(Be Here Now Network) Alan Watts - Being in the Way.
In this intimate two-part session, Alan Watts shares distinctive philosophical vantage points outlining humankind’s relationship to the nature all around us.
“All music is purposeless. Is music getting somewhere? If the aim of a symphony were to get to the final bar, the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest. When you dance do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor? The aim of dancing is to dance, is the present. It’s exactly the same with our life.” – Alan Watts
Be Here Now Network
podcasts, courses, and articles are to help live a life in balance.
Heart-centered wisdom from Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Krishna Das, and many more!
Get a FREE Guided Meditation from Sharon Salzberg when first signing up at: beherenownetwork.com
Whether we seek spiritual insight, inner peace, or simply a break from the weight of the world, this gathering offers a space to breathe, to heal, and to remember the deep freedom that is always within reach.
This remote retreat is a unique opportunity for anyone interested in bhakti (Hindu devotion) and Buddhist traditions. The confluence of these two Eastern modalities offers a practical path we can walk in order to become free in this lifetime. Hope to see you there!
Sharon Salzbergvirtually joins Krishna Das, Acharya Shunya, David Nichtern, Nina Rao, Raghu Markus, John Pattern, and friends. The event runs from 8:00 pm, Thursday, August 27, 2026, to 9:00 pm, Monday, August 31, 2026.
It occurs to us that this whole "summer" thing is a social construct. It is. What does "summer" mean. There are all those associations and connotations, but everyone knows it's when the sun's out, the clothes are mostly off, school is on break, and there's going to be a vacation, road trip, partying, and just plain old hanging around, maybe making some money.
It's a break from the routine. It's time away from the prison of the school system and the [bleep] warden who thinks s/he runs the place. Think of Project X or American Graffiti. Ah, summer, there's nothing like it. And this is Southern California, so all the more reason.
We say summer begins when school lets out. That was a week or two ago. Like gender assignment, who needs an objective measure? Well, many people do. And so we have the solstice, the astronomical measure that seems so scientific. But every American knows that summer begins on Memorial Day(May 25); that's the social reality overriding whatever others try to say is only objective and nothing else. It's both.
It runs through Labor Day (the unofficial end), a fake American holiday to remove Americans from the worldwide Labor Movement and May Day (May 1st), which idealistic socialists fight for, collectivists dream of, and New Age communists and college Marxists cheer for.
(After Skool) It's all perfect by Ram Dass (formerly Prof. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., Harvard University)
RAM DASS ("God's Servant or Slave") was born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1931 and lived until December 22, 2019) [1]. He became a hippie and is also known as Baba ["Father"] Ram Dass. He was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga [2], academic psychologist, and writer of Be Here Now, his best-selling [3] 1971 book, which has been described by as "seminal" [4, 5, 6].
With the help of his scandalous but loving sex guru Neem Karoli Baba, he helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West [7]. He authored or co-authored a dozen more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill (1977), How Can I Help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013).
Once when he was teaching with his long hair, beard, and linen garments, someone in the crowd asked him why he dressed like a guru from India when he was really a Jew from the U.S. Without missing a beat, his retort was, "I'm only Jewish on my parents' side." Ha ha ha, exactly!
We are born into a faith, and it's usually rammed down our throats before we have a chance to do anything but swallow. And most of us won't question it. But some of us vomit it up, leave or examine, sometimes even come back to it later.
Harvard professors Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert (cool squares rounding out)
However, it seems the job and duty of any human to question it, test it, attempt to validate it, argue against it, learn from it, grow from it, reject it all together, or make peace with it. There's a world of spirituality out there to explore. We usually need a floor, a ground, by which to test things. And almost all major religions have a mystic component or sect. That's a place to start.
Parents, what am I to do but follow my heart?
But question we must, and explore we will, and find? That remains to be seen. We are on a spiritual quest. And maybe the whole rest of the world can't be. But if Americans can't, what the F are you calling yourself an "American" for? Life, liberty, and the PURSUIT of happiness is all you were promised -- and you're not even going to pursue it? Truth means nothing? Just taking sides? Just being controlled by your government, schools, and parents, the "powers that be"? Pathetic. Human up, and get searching.
Ram Dass was personally and professionally associated with hippie Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s. Then known as Richard Alpert, he conducted research with Leary on the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs.
In addition, Alpert assisted Harvard Divinity School graduate student Walter Pahnke in his 1962 "Good Friday Experiment" with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience [8, 9].
While legal at the time (and not yet criminalized), their research was controversial and led to Dr. Leary's and Dr. Alpert's firing from Harvard in 1963.
In 1967, Alpert traveled to India and became "Ram Dass," a disciple of Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning "Servant of Ram," but usually rendered simply as "Servant of God" for Western audiences.
In the following years, he co-founded the charitable organizations Seva Foundation and Hanuman Foundation. From the 1970s to the 1990s, he traveled extensively, giving talks and retreats and holding fundraisers for charitable causes.
In 1997, he had a stroke, which left him with paralysis and expressive aphasia which would be better characterized as "fluent, anomic-like with hesitations and word finding difficulties at the conversational level with grossly intact auditory comprehension for high level, low-context information" [10, 11].
He eventually grew to interpret this event as an act of grace, learning to speak again and continuing to teach and write books. After becoming seriously ill during a trip to India in 2004, he gave up traveling and moved to Maui, Hawaii, where he hosted annual retreats with other spiritual teachers until his death in 2019. More
(Aron Kiss) Discovering a hidden hermitage of Buddhist monks at a peaceful meditation center in the Himalayas of Tibet (which the Chinese authorities insist is part of China).
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