Lesson 12: Beyond Good and Bad — Alan Watts on Meditation and Flow

Lesson 12 of 25 — Beyond Good and Bad

“Maybe” — the punchline of Watts’s famous Chinese farmer story — is really a complete philosophy of life, and this talk unpacks it. The horse runs away: bad luck? Maybe. It returns with seven wild horses: good luck? Maybe. The whole process of nature, Watts says, is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it is genuinely impossible to tell whether any event is fortunate or unfortunate — because you never know the consequences of the consequences.

From there he moves into meditation as the practice of watching reality before the labels arrive — not suppressing judgment by force, but noticing how fast it fires and letting the world be interesting instead of graded.

This is the authentic recording from the Official Alan Watts Org, the archive preserved by the Watts family. The complete remastered collections are at alanwatts.com.

Sit with this: Pick today’s “bad” event. Can you honestly rule out that it’s the seven horses arriving?

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