Alan W. Watts Quotes

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.

[A] life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana. The concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were[.] Furthermore, when the time and space between destinations are cut out, all destinations tend to become ever more similar.

What is real, if you have decided to live in the dimension of space and time, is muscle and nerve.

All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty - religions

Therefore, at about the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a "regular job." I have not always been able to fulfill this vow. I have had to work (in a reasonably independent manner) for the Church and for a graduate school, but since the age of forty-two I have been a free lance, a rolling stone, and a shaman ...

As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze - a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy.

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and
perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.

But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run.

Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the "mystery of the universe" only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.

Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born ... the truly inward source of one's life was never born ... Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree.

The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.
It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

Action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is, can never improve anything.

For the coherent continuity of any one individual is much like a whirlpool in a river; it is "there" day after day, although the water itself never stays put. You could even say that there is no such thing as a whirlpool, but that the river is whirlpooling in the same way that the universe eyes and the plant flowers.

[T]he natural universe is not a linear system. It involves an infinitude of variables interacting simultaneously, so that it would take incalculable aeons to translate even one moment of its operation into linear, alphabetic language.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other.

According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!

Evil" read backwards is "live." Demon est deus inversus.

The problem is that the dieticians who actually supervise such "cooking" can indeed prove that it contains the proper amount of proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins. But this is like judging the worth of music in terms of decibels and wave frequencies. "This record certified noninjurious to the human ear.

It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid.

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that "when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped." For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior - that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward.

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.

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

What we know by memory, we know only at secondhand.

Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

We have arbitrarily agreed to define the sun by the limit of its visible fire.

Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols

(Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.)

To some degree, all civilized people are out of touch with reality because we fail to distinguish between the way things are and the way they are described. For politicians this dichotomy has reached extreme proportions, but it affects everyone. We confuse money, which is an abstraction, with real wealth; we confuse the idea of who we are with the actual experience of our organic existence. During

[I]t becomes clearer and clearer that we do not live in a divided world. The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled, are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. These are misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which all events seem to be mutually interdependent[.]

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

The yin-yang view of the world is serenely cyclic. Fortune and misfortune, life and death, whether on small scale or vast, come and go everlastingly without beginning or end, and the whole system is protected from monotony by the fact that, in just the same way, remembering alternates with forgetting.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

[F]or several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility - on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere creatures" who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the "harmony of contained conflicts" in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies - leaving "I" as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone.

Millennia ago, some genius discovered that such wiggles as fish and
rabbits could be caught in nets. Much later, some other genius thought
of catching the world in a net.

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint. But

The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes. So protected from life, man becomes a sort of mollusc encrusted in a hard shell of "tradition," so that when at last reality breaks through, as it must, the tide of pent-up fear runs wild.

But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of "unselfishness," which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such "unselfishness" is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of "we're-more-tolerant-than-you." The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivations, or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.

It is generally forgotten that our guarantees of religious freedom were designed to protect precisely those who were not members of established denominations, but rather such (then) screwball and subversive individuals as Quakers, Shakers, Levellers, and Anabaptists. There is little question that those who use cannabis or other psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted religion which appears to the rest of society as a grave menace to "mental health," as distinct from the old-fashioned "immortal soul." But it's the same old story.

We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos. We

Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.

The source of all light is in the eye.

You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it - just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise,

It just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.

Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical.
When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, To travel well is better than to arrive.

Let's say (since in writing a book one has to say something) that reality or existence is a multidimensional and interwoven system of varying spectra of vibrations, and that man's five senses are attuned only to very small bands of these spectra. That sounds very profound and may mean nothing at all, but in reading it one should attend to the sound of the words rather than their meaning. Then you will get my point.

Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.

The possession of a strong will and a clever head makes some things very difficult to see

When you no longer make the distinction between the universe and how you are acting upon it, you are really on your own and so acquire a sense of responsibility.

When somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.

Taoism, on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it's not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is rally extremely simple, and that is the way it is.

But if we were to realize that we are, as it were, all action, all deed - the doer vanishes, and with it vanishes this sense of man as something separate, something cut off, walled away from the rest of the world by his skin. When that realization comes about; when, in other words, our own separateness disappears, we have what the Buddha called nirvana

Life is renewed by death because it is again and again set free from what would otherwise become an insufferable burden of memory and monotony. Genuine reincarnation lies in the fact that whenever a child is born "I" - or human awareness - arises into the world again with memory wiped clean and the wonder of life restored.

