Things are terms, not entities. They exist in the abstract world of thought, but not in the concrete world of nature. Thus one who actually perceives or feels this to be so no longer feels that he is an ego, except by definition.
1960
Ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of being or existence. Ontology seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. A key question ontology grapples with is determining what entities and phenomena exist or can be said to exist.
Some key concepts in ontology include universals and particulars. Universals refer to general entities or types of things while particulars refer to concrete individual entities. Other ontological topics look at issues like dependence, composition, identity, properties, space and time. Ontology also intersects with other branches of philosophy like metaphysics and overlaps conceptually with fields such as semantics in linguistics. Its study helps frame philosophical questions about the nature of reality and existence through systematic conceptualization. While controversial, ontology provides a structured conceptual foundation to analyze assumptions about what is in theoretical terms.
A Beautiful Loop
An Active Inference Theory of Consciousness
Laukkonen and Chandaria propose that consciousness arises from a recursive brain process involving three key elements: a reality model, competitive inferences reducing uncertainty, and a self-aware feedback loop. This framework explains various states of awareness, including meditation, psychedelic experiences, and minimal consciousness. It also offers insights into artificial intelligence by connecting awareness to self-reinforcing predictions. The authors’ theory suggests that consciousness emerges when the brain’s reality model becomes self-referential, creating a “knowing itself” phenomenon. This recursive process underlies different levels of conscious experience and potentially informs AI development.
A Weekend with Terence McKenna
“Healing the inner elf through trance, dance, and diet”—the session for true McKenna enthusiasts: twelve hours with the bard himself, in which he touches upon practically all of his trademark topics.
Appreciating Imagination
Join Terence McKenna in this weekend workshop as he takes us on an imaginative journey into the depths of human creativity. He explores psychedelics, virtual worlds, and shamanic states of consciousness, saying how an embrace of our imagination allows us to envision and manifest alternate realities beyond cultural conditioning. By cultivating our creative faculties with mathematical reasoning, intuition, and immersion in nature, he guides us toward transcending ideological limits into an enlightened future of compassion. Ultimately, breaking boundaries through the power of imagination will inspire us to reach new heights of understanding and connectivity.
Awakening to Archaic Values
A weekend workshop in which Terence encourages humanity to return to harmonic habits which have been lost in the tide of time.
Consciousness and Rhythm
This seminar explores consciousness as an intrinsic rhythmic interplay with reality. Watts challenges notions of separateness, asserting that individuals are not detached witnesses, but instead fundamentally unified with the cosmos. He encourages transcending ego and dualistic thinking to harmonize with the underlying patterns and dance that all differentiated experiences, including our own being, arise from. The goal is realizing our inherent interconnectedness with the seamless whole.
Diamond Way
Watts beckons us to peer past the veil, where remembering and forgetting engage in a cosmic dance. Traverse the paradoxical streams of jiriki and tariki, self-power and other-power, until the very concept of “I” dissolves like a dewtopped lotus. Prepare to be unshackled and uninhibited, for in the quest for nothingness lies the quintessence of everythingness.
Man and Nature
Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life (Episode 1)
Alan Watts speaks on the contrast between classical Chinese and historic Western attitudes in regard to man's place in nature. Do we see ourselves as nature's conquerors or collaborators?
God
Essential Lectures, Program 4
To many of us the image of God as a gray-bearded omnipotent and omnipresent supreme being has become implausible, yet the common sense notions of divine authority surrounding that image persist.
Time
Essential Lectures, Program 6
Here Alan Watts points out that our insistence that the past determines the present is nonsensical.
Conversation with Myself
Essential Lectures, Program 12
While walking in a field above Muir Woods, Alan Watts points to humankind's attempts to straighten out a wiggly world as the root of our ecological crisis.
Four Ways to the Center
Can an ego overcome egocentrism? Can a self become selfless? Is there even any value in this pursuit, and if so, how should one approach it? Through renunciation and repentance, or through acceptance and merging into it? Many consciousnesses encounter this conundrum on the brisk seas of being, and Alan invites us to take a closer look at our so-called individuality.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
An Eternal Golden Braid
By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, this book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of 'meaningless' elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of 'meaning' itself.
Hard Problem of Consciousness
Philosopher David Chalmers on the combination problem, dualism, and panpsychism.
How to Grow Old
In this essay (written for his book Portraits From Memory And Other Essays), Russell uses his logical thinking to lay out his advice for achieving a successful old age.
In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge
Terence shares his “Stoned Ape” theory—that psilocybin mushrooms drove human evolution by enhancing cognition and fostering social cohesion. He explores psychedelics’ power to dissolve the ego, open the Gaian mind, and guide us towards transcendence. McKenna also delves into the fractals of time, the Santa Claus-Amanita connection, and the radical implications of his Timewave Zero theory. A captivating look at psychedelics, consciousness, and the mysteries of the universe!
