Alan Watts
Quotes
A British writer and speaker known for his interpretations of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. His works on topics such as Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and the nature of reality have introduced many to Eastern thought. Watts explored the interconnectedness of life and the nature of consciousness, often using humor and accessible language to make complex spiritual concepts relatable. His insights into the nature of existence and the self continue to inspire and inform contemporary spirituality.
Alan Watts
Quotes
A British writer and speaker known for his interpretations of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. His works on topics such as Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and the nature of reality have introduced many to Eastern thought. Watts explored the interconnectedness of life and the nature of consciousness, often using humor and accessible language to make complex spiritual concepts relatable. His insights into the nature of existence and the self continue to inspire and inform contemporary spirituality.
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.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
You can't make love without art.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song.
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotization; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective”
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.
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.
To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!
Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
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.
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
