Alan Watts Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.

  Alan Watts

  Memories, Past, Reality

• 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.

  Alan Watts

  Jesus, Crazy, Congratulations

• The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

  Alan Watts

  Taught Us, Common Sense, Culture

• We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

  Alan Watts

  Suffering, Culture, Disease

• There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

  Alan Watts

  Mind, Culture, Way

  "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts, (p. 90), 1966.

• A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.

  Alan Watts

  Culture, Body, Clock

• Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhism, Culture, Loyal

  "Psychotherapy, East and West" by Alan Watts, (p. 7), 1961.

• We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time

  Alan Watts

  Culture, Illusion, Illusion Of Time

• Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use - which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing - for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.

  Alan Watts

  Thinking, Artist, Swings

  "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts, (p. 92), 1966.

• The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens... within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe.

  Alan Watts

  Intelligent, Years, Taught Us

• Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.

  Alan Watts

  Strong, Love Is, Men

  Alan W. Watts (2012). “Nature, Man and Woman”, p.11, Vintage

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