Alan Watts

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

We are pleased to bring you part four of the excerpt from "Four Ways to the Center" with Alan Watts.  There are many attitudes that run through all religions.  Explore the practices and feelings that are a part of the mind.

Now remember that I pointed out that the situation of feeling yourself to be an ego is a kind of game. It is a pattern of life, a style of life, just in exactly the same way that a robin or an ant or a marigold is a style of life. It has a particular shape, it goes this way, or it goes that way or whatever it is, you see? And so, the human world in which we live out our egocentric adventures is a certain style of behavior, a certain kind of music, and so also are these three conflicting scenes.

The fourth way, though, that we bring up now, I call reincarnation simply because for mnemonic reasons I was giving four Rs instead of the usual three Rs, and I don’t mean reincarnation quite in the sense that it’s ordinarily understood. I mean getting with life, and if this should by any chance involve reincarnation, that is to say the willingness to be manifested in this world and all its adventures again and again and again and again, yes, you could take it in that sense. But, do you know, this attitude in the religions of the world is extremely rare? Most religions are against life.


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