Topics Include: 1) The meaning of ahimsa in the different religious traditions of the world; 2) The relationship between harm and suffering; 3) The basic definition of ahimsa; 4) The relationship between ahimsa and dependent origination; 5) Ahimsa and suffering; 6) Dependent origination: how does harm arise? 7) Dependent Origination and non-self; 8) The implications for morality and ethics; 9) The progression into love and compassion; 10) The movement from restraint, to understanding, to non-self, to love and compassion.
September 19, 2026
Topics Include: 1) Ahimsa and two essential questions in the spiritual journey; 2) Dependent origination: what is the cause of suffering? 3) Dependent origination: what is my self? 4) Ahimsa from a prohibition to an expression of wisdom; 5) Can ahimsa be directed to one’s own self? 6) Can the suffering we experience be unconscious? 7) The role of ignorance in causing suffering; 8) How awareness reduces suffering; 9) The wages of ignorance.
September 26, 2026
Topics Include: 1) The difference between a set of rules and the way we see reality; 2) The connection between ahimsa and the brahmaviharas; 3) Ahimsa and the analysis of the self; 4) The self as the basis for greed, hatred, and delusion; 5) If there is no self, there is no other; 6) The brahmaviharas as the language of interconnection; 7) The five precepts as a statement of non-self; 8) Awakening itself as the cessation of harm; 9) Later developments in Mahayana thought; 10) The journey from ahimsa to the brahmaviharas. 11) Summation: How do we relate to the suffering in the world?
3 October, 2026
Topics Include: 1) The Buddha’s interpretation of ahimsa; 2) The relationship between ahimsa and the cosmology of samsara; 3) The deeper personal question: What is the purpose of my life on this planet? 4) What the Buddha taught and insights from modern neuroscience. 5) Samsara and the conditions for suffering; 6) The teaching of dependent origination; 7) The Buddha’s teaching on samsara; 8) The evidence from modern neuroscience; 9) Integrating conventional and absolute reality: the culmination of wisdom and awakening.
Watts’s major work, The Way of Zen (1957), was a bestseller that was instrumental in bringing Zen Buddhism to national attention in the West and greatly influenced the counterculture of the 1960s.
He became a popular lecturer and radio broadcaster, known for his ability to convey complex spiritual concepts in an accessible and engaging style. He often described himself as a “philosophical entertainer.”
Ego and Nonself
Topics Include: 1) The concept of non-self in Buddhism and its connection to the non-dual traditions of the world; 2) Alan Watts: our ego as a social construct; 3) The consequences of identifying with an egoic self; 4) Seeing ourselves as waves as part of the ocean; 5) Seeing the teaching of non-self as part of the non-dual traditions of the world; 6) The development of language and abstract symbolic thought through human evolution; 7) The benefits of language and symbolic thought; 8) the negative consequences of language and symbolic thought; 9) The development of the subject/object relationship; 10) Language and psychological distancing; 11) Language and the creation of a narrative self; 12) Language and the creation of the concept of time; 13) Language and the creation of the “social self”; 14) Language and the fall from innocence and redemption in our spiritual traditions; 15) The final question: Who am I?
January 31, 2026
The Harsh Truth You Forgot at Birth
Topics Include: 1) The two ideas fundamental to the Dharma: Our inherent Buddha nature and the law of karma. 2) Alan Watts: how karma conditions us into a false sense of reality; 3) How we are robbed of our ability to live in the present moment; 4) How we are an expression of the universe playing out through our lives; 5) How do we recognize the profound intelligence that we already are? 6) How we resist the flow of life moving through us; 7) Discovering the fundamental awareness that moves through our lives; 8) Understanding that consciousness has never left us; 9) Understanding the effects of karma through the evolution of homo sapiens: how language creates our separation from reality; 10) Integrating our karmic selves with our sacred presence.
January 24, 2026
Illusion and Reality
Topics Include: 1) How our identification with our karma causes us to create a sense of self which is the basis for suffering in the world; 2) The words of Alan Watts: Life is a film playing out in our mind, and we are actors in the play; 3) What it means to wake up; 4) How our karma creates our sense of identity, our sense of self; 5) How we identify with our stories to create a sense of a solid self; 6) Awareness: the silent witness that observes the comings and goings of our mind; 7) How our reality is created through our perception; 8) How awakening occurs; 9) How suffering becomes our teacher; 10) The final awakening; 11) How, as a species, we have become alienated from reality; 12) How we begin to see ourselves as manifestations of the universe, as manifestations of what is sacred and divine.
