Lesson 13: The Watercourse Way — Alan Watts, The Taoist Way Full Lecture

Lesson 13 of 25 — The Taoist Way

Watts’s final book was about Taoism, and by the time of this lecture he had spent forty years with the Tao Te Ching. Its central skill is wu wei — usually mistranslated as “doing nothing,” better translated as not forcing. Water is the great teacher: it never struggles, never strains, always yields — and it carves canyons through granite.

Listen for his treatment of trust. The Taoist gamble, he says, is that you cannot deceive yourself into genuine spontaneity, and that a life of constant self-monitoring is a life spent fighting your own current. At some point you must trust the water you’re made of. Not because it’s guaranteed safe — but because the alternative, total self-control, is a war you can only lose.

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: Where in your life are you pushing the river?

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