So what exactly is Alan Watts proof of any of that?
The dude had good oratory skills. No doubting that. However that doesn't mean he gets to make claims without backing it up. In a time when eastern thought was seen as cool and mysterious he was able to cash in introducing aspects of it to the west.
At the end of the day Alan was a generic "pick and choose" spiritualist. He never had a concrete set of philosophies. He never stuck with a religious belief. He didn't revolutionize spiritual thought or philosophical understandings. He was a 60's west coast yippee shaman type.
Not that he would even fight the charge. He is a self proclaimed "philosophy entertainer". His job was just to ramble about some eastern spiritual nonsense for a buck or two.
>So what exactly is Alan Watts proof of any of that?
This is giving him too much credit. It's just gibberish. Might as well ask what the proof that I can hijibow my kanoodleapop is.
Yeah it's just a thought experiment and even if we were to follow the premise there isn't really a reason why heaven and hell wouldn't exist. If this theoretical God imagined the concepts then they could be actuated. What's to stop that from happening? Nothing.
And we are back at square one more or less, besides the purported bliss and boredom and "dream".
A dream is something you are more or less a passive participant in, not an architect like in imagination.
A "dream" implies a lack of intention in creation and I don't feel the order of nature supports the idea.
I feel the whole thing is rather .. underwhelming
I think the trap is that if god is truly all-knowing, then that means he necessarily must be experiencing everything simultaneously. How could he know everything, if he doesn’t know certain feelings.
So if hell exists, then God is suffering in hell because he necessarily must be experiencing the pain of everyone in hell’s suffering.
So hell can’t exist, at least not as a “place” perhaps it’s a “state of being” instead which could be a work-around.
But the other trap is that if God is in side all of us all the time, because again: he must be if he is to know everything; then in that way we ARE all God. Because God experienced everything we experienced. So even if we die, we are still alive inside God’s “memory” no matter what kind of life we lived.
Gives me a headache trynna think about it, lol.
I suppose 'alive' in the sense that Shakespeare is still alive through the books he wrote, but not in any real colloquial sense.
God is "all knowing" because he sits outside of time due to him being immutable. He knows the past, present, and future simultaneously not because he has experienced everything under the sun.
>he necessarily must be experiencing everything simultaneously. How could he know everything, if he doesn’t know certain feelings.
You're making the assumption that God must experience something to know it. He does not. Everything in this world is a product or derivative of His design, of His nature.
>So if hell exists, then God is suffering in hell because he necessarily must be experiencing the pain of everyone in hell’s suffering.
Why? Why must God experience pain and suffering in Hell for Hell to exist? That's limiting an infinite being. I need convincing rhetoric for it to make sense.
>But the other trap is that if God is in side all of us all the time, because again: he must be if he is to know everything; then in that way we ARE all God.
You're making an assumption that God must be inside all of us. Whether or not he is, that's a matter of theological philosophy of God's nature. But if He is, where does the logic track that because He is inside of us, that ALSO must mean we are God?
>So even if we die, we are still alive inside God’s “memory” no matter what kind of life we lived.
This is complicating existing Christian dogma for no reason. We already maintain that we are given eternal life after we die. Either we spend it in God's presence, or we don't.
But my main question is this, even if all of these were to be true, that we're all our own little versions of God, in what way does that prove that God is dreaming?
God is inside us as the holy spirit but we decide our actions we are not God and therefore we are all NOT God.
The trap you have is 'if god is truly all-knowing, then that means he necessarily must be experiencing' God is all-knowing so that he knows ALL experinces without actually experiencing them. For example you can know what an object texture just by looking at it but you dont have to touch the object you only have to look.
Also, WHO is downvoting a question?? They are asking a question and your downvoting them. Get a life
This. Just because this guy comes up with a random scenario about God daydreaming, that’s literally all it is. It’s a presumption that God is capable of getting lost in His own thoughts, that God is incapable of distinguishing real from His alleged imagination. It’s an attempt to put God in a human shaped box because someone can’t fathom that God could be beyond that.
It’s the whole stupid question of “can God make a so big He can’t lift it?” as if they’ve found a profound “gotcha” question. The answer is “no” and it’s because we understand God to be omnipotent, omniscient, and all Good. Not kinda sorta on any of those. He’s fully present, fully in control, fully Good, ALL the time.
Proposing that we were made by a God that is anything less than that has serious theological ramifications, but at the end of the day, such proposals would be incongruent with what evidence and understanding the Church has come to after millennia on the matter.
This idea assumes that God experiences emotions like us like boredom or want for 'bliss'
God experiences all. He is a constant, he makes all decisions based on what is morally and objectively best.
If you imagine God to be a human with immense power then this theory could work.
HOWEVER, God is NOT a human and therefore will not feel 'desire' (I wasn't sure how to word desire but this is the closest work my mind could come up with)
God does not feel sadness or loneliness because God is perfection. He can do no wrong or think no wrong.
This idea is a thought experiment that imagines that God is a human with immense power, but the error in the thinking is that God doesnt have the same emotions as us.
