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Alan Watts Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Acceptance Anxiety Art Attitude Awakening Belief Birth Buddhism Change Chaos Consciousness Culture Curiosity Dance Dancing Darkness Death Desire Effort Ego Energy Enlightenment Environment Expectations Failing Faith Feelings Fighting Freedom Frustration Future Giving God Heart Human Nature Identity Ignorance Imagination Inspirational Inspiring Journey Joy Language Laughter Learning Leaving Letting Go Life Listening Love Lying Meditation Memories Mindfulness Moon Morning Motivational Nature Overcoming Pain Past Philosophy Pleasure Purpose Rain Reality Religion Risk Running Silence Simplicity Skins Sleep Soul Spirituality Suffering Taoism Technology Time Understanding Unity Universe Vision War Water Wisdom Worry Writing

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Humor, Deep Thought, Goes On

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Loving Yourself, Self Love, Realization

A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

Baby, Philosophy, War

Alan W. Watts (2007). “Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality”, p.23, New World Library

Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Self, Mind, Wish

"The Wisdom of Insecurity".

Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.

Frustration, Self, Perfect

Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to "feel it in your bones.

Cute, Simple, Practice

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Ocean, Future, Zest

"The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are". Book by Alan Watts, 1966.

To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.

Spiritual, Religious, Men

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

Christian, Buddhist, Laughter

Alan Watts (2011). “In My Own Way: An Autobiography”, p.57, New World Library

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Life, Inspiring, Yoga

Alan Watts (1977). “The essence of Alan Watts”, Celestial Arts Publishing Company

It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.

Weed, Taken, Numbers

For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process.

Real, Trying, Collaboration

For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones - for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Art, Accomplishment, Perfect

Alan W. Watts (2010). “Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality”, p.32, New World Library

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Motivational, Play, Done

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.89, Souvenir Press

I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.

Realizing, Heard, Too Real

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.18, Souvenir Press

The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

Art, Unique, Past

Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

Society is our extended mind and body.

Mind, Body, Mind And Body

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.50, Souvenir Press

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.

Inspiring, Circles, Watches

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.12, Souvenir Press

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

Lonely, Stress, Cutting

Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.

Reality, Views, Sea

Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.

Spiritual, Awakening, Flip

Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

Thinking, Discovery, Talking

Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

Running, Pain, Fighting

Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Eye, Past, Reality

Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion; and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.

Philosophy, Latin, Mean

Alan Watts (1977). “The essence of Alan Watts”, Celestial Arts Publishing Company

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