosmic game and drama of life
- Seeing the universe as the playful expression of divine energy
- Questioning identity: the tension between acting and simply being.
- Confronting the spiritual taboo of realizing the self as God—tat tvam asi.
- Indirect awareness of the networks and systems in the physical world
- Music and the pure delight in complex orders of sound
- Embracing the paradox of existence as poetic, musical, and playful, while still being serious.
- Considering all of the senses as forms of one, larger sense of touch
- The oneness of up and down, black and white, being and non-being
- Complexities of human culture that arise out of duality
Today's podcast is sponsored by Betterhelp & Dharma Seed:
Being in the Way is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/alan and get on your way to being your best self.
Join Krishna Das, the most well-known voice of Bhakti chanting (Kirtan) in the West, and David Nichtern - a senior Buddhist teacher, founder of Dharma Moon, guitarist in Krishna Das’ band, and producer of several of his albums - for a warm and engaging conversation about these two paths, their shared roots, and how they intersect in contemporary spiritual practice. Learn more about this FREE online gathering - THE HEART & MIND OF PRACTICE: BUDDHISM & BHAKTI
"The real taboo is 'that art thou'. You, lurking behind the mask of being an impermanent human person, are really responsible for the whole thing. If anybody claims that in our culture, we put them straight away into an asylum. That is the very hallmark of insanity. But, in India, if someone suddenly wakes up one morning and says 'My goodness, I'm God', everybody says, instead of you're crazy or blasphemous, they say 'Congratulations, at last you've found out'". – Alan Watts
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What we now call mindfulness is rooted in a convergence of ancient disciplines, traditions refined and practiced for centuries before reaching modern Western audiences. |
| 0:11.0 | On Tuesday, May 27th, joined Krishna Das, one of the most well-known voices of Bhakti chanting in the West, and Buddhist teacher David N Nichtern for a free online conversation about |
| 0:21.7 | these spiritual paths, their shared roots, and how they continue to inform contemporary practice. |
| 0:27.4 | We'll also discuss the upcoming Dharma Moon mindfulness meditation teacher training program, |
| 0:32.2 | offering an overview of the training, a chance to meet the teachers, ask questions, |
| 0:36.3 | and see if the Dharma Moon meditation |
| 0:38.1 | teacher training might be right for you. Visit Dharmamoon.com slash heart. That's |
| 0:42.8 | Dharmamoon.com slash heart. For more information and to reserve your spot for the free online event |
| 0:47.9 | with David Nikturn and Krishna Das. |
| 0:59.6 | Because after all, what would you do if you were God? |
| 1:03.0 | If you were what there is, the self. |
| 1:09.3 | In the Upanishads, the basic texts of Hinduism, one of them starts out saying, |
| 1:10.5 | in the beginning was the self. |
| 1:13.1 | And looking around, it said, I am. |
| 1:18.5 | And thus it is that everyone to this day, when asked who is there, says it is I. |
| 1:24.7 | For if you were, God, and in this sense that you knew everything, |
| 1:28.5 | and you were completely transparent to yourself through and through, |
| 1:31.6 | you would be bored. Welcome to Being in the Way. |
| 1:46.2 | I'm your host, Mark Watts, and this is the Alan Watts podcast. |
| 1:50.3 | And we've been listening to my father talk about the dreaming of the world. |
| 1:54.4 | And this theme in which the world is seen as the dream of the divine is taken from Hindu mythology, and he brings in the idea of |
| 2:03.6 | technology. What if we had a magical device that could give us any dream we like? And interestingly |
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