A Napkin Films series

Out of Your Mind

Alan Watts, set to motion. Twenty-three short films, every sound and frame made from code.

Out of Your Mind is a film series that adapts Alan Watts’ lectures of the same name into short Plan 9 music videos. Each song takes one idea, the world as game, the self behind the self, pain and pleasure on the same nerve, and turns it into about three and a half minutes of music, motion, and voice.

There are no samples, no stock footage, and no AI video generators. Every score is an original ChipForge arrangement, often rooted in a public-domain classical work; every frame is drawn in code. The whole series runs to roughly eighty minutes across six thematic clusters and a finale.

11 of 23 episodes released

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Cluster 1 · The Myth We Live By

World-as-made versus the machine-as-dream.

  1. Song 01 Ceramic World-as-made: were you made like a pot, or did you grow? Matter is pattern, not stuff. Watch · 4:12
  2. Song 02 The Automatic Dream A fully automatic model is laws with no lawmaker; the machine was always a dream. Watch · 3:59
  3. Song 03 Ate the Menu The map ate the territory; we made the paper more precious than the land. Watch · 3:50
  4. Song 04 The Game Inside Consciousness playing hide-and-seek with itself; the only rule is forget. Watch · 3:50

Cluster 2 · The Web

Interconnection, and attention as the loom.

  1. Song 05 The Web Figure cannot exist without ground; pull one thread and the whole web moves. Watch · 3:49
  2. Song 06 Attention Is the Loom You select from noise what you call real; what you ignore defines you. Watch · 3:51

Cluster 3 · Ecstasy and Agony

The ego, the nerve, the game, the reservation.

  1. Song 07 Ego Is an Inch The ego is an abstraction, like an inch; try to grasp it and it vanishes. Watch · 3:49
  2. Song 08 Same Nerve Pain and pleasure are the same nerve firing twice; no peak without the valley. Watch · 3:51
  3. Song 09 Maya The game inside the game; the illusion works because you forgot you built it. Watch · 3:46
  4. Song 10 The Reservation Knowing it is a game lets you bet everything and laugh. Watch · 3:48

Cluster 4 · The World as Just So (Zen)

Koans, stillness, flow, wu-wei.

  1. Song 11 One Hand The koan breaks the machine that needs an answer; the cloud of unknowing is home. Watch · 3:47
  2. Song 12 This Is It You are it, disguised so well you forgot; everything is it. In production
  3. Song 13 Stop Looking Hesitation kills flow; stop looking for the one who is looking. In production
  4. Song 14 The Piano Plays The piano plays the player as much as the reverse; flow does not wait. In production

Cluster 5 · The World as Self

Atman, Kali, that art thou, no spectator.

  1. Song 15 Atman The self behind the self behind the self; existence as such. In production
  2. Song 16 Kali Darkness is not the absence of god, it is the ground; the destroyer is the creator. In production
  3. Song 17 Tat Tvam Asi That art thou; the seeker is the sought; being is the door. In production
  4. Song 18 No Spectator Total participation, no bench and no stands; the process runs through you, not for you. In production

Cluster 6 · Emptiness and Impermanence

Sunyata, anatta, impermanence, waking up.

  1. Song 19 Sunyata Emptiness is the space that allows form; the void is full of potential. In production
  2. Song 20 Anatta No permanent self; nothing to grip and call mine. In production
  3. Song 21 Impermanence Change is not the enemy, clinging is; you held the river thinking it was a stone. In production
  4. Song 22 De-Hypnotization Awakening is coming back to your senses, back to what was always here. In production

Finale

  1. Song 23 Out of Your Mind The title track: all the themes compressed into one piece, the synthesis of the series. In production

Season 2: the deluxe rebuild

Every film is being reprocessed to a single higher bar: richer scores with a fuller instrument catalog, a denser spit-rap vocal in my own voice, more varied per-section motion, and a fuller room with real camera work and custom sound effects.

The finale, the title track, compresses all twenty-two ideas into one five-minute arc and ends on a closing theme heard nowhere else in the series.

Go deeper: Out of Your Mind by Alan Watts (the review). The book the whole series is built from, reviewed.