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This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking — in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of year… - Alan Watts
" "This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking — in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. These have had an effect on our perceptions which seems to be strictly hypnotic. It is largely by talking that a hypnotist produces illusions and strange behavioral changes in his subjects — talking coupled with relaxed fixation of the subject’s conscious attention. The stage magician, too, performs most of his illusions by patter and misdirection of attention. Hypnotic illusions can be vividly sensuous and real to the subject, even after he has come out of the so-called “hypnotic trance.” It is, then, as if the human race had hypnotized or talked itself into the hoax of egocentricity. There is no one to blame but ourselves.
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About Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Alternative Names:
Alan Wilson Watts
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Alan W. Watts
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Additional quotes by Alan Watts
Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. Speech and writing are undoubtedly marvelous, but for this very reason they have a hypnotic and fascinating quality which can lead to the neglect of nature itself until they become too much of a good thing.
It is obviously the purest anthropomorphism to assume that the absence of a human quality in bird, cloud, or star is the presence of a total blank, or to assume that what is not conscious is merely unconscious. Nature is not necessarily arranged in accordance with the system of mutually exclusive alternatives which characterize our language and logic. Furthermore, may it not be that when we speak of nature as blind, and of matter-energy as unintelligent, we are simply projecting upon them the blankness which we feel when we try to know our own consciousness as an object, when we try to see our own eyes or taste our own tongues?
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