The Real You

If you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’re going to stay pretending that you’re just a poor little me.

Listen to Alan Watts explain who the real You is. Forgive the background music, but it’s not too difficult to focus on the words. I’ve attempted my best to transcribe them below. I left out the first few sentences about waking up.

What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now.

You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

The real you is not a puppet, which life pushes around.

The real deep down you is the whole universe.

So then, when you die, you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence. Because that’s not an experience.

A lot of people are afraid that when they die they’re going to be locked up in a dark room forever. And sort-of undergo that.

But one of the most interesting things in the world – this is a yoga, this is a way of realization – try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. It’s one of the great wonders of life; what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up.

And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You will find out, among other things, that it will pose the next question to you – what was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

You see, you can’t have an experience of nothing. Nature abhors a vacuum.

So after you’re dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience, as when you were born.

In other words, we all know very well that after people die, other people are born. And they’re all you! Only you can only experience it one at a time. Everybody is “I”. You all know you’re you. And wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn’t make any difference, you are all of them. And when they come into being, that’s you coming into being. You know that very well.

Only you don’t have to remember the past. In the same way you don’t have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. Or whatever else it is in your organism. You don’t have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it. Like you breathe.

Doesn’t it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you’re doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it?