January 17, 2026
What Reality Is Not
Topics Include: 1) The breadth of Alan Watt’s perspective; 2) We are not separate from reality; 3) Perception creates reality; 4) How we create reality through language and karma; 5) The constant steady presence of awareness; 6) The role of culture and language in distorting our perception of reality; 7) The difference between being lost in thought and aware of thought; 8) The price of trying to control life; 9) Awakening is the recognition of what always has been present; 10) Understanding how we become separated from who we truly are and how we need to return.
January 10, 2026
The Observer Effect
Topics Include: 1) How our relationship to reality determines the basis for the Four Noble Truths; 2) How our karma determines the way we see the world; 3) What is the observer effect? 4) We are not separate from reality, but create realty through the act of perception; 5) Reality is co-created: we shape the world as the world shapes us: 6) We are the universe perceiving itself through our presence; 7) Who is it that is looking out through your eyes right now? 8) What it means to be the observer or to see with mindfulness; 9) How the world you experience is shaped by the lens through which you perceive it; 10) The power of attention in focussing our sense of reality; 11) How the universe mirrors back the inner state that we embody; 12) How mindfulness creates transformation and awakening; 13) What it means to truly understand who we are.
December 20, 2025
What is Reality?
Topics Include: 1) The fundamental question in Buddhism: why we don’t see reality as it truly is; 2) Alan Watts: We create reality through the act of perception: the role of the observer; 3) The observer and the observed are one; 4) The two layers of existence: our conventional life and the awareness that observes it; 5) The benefits of being the observer; 6) Understanding what awareness is and realizing awakening or enlightenment; 7) The role and value of meditation; 8) Realizing our non-dual presence in the world…who we already are!
November 29, 2025
Desire and Attachment
Topics Include: 1) Desire and craving as the cause of suffering in the world; 2) Alan Watts on the difference between desire and attachment; 3) Life itself is a form of desire; 4) The difference between desirelessness and contentment; 5) Non-wanting as a form of passive resignation from life; 6) The foundation of life energy that infuses all sentient beings; 7) How to live fully without causing suffering; 8) How to want things but not be enslaved by those wants; 9) Desirelessness and our inability to understand value and preference; 10) The difference between wanting nothing and needing nothing; 11) Desire and finding a sense of purpose in life; 12) Playing the game of life with total commitment but not attachment; 13) Seeing ourselves as the sacred energy that pervades all life, while at the same time manifesting our own unique identities.
November 22, 2025
Eight Brutal Lessons That Will Wake You Up
Topics Include: 1) Our relationship with the divine or sacred; 2) The work of Alan Watts; 3) The eight brutal lessons that will wake you up; 4) How our perceived reality gaslights us into delusion and suffering; 5) Lesson #1: You are not your thoughts; 6) If we are not our thoughts, we don’t have to be controlled by our karma; 7) Lesson #2: Resistance creates suffering; 8) The Buddha’s teaching of the two darts: We create suffering by the stories we build around our pain; 9) How our expectations cause us to suffer; 10) Lesson #3: Your Ego is a Fiction; 11) How our sense of self is a constructed illusion; 12) How we live simultaneously in two realities: conventional reality and absolute reality; 13) What is the sacred transcendent reality that resides within us?
8 November, 2025
Eight Brutal Lessons Part 2
Topics Include: 1) Lesson #1: You are not your thoughts; 2) Lesson #2: Resistance creates suffering; 3) Lesson #3: You ego is a fiction; 4) Lesson #4: Most of your problems are invented; 5) Lesson #5: You are not separate from life; 6) You are the universe expressing itself through awareness; 7) How our choices are based on our karma; 8) Lesson #6: Your desire for certainty is making you stupid; 9) Lesson #7: Your need to be right is keeping you wrong; 10) Lesson #8: Nothing matters. And that’s what makes everything matter; 11) The universe already exists within us.
