Alan Watts was incredible (and if you don’t know who he was, you can click on his name to go to the Wikipedia entry about him).
The following is an excerpt from the preface of his book “This Is It,” and an audio recording of a lecture that he gave called “Not What Should Be, But What Is.” The excerpt gives a bit of insight into his general philosophy on what he dedicated his life to, and the audio recording is just brilliant. He was articulate, funny, entertaining, insightful, and is a joy to listen to.
“I am neither a preacher nor a reformer, for I like to write and talk about this way of seeing things as one sings in the bathtub or splashes in the sea. There is no mission, nor intent to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substitutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelmingly uncanny fact of mere existence. Not for one moment do I believe that such an awakening would deprive us of energy or social concern. On the contrary, half the delight of it - though infinity has no halves - is to share it with others, and because the spiritual and the material are inseparable this means the sharing of life and things as well as insight. But the possibility of this depends entirely upon the presense of the vision which could transform us into the kind of people who can do it, not upon exhortation or appeals to our persistent, but consistently uncreative, sense of guilt. Yet it would spoil it all if we felt obliged, by that same sense, to have the vision.”
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Alan Watts - Not What Should Be, What Is
