The Before & After: Alan Watts On How You Cannot Experience The State Of Nothingness

This morning I came across a beautiful quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” When you take a moment to digest that thought you begin to realize just how much of an impact the world around us has in shaping who we think we are. There is the real you — but there’s also the you that is projected onto you by others over the course of your lifetime. Over years and years those projections begin to stick, and you confuse them as being your true self when they are in fact not your self at all. Who is the real you? What is the true essence of who you are when you strip away the false identities that society and everyone you’ve ever encountered in your life have thrust upon you? What’s left is the true purity of your self and nothing more, nothing less. When you think about it, the quest to discover the nature of that truth, that essence, is the most exciting and profound challenge of the human experience. To help you on that search Alan Watts offers a powerfully helpful mindset you can adopt as you move along your journey. Just press play above.