Life Is Not a Journey Because the End is Not the Primary Goal
In an enlightening, brilliantly illustrated episode of After Skool, British philosopher Alan W. Watts eloquently explains that life should not be considered a journey because the end is not the primary goal, unlike that of travel, which is all about getting there. Rather life is like a piece of music or dance; tasks in which the doing is far more important than reaching the end. “Life is a gift.”
Because we simply cheated ourselves a whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end the thing was to get to that end success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you’re there. But we missed the point the whole way along it was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts
My understanding of the meaning of life has been completely changed and deepened over the past 10 years using Mindfulness thinking and meditation.
This transformative understanding is very clearly expressed here by Alan Watts.
On the meaning of life
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”
“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.”
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
On the mind
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
On letting go
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
Potent advice for any creatives
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
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On change
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
On the universe
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”
On who you truly are
“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
“Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”
“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”
“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.”
“What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”
Learn about who you truly are according to Alan Watts by getting his book, The Book:On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, which discusses the underlying misunderstanding of who we truly are.
On death
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”
On love
“Never pretend to have a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”
On relationships
“When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.”
On music
“Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.”
On anxiety
“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
“To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
On thoughts and words
“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth … In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are “coins” for real things.”
On where you come from
“It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually–if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning– you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so–I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.”
Why man suffers
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
On the present moment
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
“The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”
(Do you want to live a more mindful life? Learn how to achieve mindfulness on a daily basis with our practical guide here).
Alan Watts taught me the “trick” to meditation
(and how most of us get it wrong)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xwp7tR9_Ng
Alan Watts: The essential introduction to his life and ideas
Living with Open Hands 1.0
For me, there are three essential questions that spiral deeper into my life and will continue to do so for a lifetime.
1) Who am I? ... my Identity. (What are my gifts and abilities, passions and aspirations?)
2) Why am I here? ... my Purpose. (How can I use my gifts to make a difference?)
3) What am I going to do about it? ... my Mission. (When, where, and what will I do to make a difference?)
YOU decide. No one but YOU.
For every PERSON, there are gifts within.
For every gift, there is a PLACE that needs that gift.
See more about gifts and meaning here:
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