Alan Watts Quotes

If the mind is the directive force behind action, the mind and its vision of life must be healed before action can be anything but conflict.

Something must therefore be said about the healed vision of life which comes with full awareness, for it involves a deep transformation of our view of the world. As well as words can describe it, this transformation consists in knowing and feeling that the world is an organic unity.

"Întrebări precum "De ce există universul?" sunt o nevroză intelectuală, o folosire greșită a cuvintelor, în sensul că, deși întrebarea pare rațională, ea este de fapt la fel de absurdă ca și, de pildă, "Unde este universul?

The difference between “I” and “me” is largely an illusion of memory. In truth, “I” is of the same nature as “me.” It is part of our whole being, just as the head is part of the body. But if this is not realized, “I” and “me,” the head and the body, will feel at odds with each other. “I,” not understanding that it too is part of the stream of change, will try to make sense of the world and experience by attempting to fix it.

us. The good of contemplation is contemplation — not some result that it may bring.

[W]e have never [...] permitted ourselves to be everything that we are, to see that fundamentally all the gains and losses, rights and wrongs of our lives are as natural and 'perfect' as the peaks and valleys of a mountain range.

To succeed is always to fail-in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.

The cosmos is seel as a multi-dimensional network of crystals, each one containing the reflections of all the others, and the reflections of all the others in those reflections... In the heart of each there shines, too, the single point of light that every one reflects from every other.

[N]ature is ordered organically rather than politically, [...] [i]t is a field of relationships rather than a collection of things.

Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence; Gazing in silence at the southern hills; The birds flying home in pairs Through the soft mountain air of dusk — In these things there is a deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.

WE SEEM TO BE LIKE FLIES CAUGHT IN HONEY. BEcause life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them. The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves. For intractable nature is both around and within us. The exasperating “life” which is at once lovable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and

if we can really understand what we are looking for — that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it — we shall see that we do not want it at all.

1 Goethe, West-östlicher Divan. “As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.

Protogenesis The Seven Secret
Sayings of God Before athe beginning when God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep, God said bI AM THAT. And it is so. Also, being in eternity which is neither linear nor sequential, where all is nowever, God said, YOU MUST DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE. And it was drawn. But it was no dreary straight line or flat wall, for God then said, HAVE A BALL. And there was a ball, in the image whereof all stars and planets came to be formed. Thereupon God said, THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO EVERYTHING. And there are: the inside and the outside, the dense and the spacious, the right and the wrong, the left and the taken, for, as it is written, cOne shall be taken, and the other left. And God said, IT MUST BE IN TIME. And thereafter it was, is, and will be, for as it is written again, dAs it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, through all ages of ages. Amen. And forthwith God said, SPACE IT OUT. Whereupon it came to pass that, beside this and that and now and then, there is also here and there. And God beheld ehow firm a foundation this was and said unto himself, GET LOST. And there you are.

"As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is
something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and
basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a
Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds
which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as
a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and
commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and
thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience
selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I
seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a
rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of
biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual,
sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to
vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even
absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the
whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear
fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old;
my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the
pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy."

For Lao-tzu’s Taoism is the philosophical equivalent of jujitsu, or judo, which means the way of gentleness. Its basis is the principle of Tao, which may be translated the Way of Nature. But in the Chinese language the word which we render as “nature” has a special meaning not found in its English equivalent. Translated literally, it means “self-so.” For to the Chinese, nature is what works and moves by itself without having to be shoved about, wound up, or controlled by conscious effort. Your heart beats “self-so,” and, if you would give it half a chance, your mind can function “self-so” — though most of us are much too afraid of ourselves to try the experiment.