In the Valley of Novelty
Journeying through multiple dimensions of psychedelic consciousness, Terence McKenna's visionary weekend workshop invites us on an entheogenic voyage to the frontiers of the mind and its imminent conquering of matter. Blending scientific insights with shamanic wisdom, McKenna argues that natural plant medicines like psilocybin and DMT provide portals into mystical realms and alien dimensions, catalyzing revelations about nature, reality, and the human psyche. He urges us to courageously explore these consciousness-expanding substances, seeking the gratuitous beauty and truths they unveil. For McKenna, the psychedelic experience holds secrets to our world and ourselves—if only we dare lift the veil.
Inner Perspective
Ernst Mach's illustration of the subjective visual experience.
Interview with John Hazard
Terence McKenna describes Novelty Theory to director John Hazard with an elaboration of its core principles involving hyper-complexification and the compression of time. He holds forth on the correspondences between the structure of the DNA molecule and the Chinese I-Ching, then shows how his notion of an archaic revival leads from the theories of mind and the art movements of the early twentieth century to the shaman as the quintessential figure of the twenty-first century, with psychedelic substances being the bridge between these worldviews.
Limits of Art and Edges of Science
Terence McKenna proposes a radical view of history as a self-limiting process, driven by an attractor pulling us toward a transcendent, alien encounter that will transform human experience. He advocates the transformative power of psychedelics to unlock our collective potential, urging a forced evolution of language and consciousness to navigate the looming collapse of civilization and embrace the cosmic destiny of our species.
Macrocognition
A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality
Bryce Huebner develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality, arguing that genuine cognition requires the capacity for flexible, goal-directed behavior enabled by integrated representational systems. It posits that collective mentality should be ascribed where specialized subroutines are integrated to yield group-relevant, goal-directed behavior. The approach reveals that there are many kinds of collective minds, some more akin to those of honeybees or cats than humans. It challenges traditional notions of collective intentionality, suggesting that groups are unlikely to be "believers" in the fullest sense, shedding new light on questions of collective intentionality and responsibility.
Mind over Mind
Alan unravels the myth of self-improvement through willpower alone and exposes the fruitlessness of exerting control over one's own mind. He points to another way: let go of straining, soften your grasp of yourself, and watch experience unfold with impartial awareness. In releasing the fantasy of domination, he says, our natural essence emerges freely. A thought-provoking exploration of the boundaries of self-mastery and the grace of acceptance.
The Nature of Consciousness (Part 1)
Out of Your Mind 1
A seminar about “what there is.” Watts weaves together keen insights from science and spirituality to propose that existence is more like a game of hide-and-seek where we pretend not to recognize how self and other are interconnected.
The Nature of Consciousness (Part 2)
Out of Your Mind 2
Alan Watts suggests the sole identity with our egoic thoughts limits our consciousness, and that existence is an interdependent web in which consciousness plays a game of pretending to be separate. We must recognize the fundamental unity of self and world; that consciousness encompasses all experience. He provides various techniques aimed at dissolving illusory boundaries of the ego. Watts maintains that enlightenment requires no striving, since we already live in eternal presence and are manifestations of the divine reality, pretending forgetfulness for the adventure of self-discovery.
The World As Self (Part 2)
Out of Your Mind 10
The journey of self-realization follows the winding path inward, to the place where you already are. As the egoic illusion falls away, the universe unveils your true face. Trust in the guru's skillful means, which trick the mind into its own liberation. Embrace each stage of life with sincerity, not forcing but allowing insight to dawn in its own time. Know yourself to be That, the eternal Self of all that is.
Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Sara Walker and Lex Fridman explore life’s grand mysteries, touching on the nature of existence and the origins of life to the potential of artificial intelligence and the future of consciousness. Walker’s unique perspective challenges conventional wisdom, inviting us to reconsider our place in the cosmic dance.
Pursuit of Pleasure
Where does pleasure come from? What are we trying to achieve in our frantic day-to-day activities? Why are we in such a hurry? And why do all of our efforts to pin the universe down and bring it under our control dial up the misery?
Reviving the Archaic
A New View of Evolution
Terence McKenna unveils an “archaic revival” that could save humanity and our planet. He makes the controversial claim that psychedelic plants catalyzed the emergence of human consciousness, language, and our fertile imaginations eons ago. McKenna advocates reviving the shamanic practices and partnership values of our prehistoric ancestors to transcend the isolated ego and re-establish a symbiotic relationship with nature’s “great piece of integrated linguistic machinery.” His boundary-dissolving ideas shatter conventional thinking about our past, present, and the transformative possibilities for our collective future.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Here is the book which develops a new way of thinking about the nature of order and organization in living systems, a unified body of theory so encompassing that it illuminates all particular areas of study of biology and behavior. It is interdisciplinary, not in the usual and simple sense of exchanging information across lines of discipline, but in discovering patterns common to many disciplines.
Still the Mind
Here Alan explores meditation and finding inner peace through watching your breath, chanting nonsense syllables, and generally chilling out. No goals, no force, just be. Let things flow through you. Some far-out stuff for sure, but Alan's as sincere as they come. Give it a listen if you're seeking something deeper.
