There are, then, two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and defin… - Alan Watts

" "

There are, then, two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, in the intensity of joy, we forget past and future, let the present be all, and thus do not even stop to think, “I am happy.

English
Collect this quote

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

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Alan Wilson Watts Alan W. Watts
Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Alan Watts

So if you really go the whole way and see how you feel at the prospect of vanishing forever. Have all your efforts, and all your achievements, and all your attainments turning into dust and nothingness. What is the feeling? What happens to you? That's what it's all going to come to. And for some reason or other, we are supposed to find this depressing. Do you see in a way, how that is saying: the most real state is the state of nothing? But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness. Where does all this come from? Obviously from nothingness. Once again you get how it looks behind your eyes. You see?

So in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it's your reality. Then how can anything contaminate you? All the idea of you being scared, and put out and worried, and so on, this is nothing, it's a dream. Because you're really nothing. But this is most incredible nothing. So cheer up! You see?
The essence of your mind is intrinsically pure. Pure means clear, void.
See? If you think of this idea of nothingness as mere blankness, and you hold onto this idea of blankness then kind of grizzly about it, you haven't understood it. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the sun and the stars and the mountains, and rivers, and the good men and bad men, and the animals, and insects, and the whole bit. All are contained in void. So out of this void comes everything and You Are IT. What else could You BE?

Taoists do not look upon meditation as 'practice,' except in the sense that a doctor 'practices' medicine. They have no design to subjugate or alter the universe by force or willpower, for their art is entirely to go along with the flow of things in an intelligent way.

Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience — a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

Loading...