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This is episode number 700 on The Dream of Life.
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For episode #500 and episode #600, I brought experts in a guided meditation technique called yoga nidra onto the show to take you through an extraordinary auditory experience.
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For episode #700 today, I’m taking you through a short passage by the 20th-century English writer Alan Watts called “The Dream of Life”, which I’m hoping you’ll also find to be an extraordinary auditory experience. I’ve listened to Alan Watts read this passage many times in the past year and each listen enriches me further. You ready? Here we go.
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“If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death — or shall I say, death implies life — you can feel yourself. Not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.”
(01:19): “What you are basically, deep deep down, far far in, is simply the fabric and the structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne and that has royal prerogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self. Satcitananda, which means: Sat, that which is, Cit, that which is consciousness, Ananda, that which is bliss.”
(01:52): “And in other words, what exists, reality itself, is gorgeous. It is the plenum, the fullness of total joy. Wow-wee. And all those stars if you look out in the sky, a firework display like you see on the Fourth of July. The universe is a celebration. It’s a firework show to celebrate that existence is. Wow-wee. And then they say but there’s no point just sustaining bliss.”
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“So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive.”
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“And after countless nights, of 75 years or whatever of total pleasure each night, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control. Where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ And you would dig that too and you would come out of that and you would say ‘Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?’ And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream.”
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“And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not.”
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“So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you’re all that, only you’re pretending you’re not.”
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All right, that’s it for this episode. Dream big, folks. Grasp the tremendous power you have to better yourself and the world, which — through your interest in machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence — you are uniquely well-placed to scale up your positive impact… and you are doing it at just the right time.
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All right, until next time, my friend, keep on rockin’ it out there and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience podcast with you very soon.