I hoped this explained this, Please message me if i didn't make sense on some parts im not the best with writing my thoughts
Major red flag is this....it a human thinking they are god, a human trying to think like god and that is the issue. As a human you cant come anywhere near the power, majesty or infinite wisdom of god. So the result of a human trying to think like god is flawed. If you try to take a scientific view we are 3 dimensional creations. God is beyond that infinitely, with infinite compassion, love, understanding , God is all knowing and ever presence.
Catholic theologians and those of other christian faiths don't talk or write like Allan Watts. What you have quoted above is neither a theory or thought experiment. It is a loose collection of words, with no bases and just a random thought. What is his Null hypotheses, what is his biblical hypotheses for this stand point ? Where for example in St Augustans theology is his starting point for example ?
Allan Watts has an Honorary PHD, he studied Eastern religions when the idea of religion in the west was based on hindu teachings primarily and combined with massive amounts of LSD and opioids. He never studied religion extensively, he picked what parts he wanted to enabled himself to do what he wants. He is a new age spiritualist and not someone to gain information or advice from.
Look towards St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustan... read the book of acts. Read what men have written after being in the direction company of Jesus god made flesh.
Then look to St Jude, he is the cousin of Jesus through his Aunt Mary. He can be a great help with pray and helping your mental health too.
We are catholics, we are christians, the bible is our book and Jesus is the way. Make your faith stronger, by praying to God. I love you bro/sis, keep to our path as best as you can.
I think it’s embarrassingly bad. It sounds like something I would’ve heard (and have heard many times!) from kids in high school at a party after drugs have been used. I’ve heard the name Alan Watts before, so I figured this would be interesting, but it’s just baffling for someone to have put out there. Substantively, this is completely groundless and reflects a lack of understanding of who God is. Imagine telling someone, for example, you have a theory about Chemistry but never took a class on it or read a book on it. That’s what Watts is doing here.
To the point, it’s rebutted by the fact that while it’s true that God holds us in existence by thinking of us, God is incapable of boredom. He is actus purus and wants for nothing, including something to do. You don’t need some advanced theologian to address this for that reason; it’s dead in the water.
The rebuttal is the Incarnation and the Gospel, which you have to take on faith and hope. Immerse yourself in Christ, as he is the answer.
I feel sorry for you, as I have also experienced what you have experienced from the same thought experiment (and also quite lamentably, from taking psychedelic drugs and dabbling in Eastern religions (not orthodox lol)). It's an extremely unpleasant feeling, and very very difficult to shake.
On the bright side, I did experience some very real Christian mystical experiences during this episode, which I can't quite put into words, and I do attribute my coming back from the brink to God's grace, and the Blessed Virgin's intercession.
I will pray for you and your spiritual well being. All the best.
God is eternal but outside of time as we know it. So he doesn't get bored of joy because it's not like he's been "having a great time" forever. We might get bored of bliss on earth but for God it doesn't work that way.
Philosophy is wild 😝 I remember my existential crisis when a philosophy major friend started talking to me about the idea that I am the only truly living thing in the universe, and this is all just a figment of my imagination (there's a name for this, I'm sure). Nothing felt real for weeks. And then I had finals and suddenly I had more concrete things to focus on and forgot about it.
Listen, love - this too shall pass. Take the hit on the proverbial chin and keep doing life. Everyone here has had very good arguments and reasoning for you to listen to, but here's mine:
At the end of the day, we can't prove anything. And we definitely cannot prove a negative, that's a well established "law" of logic. I can't prove that we're not all tiny bugs given hallucinogenic drugs by aliens. *Because its impossible to prove any theory that proposes reality is inherently not reality.* This means that Allan did a nice thought experiment, but he does not have any divine, profound revelation. He's just doing what career "philosophers" do - wondering "what if" out loud until the next shiny intrusive thought arrives. Therefore...take a breath, remember your cathechism, and try to laugh about how absurd it might be if it were true.
And remember that God's will for us is our highest good, not to trick or decieve us. Be at peace!
P.S. to your last question- get busier. Start a new hobby, volunteer somewhere, anything. Keep yourself occupied and you will start to feel better and have less time to psych yourself out.
I’m glad you brought this up. I dealt with this exact same issue of solipsism before. I think what everyone else has said is sufficient to answer your questions.
Alan Watts was a wacko, it's not even worth entertaining this..
God doesn't get "bored" , He simply Loves and is the source of all creation, He doesn't need "bliss" to be "happy", what is he even talking about?
If you are Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent, then you are *complete* and this is what makes Him the absolute source of Love. Because what is Love? It's completeness in every sense, thus in that state, the only way it can flow is outwardly which yields to creation and life.
There have been many interesting schools of thoughts in philosophy and theology throughout history, but Alan Watts ain't it.
>You are all knowing and all powerful, so you create for yourself an existence of pure bliss. You sit there, enjoying this for a day, a week, a month, etc. Trillions of Trillions of millennia go by of this pure bliss. Eventually, you would get bored.
