Ep. 39 – What Am I?
Alan Watts Being in the Way
Be Here Now Network / Love Serve Remember Foundation
4.9 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Moving beyond the imagined boundary of form, Alan Watts explores the idea that humanity is a microcosm of the universe and that the two are inseparable.
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This time on Being in the Way, Alan Watts discusses:
- Considering whether being part of a whole means that we are the whole
- The radial structure of humanity, Earth, and all beings
- Recognizing that skin is not the boundary of man
- How foreign the inner workings of the human body seem to humanness
- The nature of the mind, likened to the nature of space
- The illusion of an individual operating from himself
- Blending together materialism and mysticism, not getting too stuck in one or the other
This series 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.
“Any other way of looking at things is kind of schizoid. It looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a barren tree. They just got settled there, they don’t belong, a sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Well, where is this other domain, and how does it relate to this one?” –Alan Watts
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Transcript
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| 0:58.7 | For more information, and to reserve your spot for the free event on Tuesday, May 26th. |
| 1:05.2 | Thank you. Welcome again to the Alan Watts podcast being in the way. |
| 1:24.2 | I'm your host, Mark Watts. |
| 1:26.3 | And today we've got some more treats for you from the archives. |
| 1:29.8 | Today is a talk from 1963 called What Am I? And it's one of a number of talks that came to us |
| 1:36.0 | from a group of recordings made between 1962 and 1963. These are recent discoveries from |
| 1:43.6 | the Blasdell Institute. And these offer a fresh look at |
| 1:47.1 | some of what we consider to be my father's signature comparisons between spotlight and floodlight, |
| 1:53.9 | between prickles and goo. Some of these things that we hear a good bit later in the 60s, but here they are |
| 1:59.8 | for the first time from the early 60s. |
| 2:06.6 | Yesterday afternoon, I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of illusion. |
| 2:25.3 | The question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not, that is to say whether the plot is comic or tragic. |
| 2:36.0 | And if it's tragic, you see, is it, must we say that it's ultimately tragic? |
| 2:43.0 | And the question of who are you? And are we to say that I myself, right down at root, |
... |
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