I wasted 33+ years trapped in my own head before Alan Watts explained this in 10 minutes…

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[00:00:13]>> There is in you no real ego.

[00:00:21]In talking about Hinduism, the idea of the ego is a social institution.

[00:00:29]It has no physical reality.

[00:00:33]The ego is your symbol of yourself.

[00:00:38]Just as the word water is a noise which symbolizes a certain liquid reality.

[00:00:48]So the idea of the ego, the role you play, who you are is not the same as your living organism.

[00:00:57]Your ego has absolutely nothing to do with the way you color your eyes, shape your body, circulate your blood.

[00:01:11]That's the real you.

[00:01:14]But it's certainly not your ego cuz you don't even know how it's done from the standpoint of your conscious attention.

[00:01:23]So the idea of anatman is firstly that [music] the ego is unreal. There isn't one.

[00:01:33]Now then this then is the first truth.

[00:01:35]There is this situation that we have duka or frustration because we are fighting the changingness of things and because we don't realize that the ego, the eye is unreal.

[00:02:01]The ordinary person's definite feeling of the way he exists and who he is is a hallucination.

[00:02:10]To feel yourself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, somehow locked up inside a bag of skin [music] is seen as a hallucination.

[00:02:28]that you are not a stranger in the earth that comes into this world either as [music] a result of a natural fluke or uh being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere [music] else altogether.

[00:02:42]But that you in your fundamental existence, you are the total energy that [music] constitutes this universe.

[00:02:56]playing that it's you.

[00:03:00]Playing that it's this particular [music] organism and even playing that it's this particular person because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hideand seek.

[00:03:15]That is to say, the colossal reality, the energy that is everything, that is a unitary energy that is one, plays at being many at manifesting itself in all these particulars that we call you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and this and that and all around us.

[00:03:43]And it's fundamentally a game.

[00:03:47]And you can say that this goes really for all the systems that I'm talking about. It's the basis of Hinduism, of Buddhism, and of Dowoism. This intuition clinging is what makes suffering. If you don't recognize that this whole world is a fantasmagoria, an amazing illusion, a weaving of smoke and uh you you try to hold on to it, you see, then you start suffering, seriously suffering.

[00:04:29]And uh I explained in the first talk in this series how we ignore all kinds of things because we notice only what we think noteworthy and therefore our vision of everything is highly selective. We pick out certain things and say that's what's there. Just as we select and notice the figure [music] rather than the background because they ignore the background.

[00:05:01]Just as one thinks that you can have pleasure without pain. You want pleasure the figure and don't realize that pain is the background.

[00:05:13]So avidya is this state of restricted consciousness, restricted attention that moves through life unaware of the fact that to be implies not to be and vice versa.

[00:05:38]So now the third noble truth is called nirvana.

[00:05:46]This word means blow out.

[00:05:52]Now in breathing you know that breath is life.

[00:06:00]The Greek word uh you may [music] pronounce it pen or pinema uh is the same as spirit.

[00:06:12]And spirit [music] means breath. In the book of Genesis when God had made the clay figurine that was later to be Adam, he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils and it became alive because life [music] is breath.

[00:06:28]But no, if you hold your breath, you lose it. He that would save his life will lose it.

[00:06:37]So breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, get as much air as you can and Krishna cling and you lose it.

[00:06:46]So nirvana means breathe out.

[00:06:56]What a relief that was.

[00:06:58]>> [laughter] >> the sigh of [music] relief. Let it go because it'll come back to you if you let it go.

[00:07:08]But if you don't let it go, you'll just suffocate. [music] So a person in the state of nirvana is what we might call a blown out person.

[00:07:21]Let go. Don't cling. And then you're in the state of nirvana.

[00:07:29]And I re-emphasize the [music] point.

[00:07:34]This is not I I I'm not preaching. See, not saying this is what you ought to do.

[00:07:40]I'm simply pointing out a state of affairs that [music] is so.

[00:07:44]There's no moralism in this whatsoever.

[00:07:47]It's simply pointing out like if you put your hand into the fire, you'll get burned.

[00:07:53]You can get [music] burned if you want to.

[00:07:57]that's okay. But if you so happens that you don't want to get burned and you don't put [music] your hand in the fire. So in the same way if you don't want to be in a state of anxiety all the time and again I emphasize if you like to be anxious it's perfectly all right.

[00:08:17]You can go running around the wheel and the rat race and play that game just as long as you want to so long as you think it's fun.

[00:08:25]But if there comes a time when you don't think it's fun, you don't have to do it.

[00:08:34]So I wouldn't say to [music] anyone who disagrees with me and who says, "Well, uh, I think we ought to engage the forces of evil in battle and put this world to right and so on and so forth and arrange everything in this world so that it's all up.

[00:08:49]Try it, please. Uh, it's perfectly okay.

[00:08:52]Go [music] on doing that.

[00:08:55]>> [laughter]