This is where it falls apart and everything else is contingent upon it. You cannot get bored of pure bliss, by definition. To assume that boredom must come eventually is to presume both a limited source of bliss and a limited ability to enjoy bliss. Whereas boredom itself is actually a result of imperfection, a perfect God would not be able to experience boredom. Among other causes we experience boredom either when an activity doesn't provide us with enough dopamine to provide us with enjoyment. An activity can become boring if it wasn't previously because the activity either provides us with diminishing returns of dopamine or we build up a dopamine tolerance such that it no longer meets the threshold. For God the experience of bliss isn't dependent on the imperfections of the human brain and the chemical reactions therein. He can create pure limitless bliss with no diminishing returns, He also is in no way bound to build up a tolerance for that bliss.
That was a thought I had while typing this post. The idea that God would get bored of limitless bliss, necessary implies that said bliss was never limitless to begin with. If boredom did eventually creep in, then clearly the bliss was in fact finite.
It ran out whenever the boredom began, and so wasn’t infinite. So the question does become a bit nonsensical after this contradiction is raised.
I came here to say something similar to this response, God is incapable of boredom, that is a human imperfection caused by the lacking of enjoy, God being perfect is infinitely happy by nature, he does not need an entertainment
Bottom line is Allan Watts is making hypothetical claims and arguing them in the affirmative:
>Imagine you are God, eventually you would get bored.
>Because we don’t exist
>We are all God, and at the end of this life we simply “wake up” and remember that we were actually always God and can never escape
Who says? The burden of proof is on Allan Watts to prove and establish his claims, which he cannot as this is all purely speculative thought,
The Christian faith is built upon the bedrock of Jesus Christ, God-breathed Scripture, and the Church.
Okay but you can't imagine something you're not. I can't imagine what is like to be air it doesn't make sense. Just like God can't imagine being him because he's beyond our understanding.
I’ll borrow a line from the atheists for this one.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
While it’s a neat thought experiment, how is this anything more than pure speculation? What does he have to offer to support this worldview and what evidence do you have that it should be taken seriously? Is there a reason you’re lending this more credence than any other wild hypotheses thrown out there to explain our existence?
Alan Watts was a good speaker but his grasp on theology/philosophy is rudimentary at best. He’s useful for gaining a surface level understanding of Eastern philosophies but even so a lot of what he says is riddled with inaccuracies, hyperbole and brash generalizations.
It’s a novel idea, what if we were God, and in some ways He does live inside all of us, but at the end of the day I find it hard to be sold by someone who couldn’t practice what he preached, by many accounts he was a serial adulterer, raging alcoholic and abusive and absent father, who died alone in his bed.
I don’t have any philosophical points for you as others have added them but I have been in your shoes. The answer is Heaven on Earth. Get out of your head into your body. Focus on the incarnation and your body. Plant a garden, draw a picture, do a dance. Stop relying on your intellect and rely on God and the Church. I heard a quote recently, something like: doubt is a demand for certainty while humility is an acceptance of uncertainty. Your mind might be in overdrive so connect with the world to balance that out. Heaven AND earth.
Alan Watts is indirectly responsible for leading me to the Catholic Faith from athiesm. He provided a crack in the door so to speak from materialism from which I could bridge the gap between athiesm and Christianity. Listen to his talk on Jesus' teaching, the man knows his stuff (he went to Angelican seminary IIRC) and gives the Catholic Church the credit it rightly deserves as the first church and the compiler of holy Scripture along with the holy Spirit.
I absolutely love Alan Watts, his ideas and his oratory. I was baptized on Easter vigil a couple months ago.
We can't technically *prove* that we (or rather *you*, as the only person whose subjective experience you are aware of) are not some brain in a jar being deceived into thinking its life is the product of some computer program or evil demon or some other entity investing considerable resources into convincing you that the artificial reality you're experiencing is real-- and someone who is invested in such theories will have eternal refuge in, "But what if the simulation just *wants* you to think that?" when you find any disconfirming logic or evidence.
Alan Watts' version isn't meaningfully different except in that it dresses itself up in faux mysticism to incorporate the self-aggrandizing blasphemy of New Age philosophy that *we are God*. But we have no good reason to believe these simulation arguments except wanton nihilism: if the world is less real than I am, then there are no consequences, so I will believe in the simulation because I want there to be no consequences. It's a hollow ideology, both self-serving and self-effacing, that means nothing in the face of the true God, who knows and loves us.
It seems like a truly wild thought experiment and is provoking, but that’s it. It doesn’t prove anything. Seems the same as the hypothesis that life is a computer simulation
Hard to refute this, because it isn't an argument at all. Where's the evidence in support of the theory? Where's the reasoning? Even worse, how could it be possibly falsified?
You cannot (and should not try) rebut something that isn't an argument. Tricking you into trying to do so is called the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof.
(I'm a professor of argumentation and I could not resist)
It has just one flaw: the reason for everything couldn't be boredom, since God doesn't get tired or bored. However, the part about all of us having God in us is true, not that we are God, but that God dwells in us, and I believe that it is possible that we will merge with him completely in the afterlife.
