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ALAN WATTS QUOTES

 Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while
one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
o The Way of Zen, Pt. 2, Ch. 2 (1957)
 Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
o As quoted in Life magazine (21 April 1961)
 I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of
the game of hide-and-seek.
o The Two Hands of God : The Myths of Polarity (1963), p. 29
 But what we've got going wrong is we've got a kind of bifurcation [in
cultural development]:
You take your classified telephone directory, and open up "Churches",
and have a ruler in your hand. And you will find that the longest space is
occupied by authoritarian, Bible-banging churches. And these people
are barbarians, who take the written word of the Bible literally. Because
they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend
on. … The government realizes that there is a very large number of
people like that; and therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander
to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up; they
always need Papa. … The trouble is that the boys who need Papa, are
violent. They have the guns. And they are the types of people who like to
be soldiers, policemen — tough guys. And therefore they have a great
deal of power.
o Interviewed on Les Hixon's show "In The Spirit" on WBAI New
York (November 1972)
 To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you
don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
o The Essence of Alan Watts (1977)
 This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you
are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is
play.
o The Essence of Alan Watts (1977)
 Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth";
but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race —
I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the
year 2000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am
involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow
itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She
was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic
bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but
she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me
because I think you are the kind of person who will push the
button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to
push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future
generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was
a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained
my position. As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died,
"It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only
possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it
from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world
right now are being supervised by people with
very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to
clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try
to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic
messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say
anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply,
on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will
become wise.
o Play to Live : Lectures of Alan Watts (1982)
 It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And
all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets
out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more
complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at
the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this
room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of
that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very
interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think
that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very
complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way
out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big
bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut
ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way
things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning— you're not
something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a
sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You
are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as
whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define
yourself as—Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so—I see every
one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in
this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define
ourselves as separate from it.
o

 The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is


Reality? (1989)
 If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies
white, self implies other, life implies death — or shall I say, death
implies life — you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself,
not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on
probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can
begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you
are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and
structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that
the world is the drama of God. God is not something
in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that
has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the
self, Satcitananda. Which means sat, that which is, chit, that which
is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss. In other words, what
exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy.
o The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is
Reality? (1989)
 So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the
ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the
sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And
you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK
to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the
whole notion of drama.
o The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is
Reality? (1989)
 Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question,
which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five
serious philosophical questions:
The first one is: Who started it?
The second is: Are we going to make it?
The third is: Where are we going to put it?
The fourth is: Who's going to clean up?
And the fifth: Is it serious?
o Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of
Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle
 I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist,
I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert
anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say,
in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to
someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of
the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want
you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to,
say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician
with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a
point of view that I enjoy.
o Alan Watts, on Zen (2015)
 Religion is always falling apart.
o Buddhism, the Religion of No-Religion
 There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and
astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for
existence. We don’t have much of it in this culture, even though we call
it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of
course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into
junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture
because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based
on wonder.
o Images of God
 Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply
your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that
symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego
symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as
your living organism.
o Buddhism : The Religion of No-Religion
 I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe
penalties on anyone who burns the American flag,
whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag
stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological
manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of
symbols with realities.
o Audio lecture "Individual and Society"
 Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence,
and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I
didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel
it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual
greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.
o Intellectual Yoga
 The pity of all this is, you know, a man like that [Sri Ramakrishna] has to
have disciples, or no one would ever hear about him. But somehow, as
the generations pass, the flame dies out. And eventually the disciples kill
him.
I wish that there was a way of putting a time-bomb into scriptures and
records — not a time-bomb, but some kind of invisible ink, so that all
scriptures would un-print themselves about fifty years after the
master's death. And just dissolve.
o Audio lecture Ramakrishna, Ramana, and Krishnamurti (in part
three of four)
 Nowadays, of course, progressive theologians are all for sex; they say it's
a good thing, the biblical position was not that sex was evil, but that it
was good, and that it's alright.
But now, look here, what is the real point here? The proof of the
pudding is in the eating. What can you get kicked out of the church for?
Any church — Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, and
the synagogue I think too. What's the real thing for which people get
kicked out, excommunicated?
For "envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"? "Pride, vainglory,
and hardness of heart"? Owning shares in munitions factories? Profiting
off slums? No sir. You can be a bishop and live in all those sins openly.
But if you go to bed with the wrong person, you're out.
So one has to conclude that, for all practical purposes, the church is a
sexual regulation society; and it really isn't interested in anything else.
Christianity is more preoccupied with sex than even Priapism or Tantric
Yoga [are]. Because that's the thing that counts, that's the sin, the really
important sin.
o Audio lecture "Beyond Theology"
 Doctors try to get rid of their patients — clergymen try to get them
hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the
church. [1]
 The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as
things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a
way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun
isn’t a part of nature it’s a part of speech. There are no nouns in the
physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world
either.
o Watts on Wiggles Waves, used in the Cosmosis track No Such
Thing (2007).
 This is what troubles me about what we'll call vaguely "the new youth".
There's a certain sloppiness. For example, at Millbrook in New York -
that place is a mess, it's an unspeakable mess! Everything is dilapidated,
it's a pad, not just a pad, but a mattress with the stuffing coming out of
it. And this bothers me - because, after all, in America, it's bad enough
anyway, we don't revere material, we mistreat it terribly. Los Angeles is
the most amazing mistreatment of material that one can see in
centuries. This is not a materialistic civilization at all. It is a civilization
devoted to the hatred and destruction of material, its conversion into
junk and poison gas. And therefore, one of the most sacred missions
to be imposed upon those who would be liberated from this culture
is that they shall love material, that they shall love color, that they
shall dress beautifully, that they shall cook well, that they shall live
in lovely houses, and that they shall preserve the face of
nature. And this is the cardinal thing in your tradition, my friend,
because when the Lord God created the material world, he surprised
himself. And having already created it, he sat back, and saw then, that it
was good. Very good.
o Beat Zen and Hasidism talk with Maurice Friedman [2]
The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)[edit]
It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to
be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and
fluidity.

