Alan Watts' Newsletter

The very first Alan Watts newsletter has landed!

This newsletter summarises the key insights and points from a given Alan Watts' lecture. The newsletter is to help us recall with greater ease his timeless wisdom. We also suggest actionable strategies to use in daily life based on these insights.

Here we go

1. You Are Not In the World — You Are Something the World Is Doing

We often feel like strangers on Earth. As if we’ve been dropped here, wandering around inside a foreign environment called “reality.”

You cannot describe a human being without simultaneously describing the environment around them. Scientists can’t explain your behaviour without referencing oxygen, gravity, social systems, language, culture, food, and history.

Remove the environment and the “individual” vanishes.

So the idea that you are a self-contained thing moving around inside the world is a sort of strange illusion. But in many ways, we are as rooted to the ground as a tree, although not physically. Remove oxygen, what will happen to you and I in the upcoming minutes?

You wouldn’t say a wave is in the ocean. The wave is something the ocean is doing right there.

In the same way, you are not a passenger in the universe. You are a local expression of it.

Modern psychology increasingly agrees with this relational view:

• Embodied cognition shows that thinking depends on body and environment.

• Attachment theory shows identity emerges through relationships.

• Neuroscience shows no clear boundary where “self” ends and “world” begins, only feedback loops.

Actionable takeaway: When you feel isolated or “out of place,” ask:

What larger process might I be a part of right now, rather than a problem inside my head?

2. Control Is the Fastest Way to Kill What You Love

Your body already knows something your anxious mind keeps forgetting.

You don’t consciously regulate your heartbeat. You don’t instruct your liver. You don’t supervise digestion. And if you tried, you’d only interfere.

Life works because authority is distributed, not centralised.

Watts calls this democracy. Or anarchy!...not chaos, but a kind of self-organising order.

A useful contrast

• Total control gives you a doll – although human like, a doll is something plastic, not real, not spontaneous with a life of its own.

• Letting go of control though gives you a relationship.

If you want life to respond, surprise you, or feel alive, you must accept uncertainty. Predictability is excellent for machines... living systems require wiggle room!

Walking the “middle way” is like walking a tightrope. You don’t stay balanced by freezing, you stay balanced by constant micro-adjustment.

Actionable takeaway: Instead of asking “How do I control this?”, try:

“Where could I loosen my grip by 5% and see what adjusts on its own?”

3. If You Ask What You Want, You Must Also Ask Who You Think You Are

If you look closely, you may already be living much closer to how you want than you’d like to admit.

Yes I know, this risks sounding contentious, for a few reasons:

1. You might discover motives you don’t like.

2. You might discover you’re more powerful than you thought.

But the deeper issue is this: who is the “you” doing the wanting?

You can’t perceive a figure without a background. You can’t hear a sound without silence. You can’t define a self without context.

What we usually miss

We pay attention to the “figure” (me, my thoughts, my problems) and ignore the “background” (the space in which all of this appears). Space gets treated as nothing, so we forget it, even though nothing happens without it. That is not to say the background of you and your life is nothing, or blank.

Trying to find the self without context is like trying to see a shadow without light.

Actionable takeaway: When stuck in self-analysis, ask:

What am I treating as “background” that might actually be doing most of the work?

4. Life Has a Full Colour Palette… Not a Safe Setting!

Human beings secretly search for a mythical emotional position, take this for example,

‘Here is where it feels good, and nothing hurts.’

Experience is not one slider though, it’s many overlapping spectra. Emotional, physical, sensory, relational.

Pleasure and pain do no exist in isolation. They’re endpoints of the same sensitivity.

Life is not a volume knob, it’s a mixing desk. Mute one channel completely and the whole song flattens.

If you couldn’t feel discomfort, you also couldn’t feel depth, intimacy, or joy.

Psychological parallel

• ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy): Suffering increases when we try to eliminate normal human pain.

• Affective neuroscience: Emotional range predicts resilience, not fragility.

Actionable takeaway: Instead of asking “How do I get rid of this feeling?”, ask:

“What capacity does this feeling prove I have?” 

5. Why the World Needs Weeds, Villains, and Shocks

(And why this isn’t moral laziness)

This is where Watts often gets misunderstood.

When he says the universe needs weeds, villains, and shocks, he is not saying harmful behaviour is “good” or should be excused. He is saying something more structural.

The key idea

A world without contrast is not peaceful…it is blank.

Just as:

• No figure exists without background

• No sound exists without silence

• No movement exists without resistance

…no meaningful experience exists without tension, difference, and disruption. It is through tension or difference we can realise our goals, values and creates the choice for what we strive towards.

Why “shocks” are built in

Living systems do not evolve in perfectly stable environments. They evolve through disturbance. Shocks force reorganisation. Weeds test gardens. Predators test ecosystems. Psychological crises force value clarification.

From this perspective:

• Villains reveal ethical boundaries.

• Conflict exposes what matters.

• Difficulty generates meaning.

Cross-disciplinary grounding

• Evolutionary biology: Adaptation requires environmental pressure.

• Trauma psychology: Growth often follows disruption (when supported).

• Existential psychology: Meaning arises from confronting limitation, not avoiding it.

“Consciousness survives boredom by surprising itself”

Unpacked plainly: If everything were predictable, awareness would collapse into monotony. Consciousness stays vivid by encountering novelty, resistance, and difference, even when that difference is uncomfortable.

“People are points where the whole concentrates its attention”

This doesn’t mean you’re insignificant. It means the opposite.

Imagine a spotlight moving across a stage. Wherever it rests, the whole theatre’s electricity, structure, and energy focus there. The spotlight doesn’t contain the theatre, but the theatre expresses itself through it.

That’s what a person is.

Metaphor

Reality is a vast play watching itself through billions of seats.

Practical tool: The Necessary Friction Reframe

When facing conflict or disruption, ask:

1. What contrast is being revealed here?

2. What value becomes visible only because this is difficult?

3. What capacity is being trained by this resistance?

This reframes adversity as informational, not meaningless.

6. Waking Up Is Not Effort, It’s Release

Watts ends with a quiet reversal.

You don’t need a special place to feel awe. Lie on your back and look up. You’re already on a spaceship travelling at incomprehensible speed through a directionless cosmos.

There is no up, no down, no correct orientation, only motion.

Meditation, redefined

Meditation isn’t self-improvement. It’s defascination. Loosening the mental glue that keeps attention stuck on one tiny part of the process.

Metaphor

The mind is like a muddy pool. You don’t clear it by stirring. You clear it by leaving it alone.

Try to force calm and you create more waves. Let things settle, and clarity appears by itself.

Psychology meets practice

• Mindfulness research: Non-interference increases clarity.

• Neuroscience: Reduced cognitive effort quiets default-mode rumination.

Actionable takeaway: Once a day, practice doing nothing on purpose. Not relaxing. Not improving. Just not interfering.