The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 5 of 5 The Veil Thins

What you were waiting for

Alan Watts, in the middle of the twentieth century, says the simplest possible sentence on the subject.

The reading — Alan Watts, This Is It (1958) / various lectures

This Is It

The art of living is not the same as the art of achieving. Achievement is a form of warfare against the present moment. Living is the art of being fully in what already is.

You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To have running water you must let go of it and let it run.

There is no way to get there from here, because you are already there. It is not a future achievement. It is this — right here, right now. This is It. And if you object that it doesn’t feel like it, that is because you are looking for something other than what is.

Perennial c. 1970 CE Open this teaching on the Map →
The framing

Watts wrote an essay called This Is It in 1958, and the title is the teaching. The mystical experience, he argued, is not the report that something else exists. It is the report that this, this room, this breath, this ordinary unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, is the something else. You had been waiting for it from inside of it.

This is the final reading of the course. Read it slowly. The Pharisees asked when the kingdom would come, and Jesus told them it was already among them. Twenty centuries later, Watts, in California, in plain English, said the same sentence: this is it. Notice the room you are sitting in.

Carry with you
If this is it, what part of today have you been refusing to count?
And so

Five reports, nineteen centuries apart at the widest, agreeing in essentials. The veil is thin. The kingdom is here. The thing you have been looking for, you have been looking with.

If you have read this far in sequence, you have crossed the ground, the self, the veil, the practice, the subtraction, and now the glimpse. Two courses remain: the turn back, and the laugh. Or wander the Map from here and come back for them. Save what catches.

If you'd like, next
Course VII. The Turn
You have seen it. The next course is about coming back for everyone who hasn’t.
Begin