Alan Watts Quotes

For as the nonsense of the madman is a babble of words for its own fascination, the nonsense of nature and of the sage is the perception that the ultimate meaningless of the world contains the same hidden joy as its transience and emptiness.

You can, indeed, refuse to admit this, but only at the cost of the immense and futile effort of spending your whole life resisting the inevitable

"The proper meaning of "theory" is not idle speculation but vision, and it was rightly said that "where there is no vision the people perish."

But vision in this sense does not mean dreams and ideals for the future. It means understanding of life as it is, of what we are, and what we are doing."

At times when any sort of puritanism is dominant, or any fanatical, one-sided view of man, the ignored aspect of our nature appears as an external devil, sometimes an angel or fallen spirit, and sometimes in the form of other people [.]

[F]ast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point.

All this will involve a curious reversal of the Protestant ethic, which, at least in the United States, is one of the big obstacles to a future of wealth and leisure for all. The Devil, it is said, finds work for idle hands to do, and human energy cannot be trusted unless most of it is absorbed in hard, productive work — so that, on coming home, we are too tired to get into mischief. It is feared that affluence plus leisure will, as in times past, lead to routs and orgies and all the perversities that flow therefrom, and then on to satiation, debilitation, and decay — as in Hogarth's depiction of A Rake's Progress.

If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness — the thing you call “I” — is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion.

Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. 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.

Thus contemplation or meditation which seeks a result is neither contemplation nor meditation, for the simple reason that contemplation (kuan) is consciousness without seeking. Naturally, such consciousness is concentrated, but it is not 'practising concentration;' it is concentrated in whatever happens to be its 'eternal now.

"Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape. But so long as you are not aware of the inseparability of thinker and thought, you will try to escape.

...Seeing that there is no escape from the pain, the mind yields to it, absorbs it, and becomes conscious of just pain without any "I" feeling it or resisting it. It experiences pain in the same complete, unselfconscious way in which it experiences pleasure."

Ahora bien, si uno quiere vivir en una colina, lo que quiere es vivir en una colina y no destruirla para poder vivir en ella. [...] El mundo externo es la extensión de nuestro propio cuerpo. Un arquitecto inteligente y sensible siempre pregunta a la colina qué tipo de casa le gustaría que construyeran sobre ella.

"Nature appears to be a hierarchy of many grades, corresponding to what the scientist calls ''levels of magnification." Thus when we adjust our lenses to watch the individual cells of an organism we see only particular successes and failures, victories and defeats in what appears to be a ruthless ''dog-eat-dog'' battle. But when we change the level of magnification to observe the organism as a whole, we see that what was conflict at the lower level is harmony at the higher: that the health, the ongoing life of the organism is precisely the outcome of this microscopic turmoil.

[C]onsciousness is no mere phosphorescent scum upon the foundations of fire and rock - a late addition to a world which is essentially unfeeling and mineral. [...] It is in the living organism that the whole world feels: it is only by virtue of eyes that stars themselves are light.

So every spiritual journey ends by closing the circle. The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.

our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to “dope.” Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This “dope” we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction — a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time. To