15 November, 2025
You Are Not Your Thoughts
Topics Include: 1) The evolution of Buddhist thought from Theravada to Mahayana; 2) The parallel history of eastern spirituality and the Abrahamic traditions; 3) The non-dual traditions of eastern and western religions; 4) The work of Alan Watts: You Are Not Your Thoughts: How we mistake our thoughts for our self; 5) What is mindfulness? 6) You are the silent witness.; 7) Seeing your mind as your most devoted personal assistant; 8) How karma creates our thoughts and our sense of self; 9) Weakening the power of thoughts through mindfulness; 10) The mind as our biological radar system; 11) What is the sacred core of our being? 12) The benefits of increasing awareness.
Topics Include: 1) The purpose of our discussion of God from the perspective of different faith traditions; 2) How faith traditions differ or are similar in terms of their dualistic or non-dualistic aspects; 3) What is sacred and what is profane? 4) What transcends my ego based self and extends to all of nature and the universe? 5) Is this reality separate and apart from me or is it something of which I am a manifestation? 6) If it is something different from me, then what is it? Could it be a projection, a product of my mind? 7) Types of positive and negative projections; 8) Paul Tillich and the Ground of Being; 9) How is God seen from a Buddhist perspective? 10) How is Buddhist pure awareness or rigpa similar to the Christian Ground of Being?
God from a Christian Perspective
August 30, 2025
Topics Include: 1) What is God? Defining a dualistic and non-dualistiic relationship; 2) Is the concept of God a mental projection? 3) Types of projections; 4) Paul Tillich and the concept of the Ground of Being; 5) God from a Buddhist perspective; 6) How is the Buddhist perspective similar to the Christian Ground of Being? 7) Examples of Christian contemplatives who embraced Buddhism; 8) Quotations from Buddhist and Christian masters; 9) Trying to find what unites as opposed to what divides the faith traditions of the world.
What is God: Buddhism and Judaism
September 13, 2025
Topics Include: 1) What is the relationship between the sacred and the profane in Buddhism and the faith traditions of the world? 2) Dualism and non-dualism in the faith traditions; 3) Paul Tillich and the concept of the ground of being; 4) How is rigpa or pure awareness in Buddhism similar to the Christian concept of the ground of being? 5) How is rigpa or pure awareness in Buddhism smilar to the Kabbalah in Judaism? 6) The sacred is already within us and within all sentient life.
What is God: Buddhism and Islam
September 20, 2025
Topics Include: 1) The basic premise: What is it that is sacred vs profane, that transcends our sense of egoic self: 2) Dualism and non-dualism within all faith traditions; 3) Mindfulness and non-dualism; 5) The relationship between Buddhism and Islam: Sufism; 6) Similarities expressed through the expression of ultimate reality, the overcoming of the egoic self; the attainment of liberation, and the expression of wisdom as love and compassion; 7) The writings of the Sufi poet Rumi; 8) Experiencing sacred presence in our moment to moment lives.
What is God: Buddhism and Hinduism
September 27, 2025
Topics Include: 1) What is sacred and what is profane? 2) Is this sacred reality separate from me or something of which I am a manifestation. Is it a dual or non-dual relationship? 3) How mindfulness is a sacred practice; 4) How our sense of self is created; 5) How is Buddhism similar to the non-dual traditions of Hinduism? 6) What is awareness? 7) How are form and emptiness inseparable; 8) Seeing the ultimate nature of reality as pure awareness; 9) Why sacred reality has always been within us and why we forgot; 10) What is the process of awakening?
The Nature of Ultimate Reality
October 11, 2025
Topics Include: 1) Definition of the sacred and the profane, dualism and non-dualism; 2) What does mindfulness mean? 3) What is ultimate reality ? 4) How is it non-dualistic? 5) What is the result of this awakening? 6) Quotations from the five faith traditions; 7) What is it that is deathless and unconditioned, the final Nibanna? 8) What do these faith traditions share? 9) How is compassion inseparable from awareness? 10) A closing poem.
The Permanent Witness State
October 18, 2025
Topics Include: 1) Basic premise of the series: what is sacred and what is profane: dualism and non-dualism; 2) Introductory poem: the sacred reality tht resides within every sentient being; 3) Definition of the permanent witness state; 4) What is the opposite of the permanent witness state? 5) Life after the collapse of the ego: what happens when we become the permanent witness? 6) We are the Ground; 7) What is the reality of truth?
