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Alan Watts Quotes - Page 15

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

Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a

Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.

Anxiety, Brain, Attention

To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

Wise, Technology, Men

But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.

Skills, Perception, Taoism

Alan Watts (1970). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

Inspiring, Confused, Purpose

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.69, Souvenir Press

The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.

Art, Jobs, Men

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

Moon, Suffering, World

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

...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

Technology, Civilization, Goal

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

World, Whole

Alan Watts (2000). “What is Zen?”, p.116, New World Library

There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.

Integrity, Light, Shining

We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

People, Giving, Sun

Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.85, Vintage

The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.

Self, Games, Play

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

Definitions, Want, Able

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.

Telescopes, Lsd, Microscopes

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

Life, Nature, Attitude

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.9, Souvenir Press

There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.

Sex, Interesting, Pruning

Alan Watts (1996). “Myth and Religion: The Edited Transcripts”, p.94, Tuttle Publishing

Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

Buddhism, Hands, Knives

Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.29, New World Library

The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.

Beach, Moving, Book

Alan Watts (2010). “Tao: The Watercourse Way”, p.54, Souvenir Press

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Reality, Men, Ink

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

Two, Together, Division

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.44, Souvenir Press

To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!

Death, Space, Secret

Alan Watts (2000). “What is Zen?”, p.81, New World Library

People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'

Talking, People, Wonder

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

Real, Book, Paper

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.10, Souvenir Press

The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.

Soul, Body, Language

One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.

Men, Ego, Mind

Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.66, New World Library

I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.

Mind, Today, Humans

Alan Watts (1998). “The Culture of Counter-culture: The Edited Transcripts”, Tuttle Publishing

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