Here is a person who knows that in two weeks' time he has to undergo a surgical operation. In the meantime he is feeling no physical pain; he has plenty to eat; he is surrounded by friends and human affection; he is doing work that is normally of great interest to him. But his power to enjoy these things is taken away by constant dread. He is insensitive to the immediate realities around him. His mind is preoccupied with something that is not yet here. It is not as if he were thinking about it in a practical way, trying to decide whether he should have the operation or not, or making plans to take care of his family and his affair if he should die. These decisions have already been made. Rathre, he is thinking about the operation in an entirely futile way, which both ruins his present enjoyment of life an dcontributes nothing to the solution of any problem. But he cannot help himself.

The concepts of health and sickness, good and evil, better and worse, have the same use and relation to life as those of long and short, high and low to carpentry: even a short piece of wood can be three inches long. Even cancer is called a growth, and when Ramana Maharshi was dying of cancer he resisted the doctors,
saying, "It wants to grow, too. Let it." This is, perhaps, an extreme example of renunciation - not of love
or energy - but of willing right as against wrong, and thus of renouncing one's own separateness from
everything that happens, which is what Tillich called "the courage to be.

Know yourself as Nothing. Feel yourself as Everything.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature, because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.

In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.

Society is our extended mind and body.

Backwards law. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.

Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen.

We can't reimpose old myths on ourselves or believe in new ones made up out of a desire for comfort; therefore, the path of self-examination is the only one a person of conscience can reasonably follow.

Look at the stars. They are not arranged; instead they seem to be scattered through the heavens like sea spray. Yet you could never criticize stars for displaying poor taste, any more than you could criticize mountain ranges for having awkward proportions. These designs are spontaneous, and yet they demonstrate the wiggly patterns of nature that are quite different from anything you would call a mess. We can't quite put our finger on what the difference is between the two, but we certainly can see the difference between a tide pool and an ashtray full of garbage. We may not be able to define the difference, but we know they are different.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

For
the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from
the standpoint of someone standing aside from it - as if it were quite
other than himself - and then trying to grasp it.
But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on
the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the
world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts - based on the
realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process.

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.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain.

[A] certain amount of "sitting just to sit" might well be the best thing in the world for the jittery minds and agitated bodies [...].

Human desire tends to be insatiable.

Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as "Your Honor" or "Mi Lud," without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this.

What's it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.

Well, a lot of things it's not gonna be like. It's not going to be like being buried alive. It's not going to be like being in the darkness forever.

I tell you what - it's going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there's no one to regret it - and there's no problem.

Well, think about that for a while - it's kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.

[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]

We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight - and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms.

Who believe more firmly in the Devil than in God are always afraid that if they let go, the Devil will take over first, unaware that not having let go is the Devil already in full control.

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

Us. The good of contemplation is contemplation - not some result that it may bring.

The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.

Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.

Aesthetics is really a much better approach to ethics than theology is.

But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything
including "my" thoughts and actions
were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.

Accustomed, as it is, to think of man as a dualism of mind and body, and to regard the former as "sensible" and the latter as a "dumb" animal, our cultture is an affront to the wisdom of nature and a ruinous exploitation of the human organism as a whole.

Perhaps the most exasperating thing about "me," about nature and the universe, is that it will never "stay put." It is like a beautiful woman who will never be caught, and whose very flightiness is her charm. For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness.

Wanted to dream when you went to sleep at night. For at least a month you would live out all your wishes in your dreams. You would have banquets and music and everything that you ever thought you wanted. But then, after a few weeks of this, you would say, "Well, this is getting a little dull. Let's have an adventure. Let's get into trouble." It is all right to get into trouble because you know you are going to wake up at the end of it. So you could fight dragons and rescue princesses, and all that sort of thing.

The heaven and earth afford me no shelter at all; I'm glad, unreal are body and soul. Welcome thy weapon, O warrior of Yuen! Thy trusty steel, That flashes lightning, cuts the wind of Spring, I feel.

Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.

When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.

In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground
relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived
except in relation to a background.

If you read the literature of the great religions, time and time again you come across descriptions of what is usually referred to as "spiritual experience." You will find that in all the various traditions this modality of spiritual experience seems to be the same, whether it occurs in the Christian West, the Islamic Middle East, the Hindu world of Asia, or the Buddhist world. In each culture, it is quite definitely the same experience, and it is characterized by the transcendence of individuality and by a sensation of being one with the total energy of the universe.

We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger - a visitor who hardly belongs - for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself - through our eyes and IT's.

Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.