Alan Watts Quotes - Page 15

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• To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

  Alan Watts

  Wise, Technology, Men

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• For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

  Alan Watts

  Giving Up, Ideas, Vision

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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• Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain
  which scans the environment for any trouble making changes.
  If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.

  Alan Watts

  Anxiety, Brain, Attention

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• But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.

  Alan Watts

  Skills, Perception, Taoism

  Alan Watts (1970). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”

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• Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Confused, Purpose

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.69, Souvenir Press

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• The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Jobs, Men

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• If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

  Alan Watts

  Moon, Suffering, World

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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• There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.

  Alan Watts

  Integrity, Light, Shining

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• We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

  Alan Watts

  People, Giving, Sun

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.85, Vintage

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• ...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

  Alan Watts

  Technology, Civilization, Goal

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• The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

  Alan Watts

  World, Whole

  Alan Watts (2000). “What is Zen?”, p.116, New World Library

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• The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.

  Alan Watts

  Self, Games, Play

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• LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.

  Alan Watts

  Telescopes, Lsd, Microscopes

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• The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Nature, Attitude

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.9, Souvenir Press

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• There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.

  Alan Watts

  Sex, Interesting, Pruning

  Alan Watts (1996). “Myth and Religion: The Edited Transcripts”, p.94, Tuttle Publishing

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• You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

  Alan Watts

  Definitions, Want, Able

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• Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

  Alan Watts

  Two, Together, Division

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.44, Souvenir Press

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• People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'

  Alan Watts

  Talking, People, Wonder

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• The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.

  Alan Watts

  Beach, Moving, Book

  Alan Watts (2010). “Tao: The Watercourse Way”, p.54, Souvenir Press

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• The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.

  Alan Watts

  Soul, Body, Language

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• 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.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhism, Hands, Knives

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.29, New World Library

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• We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Class, Play

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.58, Souvenir Press

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• 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.

  Alan Watts

  Opposites, Play, Choices

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.65, New World Library

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• One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.

  Alan Watts

  Men, Ego, Mind

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.66, New World Library

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• Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Book, Paper

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.10, Souvenir Press

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