Alan Watts Quotes

De rivieren stromen; de bloemen bloeien; je loopt over straat - nou èn?'
Nou èn? Nou ja, wat wil je nog meer? Hier is iemand die eet uit de kruidenierswinkel en toch nog klaagt dat hij sterft van de honger. Maar het woord en begrip God, Brahman, Tao, of wat je wilt, is eigenlijk geïntroduceerd voor dergelijke ondankbare magen. Het is een manier om het leven te benadrukken door er de aandacht op te vestigen, zoals we woorden onderstrepen of cursief schrijven.

If the earth is man’s extended body, to be loved and respected as one’s own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America.

When I stand by the stream and watch it, I am relatively still, and the flowing water makes a path across my memory so that I realize its transience in comparison with my stability. This is, of course, an illusion in the sense that I, too, am in flow and likewise have no final destination — for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.

Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines,

Certainly I cannot command the sun to be egg-shaped, nor force your brain to think differently. I cannot see the inside of the sun, nor can I share your private feelings. Yet neither can I change the shape or structure of my own brain, nor have a sensation of it as a contraption like a cauliflower. But if my brain is nonetheless I, the sun is I, the air is I, and society, of which you are a member, is also I — for all these things are just as essential to my existence as my brain.

The problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premises of thought and in the very methods of thinking, and these are so often overlooked that our interpretations of Chinese philosophy are apt to be a projection of characteristically Western ideas into Chinese terminology.

The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, begins: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.” This is, in effect, the same statement that opens St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things were made by him (the Word), and without him was not anything made that was made.” By thoughts, or mental words, we distinguish or “make” things. Without thoughts, there are no “things”; there is just undefined reality.

"If, on the other hand, you are aware of fear, you realize that, because this feeling is now yourself, escape is impossible. You see that calling it "fear" tells you little or nothing about it, for the comparison and the naming is based, not on past experience, but on memory. You have then no choice but to be aware of it with your whole being as an entirely new experience. Indeed, every experience is in this sense new, and at every moment of our lives we are in the midst of the new and the unknown. At this point you receive the experience without resisting it or naming it, and the whole sense of conflict between "I" and the present reality vanishes. For most of us this conflict is ever gnawing within us because our lives are one long effort to resist the unknown, the real present in which we live, which is the unknown in the midst of coming into being."

But most of us know that we will not, and probably cannot do it — that we shall continue to cling to our habitual ways of life with all the helplessness of addicts to a destroying passion.

English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.

Si întrucât fericirea
exista doar în corelatie cu nefericirea si placerea în corelatie cu durerea, omul inteligent nu
încearca sa le separe. Aceste relatii sunt inseparabile, mergând pâna acolo încât putem spune ca
fericirea este nefericire iar placerea este – întrucât o implica – durere. Pe masura ce realizeaza
aceste lucruri, omul învata sa abandoneze orice dorinta de a obtine fericire separata de suferinta
sau placere separata de durere.
Evident ca aceste lucruri sunt greu de realizat. Eu pot sa înteleg la nivel verbal si intelectual
ca râvnind dupa placere îmi potolesc setea bând apa sarata – deoarece cu cât obtin mai multa
placere cu atât vreau mai multa (Sa ne amintim de sensul mai vechi al cuvântului „dorin.a”, care
era „lipsa”!).

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.

In keeping with the old principle of triangulation, you cannot establish the position of a particular object unless you observe it from two particularly different points of view, and thereby calculate its actual distance from you.

To begin with, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not
of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is
notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of
interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a
dancing present, the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future
but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much
the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement
with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as
overlook them.” — Alan W Watts

How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven and hell are all a monarchy?