As we come to the end of another year, I find my thoughts and writing turning towards year-end reflections. Yesterday I wrote “Day by day, nothing seems to change” and in there noted a process for reflecting, noting:
“At this time of year, my meetings and calls with clients turn towards reflection on the year past, then to where they are now, and only after that to where they will focus in 2019”
That post largely focussed on a process for reflecting on the year past. Today, with guidance from the philosopher Alan Watts, an esoteric look at how to consider where you are today, so that then you can embrace that reality and so be truly effective in considering where you will focus in 2019.
Yes, I’m not your conventional leadership sounding board, I’m here to take you where you want to go if you are up for the journey as it can be!
Alan Watts was a British esoteric philosopher who synthesised much ancient wisdom into helping us consider our way of being in our modern world. Joyfully, his words were recorded and now many have been accompanied by wonderful videos and music.
In order for our year-end reflections to birth clarity of focus and intention for the next year, as I said I feel it is key to both reflect on the past year and then, before considering the next year, to pause and see where we truly are.
Today I shall not talk about how to review your business, or even on any surface level yourself.
Instead, I give you the beauty of two short talks by Alan Watts, each under five minutes and full of both depth and joy, and truly help me and many others to find absolute presence and gratitude in where we are today.
The first is called The Dream of Life and I follow that with the transcript of his words. Please do then watch the second, on why life is not a journey. The first is wonderful, the second truly magnificent, it brings forth emotions like little else.
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke – but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it’s gonna be.
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t god, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not god in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.
Now, to the second Alan Watts talk. Enjoy.