Alan Watts Quotes about Ego

All Alan Watts Quotes Acceptance Anxiety Art Attitude Awakening Belief Birth Buddhism Change Chaos Consciousness Culture Curiosity Dance Dancing Darkness Death Desire Effort Ego quotes 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

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be

Alan Watts

Letting Go, Ego, Purpose

The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

Alan Watts

Ego, Ego Trip

"Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969".

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

Alan Watts

Independent, Knowing, Ego

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

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Alan Watts

Focus, Ego, Attention

Alan Watts (2017). “Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek”, p.21, Sounds True

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

Alan Watts

Rejection, Ego, Identity

Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

Alan Watts

Ego, Life Is, Inches

"Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety".

The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.

Alan Watts

Art, Ego, Mind

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

Alan Watts

People, Effort, Ego

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Alan Watts

Ego, Skins, Bags

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.

Alan Watts

Men, Ego, Mind

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

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.

Alan Watts

Letting Go, Effort, Ego

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