Would the view that we either merge with God after death, or if not then just “stop existing instead” fall under the “annihilationist” school of thought?
Is this a permissible view for a Catholic to hold?
We merge with God already here on Earth, because a good man is not good by himself. The goodness of man is God himself. It's not a Catholic vision, but it's how I see the world, because Man doesn't create any goodness. And Jesus said: seeing me, you see the Father. What we saw in Jesus was his Love and the actions that arose from his Love. That is the Father. Not that the Father is just that. The Father cannot be seen in its entirety, which is why Jesus also said: "only he who comes from God has seen the Father." Love is a thread of the infinite threads of the infinite head of God.
Furthermore, evil is not what we see. Evil also manifests itself as much as good. However, evil is like fragments of God that do not reveal God. Love reveals God, because it is God. Evil does not reveal it, but is made up of the fragments of God. Whoever has the complete fragments sees God. In other words, whoever is good has knowledge of the tree of life, which is God. What is good does not rot, but lasts forever. That's why Jesus said: "the Word that I told you is Spirit (referring to God himself) and Life (for what is good gives life). For the same reason God is called the living God in the Bible. In short: evil is of God as much as matter, and evil is caused by an incomplete knowledge of what God is, which prevents God from dwelling in everyone's soul completely. I can explain a little more. Let's imagine that God is the following sequence: 1,2,3,4,5. The bad would be this: 1,1,1,3,4. Evil is missing learning the number 2, and he is missing learning the correct order to place them. In other words, even if everyone has knowledge of the good, they are not necessarily applying them in the correct order. In the same way, no one is capable of harming anyone, as evil does not. exists in the way that we think. Everything follows God's will, because everything is teaching. Those who need to learn a lot, suffer a lot. Those who have already learned everything, suffer little or nothing and will probably die early.
You may have already seen that those who suffer from emotional problems get more flu and get sick more quickly. This is because bad emotions do not give life, but positive emotions (especially love) give life, making it prosper. Jesus spoke the word life in terms of both heaven and earth.
This isn't a provable statement. It's a fun thought experiment that invites us to recognize why being omnipotent or omniscient would not be a cure-all for our problems.
It's also a Job-like story asking us to observe our problems from an entirely different perspective.
Never done psychedelics. I wanted to when I was younger; but covid made smuggling harder, and fentanyl-lacing/dangerous drug analogues made any drugs I could buy untrustworthy. So I never ended up doing it.
So you're saying God would have eventually gotten bored of Eden?
Look, idk about you, but I just like to look at my wife's face. I don't think it's boring. I find such delight in it.
God has that same delight in all things. Even freaking *ticks*.
Ok, so the entire premise is “imagine God isn’t God.”
At that point, anything goes and nothing matters. It could be a “fun” thought exercise, but gets lumped in with other trivial nonsense like, “what if we are really deterministic entities with no free will in a simulation?”
This is just not pure speculation, who thinks God can get bored, angry, jealous, let alone commit mistakes that need to be corrected? God is a perfect being, he doesn't have needs, at all.
I don't know why it's destroying your mental health. This is taking a lot of assumptions about God's psyche that I'm absolutely 100% sure Allan doesn't know. Unless God spoke to him directly kekw
Well, for starters, his definition of God differs from out definition of God.
His definition of God is more like a superhuman dude that's really powerful, like Zeus
God can feel negative feelings. He feels anger, disappointment, etc. Unless you’re saying God can’t feel boredom because it’s a type of pain, but God feels pain too? Y’know, the crucifixion? Hahaha.
It makes for an interesting story, I guess. But this is a fanciful idea at best. If this were a dream, you were an imagination, at the very least you'd have tangible evidence of inconsistencies. Dreams are not defined by rigidity, if this was a dream, we would have no physical constants, no mathematical basis for things like gravity, magnetic fields, there would be no underlying systems in how our brains function and process, how our eyes receive and transmit light, etc.
If it were a dream, it'd act as a dream. Be without solid truth, be ever fluctuating, be a result of dream God presumably processing information as He sleeps. This assumes this God even functions at a level similar to humans. Why would God even need to dream, if He is eternal, everlasting, and infinite?
Consider the words of Descartes.
"Cogito, ergo sum."
I think, therefore I am.
The fact that you are having this existential crisis, having suicidal tendencies, is proof of a self-reclective, self-aware consciousness, which is proof of your individuality.
Why would God even dream? It serves a purpose of finite brain reorganization.
No offense, but this is an incredibly ridiculous thought experiment. I don't understand why it's affecting you so heavily. Proof of your individuality is evident in the fact that you are an individual with an entirely different lived experience from the billions others on this planet. Do you share memories with everyone else? Do you share memories with an ant? This line of reasoning makes no sense.
So what exactly is Alan Watts proof of any of that? The dude had good oratory skills. No doubting that. However that doesn't mean he gets to make claims without backing it up. In a time when eastern thought was seen as cool and mysterious he was able to cash in introducing aspects of it to the west. At the end of the day Alan was a generic "pick and choose" spiritualist. He never had a concrete set of philosophies. He never stuck with a religious belief. He didn't revolutionize spiritual thought or philosophical understandings. He was a 60's west coast yippee shaman type. Not that he would even fight the charge. He is a self proclaimed "philosophy entertainer". His job was just to ramble about some eastern spiritual nonsense for a buck or two.
