Alan Watts

[Mudhammam]

On the one hand, I don't dismiss his ideas as vapid and meaningless---I think to do so is probably to misunderstand him or be too simple-minded.

Bullocks.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I don't think you could have picked a better example to demonstrate my point. That statement, I think, is both absurd and profound, but far from banal. The fact is every atom in your body has existed since the big bang and will continue to do so long after your mind is destroyed. Bodies of matter are like continuous waves in an ocean that perpetuates ever-changing forms, then dissolves them, and the process repeating ad infinitum. Another way of putting it is that you may very well, at this moment, be inhaling molecules that were once the brain of Plato. Many rightly find that thought quite mystical.

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.

I find that statement as silly as you but it also might make more sense if I had the context. Like I said, I don't agree with a lot of Watt's ideas, and there certainly is some woo. But I find quite a bit of truth in the following quotes, eloquently expressed:

"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."

"Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as “Why this universe?” are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking “Where is this universe?” when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense. . . . Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons."

"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin."

I could give countless more examples.

Mystics share a common trait. They tend to torture language into flowery statements meant to make the banal and absurd sound profound.

Not exactly. That may be true of some, but not all. Many simply emphasize a difference aspect about the human experience, namely, the subjective, and there's no point in arguing the validity of that, which is why they don't.