“So, in this way, what is called the Zen problem—or kōan—is likened to a person who swallowed a ball of red hot iron: he can’t gulp it down and he can’t spit it out. Or it’s like a mosquito biting an iron bull: it’s the nature of a mosquito to bite, and it’s the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable, and both go on doing their thing that is their nature. And so nothing can happen. And you realize absolutely you are up against it. Absolutely no answer to this problem! No way out. Now, what does that mean? If I can’t do the right thing by doing, and if I can’t do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that ‘I’ (who is said to do all this) am a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it, because it isn’t there. So you recover from the illusion, and you suddenly wake up and think, ‘Oh! What a relief!’ And they call that satori. That’s awakening; the first step in awakening.” – Alan Watts
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“Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Alan Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the un-writable’. Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit. A fascinating entry into the deepest ways of knowing.” — Los Angeles Times
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• Introduction to Zen
• Early Chinese Zen (1-2)
• Uncarved Block
• Zen Bones
• Biting an Iron Bull (contains the above excerpt)
• World as Just So (1-3)
Total Length: 13 hours 24 minutes
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“What you are in your in-most being escapes your examination in rather the same way that you can’t look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror, you can’t bite your own teeth, you can’t taste your own tongue, and you can’t touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger.” – Alan Watts
▶ For more Alan Watts quotes | https://alanwatts.org/quotes/
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