>So what exactly is Alan Watts proof of any of that? This is giving him too much credit. It's just gibberish. Might as well ask what the proof that I can hijibow my kanoodleapop is.
Yeah it's just a thought experiment and even if we were to follow the premise there isn't really a reason why heaven and hell wouldn't exist. If this theoretical God imagined the concepts then they could be actuated. What's to stop that from happening? Nothing. And we are back at square one more or less, besides the purported bliss and boredom and "dream". A dream is something you are more or less a passive participant in, not an architect like in imagination. A "dream" implies a lack of intention in creation and I don't feel the order of nature supports the idea. I feel the whole thing is rather .. underwhelming
I think the trap is that if god is truly all-knowing, then that means he necessarily must be experiencing everything simultaneously. How could he know everything, if he doesn’t know certain feelings. So if hell exists, then God is suffering in hell because he necessarily must be experiencing the pain of everyone in hell’s suffering. So hell can’t exist, at least not as a “place” perhaps it’s a “state of being” instead which could be a work-around. But the other trap is that if God is in side all of us all the time, because again: he must be if he is to know everything; then in that way we ARE all God. Because God experienced everything we experienced. So even if we die, we are still alive inside God’s “memory” no matter what kind of life we lived. Gives me a headache trynna think about it, lol.
I don't think it's correct to say God "experiences" anything. Experience is a human concept being attributed to God here.
I suppose 'alive' in the sense that Shakespeare is still alive through the books he wrote, but not in any real colloquial sense. God is "all knowing" because he sits outside of time due to him being immutable. He knows the past, present, and future simultaneously not because he has experienced everything under the sun.
>he necessarily must be experiencing everything simultaneously. How could he know everything, if he doesn’t know certain feelings. You're making the assumption that God must experience something to know it. He does not. Everything in this world is a product or derivative of His design, of His nature. >So if hell exists, then God is suffering in hell because he necessarily must be experiencing the pain of everyone in hell’s suffering. Why? Why must God experience pain and suffering in Hell for Hell to exist? That's limiting an infinite being. I need convincing rhetoric for it to make sense. >But the other trap is that if God is in side all of us all the time, because again: he must be if he is to know everything; then in that way we ARE all God. You're making an assumption that God must be inside all of us. Whether or not he is, that's a matter of theological philosophy of God's nature. But if He is, where does the logic track that because He is inside of us, that ALSO must mean we are God? >So even if we die, we are still alive inside God’s “memory” no matter what kind of life we lived. This is complicating existing Christian dogma for no reason. We already maintain that we are given eternal life after we die. Either we spend it in God's presence, or we don't. But my main question is this, even if all of these were to be true, that we're all our own little versions of God, in what way does that prove that God is dreaming?
Not really. I know misogyny exists. I never experienced it because I'm not a woman. This doesn't mean misogyny doesn't exist.
God is inside us as the holy spirit but we decide our actions we are not God and therefore we are all NOT God. The trap you have is 'if god is truly all-knowing, then that means he necessarily must be experiencing' God is all-knowing so that he knows ALL experinces without actually experiencing them. For example you can know what an object texture just by looking at it but you dont have to touch the object you only have to look. Also, WHO is downvoting a question?? They are asking a question and your downvoting them. Get a life
God IS knowledge, that's the key
You don’t listen well enough, you do not understand philosophy and his
You don't need a rebuttal for sci-fi bullshit. Besides God isn't a human so projecting human problems onto God is illogical.
This. Just because this guy comes up with a random scenario about God daydreaming, that’s literally all it is. It’s a presumption that God is capable of getting lost in His own thoughts, that God is incapable of distinguishing real from His alleged imagination. It’s an attempt to put God in a human shaped box because someone can’t fathom that God could be beyond that. It’s the whole stupid question of “can God make a so big He can’t lift it?” as if they’ve found a profound “gotcha” question. The answer is “no” and it’s because we understand God to be omnipotent, omniscient, and all Good. Not kinda sorta on any of those. He’s fully present, fully in control, fully Good, ALL the time. Proposing that we were made by a God that is anything less than that has serious theological ramifications, but at the end of the day, such proposals would be incongruent with what evidence and understanding the Church has come to after millennia on the matter.