The Book
On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
At the root of human conflict is our fundamental misunderstanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated beings, unconnected to the rest of the universe, has led us to view the “outside” world with hostility, and has fueled our misuse of technology and our violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world. In The Book, philosopher Alan Watts provides us with a much-needed answer to the problem of personal identity, distilling and adapting the ancient Hindu philosophy of Vedanta to help us understand that the self is in fact the root and ground of the universe. In this mind-opening and revelatory work, Watts has crafted a primer on what it means to be human—and a manual of initiation into the central mystery of existence.
The Meaning of Happiness
The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East
Deep down, most people think that happiness comes from having or doing something. Here, Alan Watts offers a more challenging thesis: authentic happiness comes from embracing life as a whole in all its contradictions and paradoxes, an attitude he calls the “way of acceptance.” Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Western mysticism, and analytic psychology, Watts demonstrates that happiness comes from accepting both the outer world around us and the inner world inside us—the unconscious mind, with its irrational desires, lurking beyond the awareness of the ego. Although written early in his career, The Meaning of Happiness displays the hallmarks of his mature style: the crystal-clear writing, the homespun analogies, the dry wit, and the breadth of knowledge that made Alan Watts one of the most influential philosophers of his generation.
The Old and the New Vision
Herbert Günther reveals how ancient Tibetan Buddhist texts offer insights into consciousness that parallel modern scientific discoveries. The Tibetans viewed humans not as isolated beings, but as expressions of universal intelligence, describing three levels: the physical body, an experiential “phantom-like” body, and a mysterious deep structure. Their texts suggest that the universe itself is conducting a grand experiment through human consciousness—playfully creating new possibilities and evolving toward higher forms of order.
The Psychedelic Explosion
Alan talks about the upcoming revolution in which Western society will have to come to grips with the existence of the psychedelic/mystical experience, and how to integrate it into our culture in a productive, fulfilling, and responsible manner. Included are personal recollections of DMT and LSD trips experienced by Watts himself, why the utilization of psychedelic drugs should be seen as a tool, his vision of a psychedelic campus for guided mystical experiences, and why prohibition is doomed to failure.
The Religion of Man
The Religion of Man is a compilation of lectures by Rabindranath Tagore, edited by him and drawn largely from his Hibbert Lectures given at Oxford University. A Brahmo playwright and poet of global renown, Tagore deals with the universal themes of God, divine experience, illumination, and spirituality.
Images of God
The Tao of Philosophy 2
Alan Watts talks on the impact of various models of the ultimate reality, and the contrasts between male and female symbolism.
Coincidence of Opposites
The Tao of Philosophy 3
Alan Watts explains the sense in nonsense and how to enjoy the playfulness of life while sincerely participating in the human game.
Seeing Through the Net
The Tao of Philosophy 4
In a talk given to the IBM Systems Group, Alan Watts describes the wiggly world of nature and the net we cast over it.
Symbols and Meaning
The Tao of Philosophy 7
Alan Watts joyfully upends assumptions about reality, using wit and wisdom to reveal how existence is a dazzling, musical mystery beyond language—not a problem to be solved but an unfolding to be experienced.
The Watcher, the Knower, the Spirit Self
Swami Sarvapriyananda discusses the Advaita Vedanta understanding of consciousness, which sees it as the fundamental, non-dual reality behind all experience. He contrasts this with scientific theories that try to explain consciousness in terms of brain activity, arguing that such approaches cannot account for the subjective, first-person nature of consciousness. He also touches on the Vedantic views on consciousness after death, rebirth, and the relationship between spirituality and emerging technologies like AI.
This Is It
and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience
Six revolutionary essays exploring the relationship between spiritual experience and ordinary life—and the need for them to coexist within each of us. With essays on “cosmic consciousness” (including Alan Watts’ account of his own ventures into this inward realm); the paradoxes of self-consciousness; LSD and consciousness; and the false opposition of spirit and matter, This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience is a truly mind-opening collection.
Transcending Duality
An exploration of the male and female symbolism in Tantric yoga and the unity of polar opposites as a form of resonance.
What I've Learned from Psychedelics
McKenna describes his encounters while in the DMT state, theorizing that the beings he met are ancestor souls communicating from beyond death, offering reassurance about the afterlife to ease anxiety over mortality. He says psychedelics catalyze an expanded consciousness, unfolding awareness into a higher dimension where one can behold this ecology of souls, and sees this expanded awareness as helping to midwife humanity’s transition to a new stage of being.
What is it Like to be a Thermostat?
Commentary on Dan Lloyd, “What is it Like to Be a Net?”
Could a simple thermostat possess consciousness? Philosopher David Chalmers believes it's possible. He compares connectionist networks to mundane thermostats, finding uncanny similarities in how they process information. This suggests thermostats could model basic conscious experience, if we accept certain criteria. Chalmers argues complexity alone cannot explain awareness. Though advanced artificial networks mimic consciousness, some essence eludes. He concludes we must look beyond connectionist models, seeking deeper laws not yet conceived, as we continue our quest to unveil the very essence of consciousness.
