Alan Watts Quotes

sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions.

When you dig sound you realize that the flow or vibration of sound is a way in which you experience basic existence, being here. You can learn everything from sound, because it is not a constant. It comes and goes. It is on and off. You only hear it because it is vibrating. The lesson is that life is on and off, black and white, life and death, inside and outside, knowing and not knowing: they’re all vibrations. It’s easy to explain that in words, but to feel and understand it in your bones you have to learn how to listen to a sound. It was to teach that skill that this system of chanting sounds was invented.

As a mirror of our own inner division, we have fragmented the world into inner and outer experience. We embrace our separateness without realizing that there is only one reality. The universe is a single process occurring in consciousness (“the great stream”), and only by merging into that process can we discover who we really are.

But the mind-body is a system which conserves and accumulates energy. While doing this it is properly lazy. When the energy is store, it is just as happy to move, and yet to move skillfully — along the line of least resistance. Thus it is not only necessity, but also laziness, which is the mother of invention.

Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy.

I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain.

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it.

The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure — like the Pasteur serum for rabies.

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.4

"[A] certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies [...]."

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way,

Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.

We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the best place for it.

"To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only "give," but also stability or "weight.

Life & love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.