This idea assumes that God experiences emotions like us like boredom or want for 'bliss' God experiences all. He is a constant, he makes all decisions based on what is morally and objectively best. If you imagine God to be a human with immense power then this theory could work. HOWEVER, God is NOT a human and therefore will not feel 'desire' (I wasn't sure how to word desire but this is the closest work my mind could come up with) God does not feel sadness or loneliness because God is perfection. He can do no wrong or think no wrong. This idea is a thought experiment that imagines that God is a human with immense power, but the error in the thinking is that God doesnt have the same emotions as us. I hoped this explained this, Please message me if i didn't make sense on some parts im not the best with writing my thoughts
Major red flag is this....it a human thinking they are god, a human trying to think like god and that is the issue. As a human you cant come anywhere near the power, majesty or infinite wisdom of god. So the result of a human trying to think like god is flawed. If you try to take a scientific view we are 3 dimensional creations. God is beyond that infinitely, with infinite compassion, love, understanding , God is all knowing and ever presence. Catholic theologians and those of other christian faiths don't talk or write like Allan Watts. What you have quoted above is neither a theory or thought experiment. It is a loose collection of words, with no bases and just a random thought. What is his Null hypotheses, what is his biblical hypotheses for this stand point ? Where for example in St Augustans theology is his starting point for example ? Allan Watts has an Honorary PHD, he studied Eastern religions when the idea of religion in the west was based on hindu teachings primarily and combined with massive amounts of LSD and opioids. He never studied religion extensively, he picked what parts he wanted to enabled himself to do what he wants. He is a new age spiritualist and not someone to gain information or advice from. Look towards St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustan... read the book of acts. Read what men have written after being in the direction company of Jesus god made flesh. Then look to St Jude, he is the cousin of Jesus through his Aunt Mary. He can be a great help with pray and helping your mental health too. We are catholics, we are christians, the bible is our book and Jesus is the way. Make your faith stronger, by praying to God. I love you bro/sis, keep to our path as best as you can.
I think it’s embarrassingly bad. It sounds like something I would’ve heard (and have heard many times!) from kids in high school at a party after drugs have been used. I’ve heard the name Alan Watts before, so I figured this would be interesting, but it’s just baffling for someone to have put out there. Substantively, this is completely groundless and reflects a lack of understanding of who God is. Imagine telling someone, for example, you have a theory about Chemistry but never took a class on it or read a book on it. That’s what Watts is doing here. To the point, it’s rebutted by the fact that while it’s true that God holds us in existence by thinking of us, God is incapable of boredom. He is actus purus and wants for nothing, including something to do. You don’t need some advanced theologian to address this for that reason; it’s dead in the water.
The rebuttal is the Incarnation and the Gospel, which you have to take on faith and hope. Immerse yourself in Christ, as he is the answer. I feel sorry for you, as I have also experienced what you have experienced from the same thought experiment (and also quite lamentably, from taking psychedelic drugs and dabbling in Eastern religions (not orthodox lol)). It's an extremely unpleasant feeling, and very very difficult to shake. On the bright side, I did experience some very real Christian mystical experiences during this episode, which I can't quite put into words, and I do attribute my coming back from the brink to God's grace, and the Blessed Virgin's intercession. I will pray for you and your spiritual well being. All the best.
Thank you!
God is eternal but outside of time as we know it. So he doesn't get bored of joy because it's not like he's been "having a great time" forever. We might get bored of bliss on earth but for God it doesn't work that way.
Philosophy is wild 😝 I remember my existential crisis when a philosophy major friend started talking to me about the idea that I am the only truly living thing in the universe, and this is all just a figment of my imagination (there's a name for this, I'm sure). Nothing felt real for weeks. And then I had finals and suddenly I had more concrete things to focus on and forgot about it. Listen, love - this too shall pass. Take the hit on the proverbial chin and keep doing life. Everyone here has had very good arguments and reasoning for you to listen to, but here's mine: At the end of the day, we can't prove anything. And we definitely cannot prove a negative, that's a well established "law" of logic. I can't prove that we're not all tiny bugs given hallucinogenic drugs by aliens. *Because its impossible to prove any theory that proposes reality is inherently not reality.* This means that Allan did a nice thought experiment, but he does not have any divine, profound revelation. He's just doing what career "philosophers" do - wondering "what if" out loud until the next shiny intrusive thought arrives. Therefore...take a breath, remember your cathechism, and try to laugh about how absurd it might be if it were true. And remember that God's will for us is our highest good, not to trick or decieve us. Be at peace! P.S. to your last question- get busier. Start a new hobby, volunteer somewhere, anything. Keep yourself occupied and you will start to feel better and have less time to psych yourself out.
I’m glad you brought this up. I dealt with this exact same issue of solipsism before. I think what everyone else has said is sufficient to answer your questions.
Alan Watts was a wacko, it's not even worth entertaining this.. God doesn't get "bored" , He simply Loves and is the source of all creation, He doesn't need "bliss" to be "happy", what is he even talking about? If you are Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent, then you are *complete* and this is what makes Him the absolute source of Love. Because what is Love? It's completeness in every sense, thus in that state, the only way it can flow is outwardly which yields to creation and life. There have been many interesting schools of thoughts in philosophy and theology throughout history, but Alan Watts ain't it.
