Alan Watts Quotes

the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

The structure of your organism, of your senses and nerves, endows the world with all its sensible and measurable properties — for rocks cannot seem to be hard except in relation to soft skin.

We do not feel that ordinarily, do we? What we feel, instead, is an identification of ourselves with our ideas of ourselves — I would rather say, with our image of ourselves. That is the person, or the ego. You play a role; you identify with that role. I play a role called Alan Watts. And I know very well that it is a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary, but I find this one is best for making a living. But I assure you that is a mask and I do not take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of guru, or savior of the world just breaks me up, because I know me. Besides, it is very difficult to be holy, in the ordinary sense.

Sexuality will remain a problem so long as it continues to be the isolated area in which the individual transcends himself and experiences spontaneity. He must first allow himself to be spontaneous in the whole play of inner feeling and of sensory response to the everyday world. Only as the senses in general can learn to accept without grasping, or to be conscious without straining, can the special sensations of sex be free from the grasping of abstract lust and its inseparable twin, the inhibition of abstract or 'spiritual' disgust.

does the root of a flower influence the flower as something fundamentally different from it? No, surely the root and the flower are one process, and like your head and your feet it all goes together. In that sense then, the universe, and what you or I do, all goes together, and so that picture of the universe is really a picture of you.

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

[T]he full and real self is not the willing and deliberating function but the spontaneous.

It is simply being aware of this present experience, and realizing that you can neither define it nor divide yourself from it. There is no rule but “Look!

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.

Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to heaven and seen God. And he said: "Yes". And so they said to him: "Well, what about God?" And he said: "She's Black".

"The British and the Western Europeans in general, as well as the North Americans, waste the space of their homes with these rooms for ludicrously vast sleeping-machines — some with four pillars and a roof, some with iron fences at each end, topped with brass balls, and some with mahogany headboards whose function I have never yet understood. I would rather follow the Turkish proverb that "he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed." In sum, I despise all furniture as monstrous, heavy, space-greedy, expensive, and pretentious."

Civilized people, whether Western or Eastern,
need to be liberated and dehypnotized from their systems of symbolism and, thereby, become more
intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world. For lack of such awareness our
consciousnesses and consciences have become calloused to the daily atrocities of burning children with
napalm, of saturation bombing of fertile earth with all its plants, wild animals, and insects (not to mention
people), and of manufacturing nuclear and chemical weapons concerning which the real problem is not so
much how to prevent their use as how to get them off the face of the earth.

You don’t listen to a song to get to the end of it, you listen to enjoy the song as a whole.

"God is the most obvious thing in the world. He is absolutely self-evident - the simplest, clearest and closest reality of life and consciousness. We are only unaware of him because we are too complicated, for our vision is darkened by the complexity of pride. We seek him beyond the horizon with our noses lifted high in the air, and fail to see that he lies at our very feet. We flatter ourselves in premeditating the long, long journey we are going to take in order to find him, the giddy heights of spiritual progress we are going to scale, and all the time are unaware of the truth that "God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves." We are like birds flying in quest of the air, or men with lighted candles searching through the darkness for fire."

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.