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Alan Watts Quotes - Page 16

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

We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the

We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

Art, Class, Play

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.58, Souvenir Press

But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.

Opposites, Play, Choices

Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.65, New World Library

The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies.

Inspiring, Mistake, Cat

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

But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.

Taken, Law, Land

Alan Watts (2010). “Tao: The Watercourse Way”, p.43, Souvenir Press

Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.

Order, Names, Knowing

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

But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.

Men, Thinking, Intelligent

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Intelligent, Frustrated, Want

The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves.

Love, Nature, Winning

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Life, Change, Trying

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

Able, Bodhisattva, Preaching

The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.

Real, Insecure, Hands

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

But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.

Letting Go, Effort, Ego

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

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 seperate 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.

People, Feelings, Suffering

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.8, Souvenir Press

In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.

Ocean, Moving, Reality

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

What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.

Discipline, Giving, Understanding

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

Stars, Soul, Consciousness

If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.

Grateful, People, Track

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Religious, Ideas, Religion

Alan Watts (1950). “The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion”, Vintage

For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.

Overcoming, Form, Method

The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.

Animal, Men, Brain

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

More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.

Life, Mean, Thinking

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

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.

Stars, Moving, Thinking

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Intelligent, Organization, Anxiety

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

What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.

People, Needs, Movement

Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.

Long, Enlightenment, States

Alan W. Watts (2012). “Nature, Man and Woman”, p.132, Vintage

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