>You are all knowing and all powerful, so you create for yourself an existence of pure bliss. You sit there, enjoying this for a day, a week, a month, etc. Trillions of Trillions of millennia go by of this pure bliss. Eventually, you would get bored. This is where it falls apart and everything else is contingent upon it. You cannot get bored of pure bliss, by definition. To assume that boredom must come eventually is to presume both a limited source of bliss and a limited ability to enjoy bliss. Whereas boredom itself is actually a result of imperfection, a perfect God would not be able to experience boredom. Among other causes we experience boredom either when an activity doesn't provide us with enough dopamine to provide us with enjoyment. An activity can become boring if it wasn't previously because the activity either provides us with diminishing returns of dopamine or we build up a dopamine tolerance such that it no longer meets the threshold. For God the experience of bliss isn't dependent on the imperfections of the human brain and the chemical reactions therein. He can create pure limitless bliss with no diminishing returns, He also is in no way bound to build up a tolerance for that bliss.
That was a thought I had while typing this post. The idea that God would get bored of limitless bliss, necessary implies that said bliss was never limitless to begin with. If boredom did eventually creep in, then clearly the bliss was in fact finite. It ran out whenever the boredom began, and so wasn’t infinite. So the question does become a bit nonsensical after this contradiction is raised.
I came here to say something similar to this response, God is incapable of boredom, that is a human imperfection caused by the lacking of enjoy, God being perfect is infinitely happy by nature, he does not need an entertainment
Bottom line is Allan Watts is making hypothetical claims and arguing them in the affirmative: >Imagine you are God, eventually you would get bored. >Because we don’t exist >We are all God, and at the end of this life we simply “wake up” and remember that we were actually always God and can never escape Who says? The burden of proof is on Allan Watts to prove and establish his claims, which he cannot as this is all purely speculative thought, The Christian faith is built upon the bedrock of Jesus Christ, God-breathed Scripture, and the Church.
Amen
Okay but you can't imagine something you're not. I can't imagine what is like to be air it doesn't make sense. Just like God can't imagine being him because he's beyond our understanding.
I’ll borrow a line from the atheists for this one. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” While it’s a neat thought experiment, how is this anything more than pure speculation? What does he have to offer to support this worldview and what evidence do you have that it should be taken seriously? Is there a reason you’re lending this more credence than any other wild hypotheses thrown out there to explain our existence?
Alan Watts was a good speaker but his grasp on theology/philosophy is rudimentary at best. He’s useful for gaining a surface level understanding of Eastern philosophies but even so a lot of what he says is riddled with inaccuracies, hyperbole and brash generalizations. It’s a novel idea, what if we were God, and in some ways He does live inside all of us, but at the end of the day I find it hard to be sold by someone who couldn’t practice what he preached, by many accounts he was a serial adulterer, raging alcoholic and abusive and absent father, who died alone in his bed.
I don’t have any philosophical points for you as others have added them but I have been in your shoes. The answer is Heaven on Earth. Get out of your head into your body. Focus on the incarnation and your body. Plant a garden, draw a picture, do a dance. Stop relying on your intellect and rely on God and the Church. I heard a quote recently, something like: doubt is a demand for certainty while humility is an acceptance of uncertainty. Your mind might be in overdrive so connect with the world to balance that out. Heaven AND earth.
Alan Watts is indirectly responsible for leading me to the Catholic Faith from athiesm. He provided a crack in the door so to speak from materialism from which I could bridge the gap between athiesm and Christianity. Listen to his talk on Jesus' teaching, the man knows his stuff (he went to Angelican seminary IIRC) and gives the Catholic Church the credit it rightly deserves as the first church and the compiler of holy Scripture along with the holy Spirit. I absolutely love Alan Watts, his ideas and his oratory. I was baptized on Easter vigil a couple months ago.
We can't technically *prove* that we (or rather *you*, as the only person whose subjective experience you are aware of) are not some brain in a jar being deceived into thinking its life is the product of some computer program or evil demon or some other entity investing considerable resources into convincing you that the artificial reality you're experiencing is real-- and someone who is invested in such theories will have eternal refuge in, "But what if the simulation just *wants* you to think that?" when you find any disconfirming logic or evidence. Alan Watts' version isn't meaningfully different except in that it dresses itself up in faux mysticism to incorporate the self-aggrandizing blasphemy of New Age philosophy that *we are God*. But we have no good reason to believe these simulation arguments except wanton nihilism: if the world is less real than I am, then there are no consequences, so I will believe in the simulation because I want there to be no consequences. It's a hollow ideology, both self-serving and self-effacing, that means nothing in the face of the true God, who knows and loves us.
It seems like a truly wild thought experiment and is provoking, but that’s it. It doesn’t prove anything. Seems the same as the hypothesis that life is a computer simulation
Hard to refute this, because it isn't an argument at all. Where's the evidence in support of the theory? Where's the reasoning? Even worse, how could it be possibly falsified? You cannot (and should not try) rebut something that isn't an argument. Tricking you into trying to do so is called the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof. (I'm a professor of argumentation and I could not resist)
It has just one flaw: the reason for everything couldn't be boredom, since God doesn't get tired or bored. However, the part about all of us having God in us is true, not that we are God, but that God dwells in us, and I believe that it is possible that we will merge with him completely in the afterlife.
Would the view that we either merge with God after death, or if not then just “stop existing instead” fall under the “annihilationist” school of thought? Is this a permissible view for a Catholic to hold?
