Excerpt from Alan Watts: Four Ways to the Center (preview 2)

We are happy to present part two in the Four Ways to the Center from Alan Watts.  

Now I have been discussing four fundamental attitudes that are found in the various religions of the world was the human predicament, and as you see still on the blackboard, they are given to be four Rs, instead of the three Rs, repentance, opposite rebellion, and resignation, opposite reincarnation, the latter word being used in a special sense, not in the ordinary sense of rebirth, but of an affirmation of the human predicament of getting with life. 

And this morning I discussed the attitude of repentance, the frame of mind in which it is felt, that there is something profoundly wrong about being a self-conscious, isolated, individual human being, and I tried to show that when this attitude is carried to an extreme point, it results in your discovering that you are a total phony, and I said that the difficulty of the repentance attitude is that people don’t carry it to an extreme point, and they use the attitude of repentance and the indulgence in punishment for whatever they think is wrong about themselves as a kind of lifestyle which assures you that you’re in the right.

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