Alan Watts: The time to wake up is NOW

Alan Watts via TheSpiritualLibrary, 7/7/19; Allisi; Crystal Q., Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly

Learning has no past. Wisdom is something that has to be discovered by each one. And it is not the result of knowledge. Knowledge and wisdom do not go together. Wisdom comes when there is the maturity of self-knowing. Without knowing oneself, order is not possible, and therefore there is no virtue.

Now, learning about oneself and accumulating knowledge about oneself are two different things....A mind that is acquiring knowledge is never learning. What it is doing is this:

It is gathering to itself information, experience as knowledge. And from the background of what it has gathered, it experiences and learns. Therefore, it is never really learning but always knowing, acquiring.

Learning is always in the active present. It has no past. The moment one says to oneself, “I have learned,” it has already become knowledge. And from the background of that knowledge, one can accumulate, translate, but one cannot further learn.

It is only a mind that is not acquiring but always learning -- it is only such a mind that can understand this whole entity we call the “me,” the “I,” the self. I have to know myself, the structure, the nature, the significance of the total entity.

But I can’t do that burdened with my previous knowledge, with my previous experience, or with a mind that is conditioned. For then I am not learning. I am merely interpreting, translating, looking with an eye that is already clouded by the past.

-The Book of Life, Jan. 13, 1995, Harper, San Francisco

Why wake up? HOW to wake up?