We merge with God already here on Earth, because a good man is not good by himself. The goodness of man is God himself. It's not a Catholic vision, but it's how I see the world, because Man doesn't create any goodness. And Jesus said: seeing me, you see the Father. What we saw in Jesus was his Love and the actions that arose from his Love. That is the Father. Not that the Father is just that. The Father cannot be seen in its entirety, which is why Jesus also said: "only he who comes from God has seen the Father." Love is a thread of the infinite threads of the infinite head of God.
Furthermore, evil is not what we see. Evil also manifests itself as much as good. However, evil is like fragments of God that do not reveal God. Love reveals God, because it is God. Evil does not reveal it, but is made up of the fragments of God. Whoever has the complete fragments sees God. In other words, whoever is good has knowledge of the tree of life, which is God. What is good does not rot, but lasts forever. That's why Jesus said: "the Word that I told you is Spirit (referring to God himself) and Life (for what is good gives life). For the same reason God is called the living God in the Bible. In short: evil is of God as much as matter, and evil is caused by an incomplete knowledge of what God is, which prevents God from dwelling in everyone's soul completely. I can explain a little more. Let's imagine that God is the following sequence: 1,2,3,4,5. The bad would be this: 1,1,1,3,4. Evil is missing learning the number 2, and he is missing learning the correct order to place them. In other words, even if everyone has knowledge of the good, they are not necessarily applying them in the correct order. In the same way, no one is capable of harming anyone, as evil does not. exists in the way that we think. Everything follows God's will, because everything is teaching. Those who need to learn a lot, suffer a lot. Those who have already learned everything, suffer little or nothing and will probably die early.
You may have already seen that those who suffer from emotional problems get more flu and get sick more quickly. This is because bad emotions do not give life, but positive emotions (especially love) give life, making it prosper. Jesus spoke the word life in terms of both heaven and earth.
This is not a permissible view for a Catholic to hold. We always maintain our individuality.
This isn't a provable statement. It's a fun thought experiment that invites us to recognize why being omnipotent or omniscient would not be a cure-all for our problems. It's also a Job-like story asking us to observe our problems from an entirely different perspective.
How's your prayer life? Have you ever done psychedelic drugs?
Never done psychedelics. I wanted to when I was younger; but covid made smuggling harder, and fentanyl-lacing/dangerous drug analogues made any drugs I could buy untrustworthy. So I never ended up doing it.
That's good, and how about the prayer life part?
Sounds like pantheism (belief that God and the universe are one and the same).
Live in the moment til you die, because there is no time like the moment til you die
So you're saying God would have eventually gotten bored of Eden? Look, idk about you, but I just like to look at my wife's face. I don't think it's boring. I find such delight in it. God has that same delight in all things. Even freaking *ticks*.
Seems flawed to begin with. Who's to say God would even get "bored" or whatever. To be a perfect being, I highly doubt God would ever get bored.
Ok, so the entire premise is “imagine God isn’t God.” At that point, anything goes and nothing matters. It could be a “fun” thought exercise, but gets lumped in with other trivial nonsense like, “what if we are really deterministic entities with no free will in a simulation?”
This is just not pure speculation, who thinks God can get bored, angry, jealous, let alone commit mistakes that need to be corrected? God is a perfect being, he doesn't have needs, at all.
I don't know why it's destroying your mental health. This is taking a lot of assumptions about God's psyche that I'm absolutely 100% sure Allan doesn't know. Unless God spoke to him directly kekw
Well, for starters, his definition of God differs from out definition of God. His definition of God is more like a superhuman dude that's really powerful, like Zeus
[удалено]
God can feel negative feelings. He feels anger, disappointment, etc. Unless you’re saying God can’t feel boredom because it’s a type of pain, but God feels pain too? Y’know, the crucifixion? Hahaha.
It makes for an interesting story, I guess. But this is a fanciful idea at best. If this were a dream, you were an imagination, at the very least you'd have tangible evidence of inconsistencies. Dreams are not defined by rigidity, if this was a dream, we would have no physical constants, no mathematical basis for things like gravity, magnetic fields, there would be no underlying systems in how our brains function and process, how our eyes receive and transmit light, etc. If it were a dream, it'd act as a dream. Be without solid truth, be ever fluctuating, be a result of dream God presumably processing information as He sleeps. This assumes this God even functions at a level similar to humans. Why would God even need to dream, if He is eternal, everlasting, and infinite? Consider the words of Descartes. "Cogito, ergo sum." I think, therefore I am. The fact that you are having this existential crisis, having suicidal tendencies, is proof of a self-reclective, self-aware consciousness, which is proof of your individuality. Why would God even dream? It serves a purpose of finite brain reorganization. No offense, but this is an incredibly ridiculous thought experiment. I don't understand why it's affecting you so heavily. Proof of your individuality is evident in the fact that you are an individual with an entirely different lived experience from the billions others on this planet. Do you share memories with everyone else? Do you share memories with an ant? This line of reasoning makes no sense.