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be


copied.
 The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually
killing what we love.
o p. 32
 The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent
those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they
are changing.
o p. 32
 It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be
perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness
and fluidity.
 Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave
is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has
no other form than his thought.
 There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It
cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by
straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the
service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out
when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of
trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through
condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad
names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has
no self to love.
The Way of Zen (1957)[edit]
 It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great,
not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or
"human-heartedness" (jen) was always felt to be superior to
"righteousness" (i), since man himself is greater than any idea which he
may invent. There are times when men's passions are much more
trustworthy than their principles.
o p. 29
 If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.
o p. 190
Psychotherapy, East and West (1961)[edit]
 If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism,
Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these
are understood in the West. We find something more nearly
resembling psychotherapy. … The main resemblance between these
Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of
both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways
of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the
natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been
interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed
individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however,
concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted
people.
o pp. 3-4
 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.
o p. 7
 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.
o p. 7
 Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work
as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into
social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity
and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches,
corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On
the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the
individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has
to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the
individual in liberating himself from various forms of social
conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning —
hatred being a form of bondage to its object.
o p. 8
 Psychotherapists … are dealing with people whose distress arises from
what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose
exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of
a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play
(Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction
of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be
taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself
which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused
with reality.
o p. 9
 When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself
that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is
universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the
cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any
stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of
social communication.
o p. 9
The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of
Consciousness (1962)[edit]
 Our trouble is that we have ignored and thus feel insecure in the
enormous spectrum of love which lies between rather formal friendship
and genital sexuality, and thus are always afraid that once we overstep
the bounds of formal friendship we must slide inevitably to the extreme
of sexual promiscuity.
o p. 91
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)[edit]
The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin
is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the
experimental philosophy-religions of the East…

Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action


of the total universe.
 How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes,
such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous
arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than
a god.
o Page 138
 The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a
bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with
Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of
the East — in particular the central and
germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination
underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's
natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.
We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which
is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of
alienation from the universe
 Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own.
Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not
other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More
precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to
be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its
environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or
"comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing
that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but
that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate
parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the
world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. 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.
o p. 73
 We define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our
narrowed "spotlight" consciousness which largely ignores the field or
environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the
Greek "atom"—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into
separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart
without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating
him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom
is the universe—that total system of interdependent "thing-events"
which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human
individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by
assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a
set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs,
brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate
events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and
interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate
from his universal environment only in name. When this is not
recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with
nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a
separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.
o p. 53
 Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the
more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of
an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. Once
upon a time the mouth, the hands, and the feet said to each other, "We
do all this work gathering food and chewing it up, but that lazy fellow,
the stomach, does nothing. It's high time he did some work too, so let's
go on strike!" Whereupon they went many days without working, but
soon found themselves feeling weaker and weaker until at last each of
them realized that the stomach was their stomach, and that they would
have to go back to work to remain alive. But even in physiological
textbooks, we speak of the brain, or the nervous system, as "governing"
the heart or the digestive tract, smuggling bad politics into science, as if
the heart belonged to the brain rather than the brain to the heart or the
stomach. Yet it is as true, or false, to say that the brain feeds itself"
through the stomach as that the stomach "evolves" a brain at its upper
entrance to get more food.
o p. 70-71
 Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch
is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every
branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our
independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive
connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be
repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head
and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not
connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as
branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by
physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual
is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a
footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self
has ceased to do.
o p. 60
 What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough
between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the
illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the
future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get
it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-
and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest
of the game is to pretend that there is.
o p. 96
 Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into
crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy.
You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the
whole thing is a kind of music—the voice playing on your nerves as the
breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music
has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of
sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of
symbols and words—all evoking and playing upon each other.
o p. 95
 You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. 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.
o p. 92
 So, too, in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya
of the Self, the first word meaning "play" and the second having the
complex sense of illusion (from the Latin ludere, to play), magic,
creative power, art, and measuring—as when one dances or draws a
design to a certain measure. From this point of view the universe in
general and playing in particular are, in a special sense, "meaningless":
that is, they do not—like words and symbols—signify or point to
something beyond themselves, just as a Mozart sonata conveys no
moral or social message and does not try to suggest the natural sounds
of wind, thunder, or birdsong.
o p. 94
 The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way.
We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just
nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing,
because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning
was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as
two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but
inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart,
and the cat dies. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough.
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a
narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first
the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail.
Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees
the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like
something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he
witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail.
Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and
necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd
and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and
tail go together: they are all one cat.
The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it
was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was
that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the
whole cat at once.
o p. 26-27
 Wouldn't it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the
cat's head the cause of the tail? Lifting the neck of a bottle implies lifting
the bottom as well, for the "two parts" come up at the same time. If I
pick up an accordion by one end, the other will follow a little later, but
the principle is the same. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time
as much as patterns in space.
o p. 72
 There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round
and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins.
Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world
repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch
goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking
and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any
one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know
what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white
unless side-by-side with black.
o Inside information p. 16
 Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more
about it than adults.
o Inside Information p. 4
 There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or
just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look
is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
o Inside Information
 Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and
the arts, are among the most important things which seem to
distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and
sensitive people from morons.
o Inside Information p. 7
 The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases
often require the risk of a dangerous cure — like the Pasteur serum for
rabies.
o Inside Information p. 4
 In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands
of people who detest and abominate Negroes, communists, Russians,
Chinese, Jews, Catholics, beatniks, homosexuals, and "dope-fiends."
These hatreds are not going to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting
those who feel them, and the abusive labels with which we plaster
them—squares, fascists, rightists, know-nothings—may well become
the proud badges and symbols around which they will rally and
consolidate themselves. Nor will it do to confront the opposition in
public with polite and nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations, while
boosting our collective ego by insulting them in private. If we want
justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies,
whether human or non-human, we must first come to terms with the
minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the
rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world—-especially
when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as
the world inside. For want of this awareness, no one can be more
belligerent than a pacifist on the rampage, or more militantly
nationalistic than an anti-imperialist.
o p. 98
 The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights,
international peace, population control, conservation of natural
resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they
are—will destroy rather than help if made in the [current] spirit. For, as
things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own
way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else.
Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that
methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be
made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by
those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or
hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by
those who have no capacity for living now.
o p. 83
 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.
This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even
those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but
continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of
skin.
o Inside Information
 If I first see a tree in the winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree.
But when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must
exclaim, 'Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all.' Imagine, then, that a
billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a
tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life.
They would dismiss it as 'Just a bunch of old rocks!' But if they returned
today, they would have to apologize: 'Well - you were peopling rocks
after all!'
You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two
situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the
earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed
inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong.
o p. 74
 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.
o Inside Information
 I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time —
a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of
biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual,
sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to
vanish forever.
o Inside Information.
 The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain,
but for 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.
o p. 78
 We are becoming accustomed to a conception of the universe so
mysterious and so impressive that even the best father-image will no
longer do for an explanation of what makes it run. But the problem then
is that it is impossible for us to conceive an image higher than the
human image. Few of us have ever met an angel, and probably would
not recognize it if we saw one, and our images of an impersonal or
suprapersonal God are hopelessly subhuman—jello, featureless light,
homogenized space, or a whopping jolt of electricity. However, our
image of man is changing as it becomes clearer and clearer that the
human being is notsimply and only his physical organism. My body is
also my total environment, and this must be measured by light-years in
the billions. Hitherto the poets and philosophers of science have used
the vast expanse and duration of the universe as a pretext for reflections
on the unimportance of man, forgetting that man with "that enchanted
loom, the brain" is precisely what transforms this immense electrical
pulsation into light and color, shape and sound, large and small, hard
and heavy, long and short. In knowing the world we humanize it, and if,
as we discover it, we are astonished at its dimensions and its
complexity, we should be just as astonished that we have the brains to
perceive it.
o p. 111-112
 We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the
source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is
miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes,
ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know
how to walk and breathe, talk and think—only we can't put it into
words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things,
and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their
details.
o p. 112
 An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there
were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable
and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no
considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid
and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the
answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond
themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or
even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not
life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
o p. 14
 When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that
just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I'm beautiful,
but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be
admired for myself, not my chassis." Poor little chauffeur! All she is
saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and
ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can
perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same
situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the
whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live.
o p. 112
 Furthermore, the younger members of our society have for some time
been in growing rebellion against paternal authority and the paternal
state. For one reason, the home in an industrial society is chiefly a
dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that wife
and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character who
brings in money, and after working hours he is supposed to forget about
his job and have fun. Novels, magazines, television, and popular
cartoons therefore portray "Dad" as an incompetent clown. And the
image has some truth in it because Dad has fallen for the hoax that work
is simply something you do to make money, and with money you can get
anything you want.
It is no wonder that an increasing proportion of college students want
no part in Dad's world, and will do anything to avoid the rat-race of the
salesman, commuter, clerk, and corporate executive. Professional men,
too—architects, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and professors—have
offices away from home, and thus, because the demands of their families
boil down more and more to money, are ever more tempted to regard
even professional vocations as ways of making money. All this is further
aggravated by the fact that parents no longer educate their own
children. Thus the child does not grow up with understanding of or
enthusiasm for his father's work. Instead, he is sent to an understaffed
school run mostly by women which, under the circumstances, can do no
more than hand out mass-produced education which prepares the child
for everything and nothing. It has no relation whatever to his father's
vocation.
o p. 111
 Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our
culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and
uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance,
obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by
serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics,
have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The
potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either
gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a
commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered
affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable
from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing
comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and
illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu
textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and
brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there
are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close
to fine jewels.)
The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense
of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such
things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials.
The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have
lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no
longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for
attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom
everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.
o p. 84-85
 Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the
hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is
tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the
society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and,
above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who
we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see
ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly
aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom
realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are
not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images
which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We
copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that
excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is
supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also
learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to
funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just
because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended
mind and body.
o p. 53-54
 This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature,
Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite—
names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectabilitywith the
winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or
stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might
be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground
of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But
these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and
almost sensorily concrete experience—the "unitive" experience of the
mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures
at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was
discussing in the previous chapter, though in "naturalistic" terms,
purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other
intellectually gaseous words.
o p. 104-105
 One sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies—correlative in the
sense that they "gowith" each other and cannot exist apart. This, rather
than any miasmic absorption of differences into acontinuum of ultimate
goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world. For this unity is not
mere one-ness as opposed to multiplicity, since these two terms are
themselves polar. The unity, or inseparability, of one and many is
therefore referred to in Vedanta philosophy as "nonduality" (advaita) to
distinguish it from simple uniformity.
o p. 107-108
 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.
o p. 90
 As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share
philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles
and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
o p. 22
 Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous
forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or
growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural,
contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and
scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and
love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life,
in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the
spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
o p. 56
In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972)[edit]
 I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that
comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced;
but also perverse, although you must remember that this word
means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward,
which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer—to "follow your
own weird"—is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or
destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom."
o p. xiii
 Do you suppose that God takes himself seriously? I know a Zen master,
Joshu Sasaki, who has let it be known that the best form of meditation is
to stand up with your hands on your hips and roar with laughter for ten
minutes every morning. I have heard of a sophisticated shaman-type
fellow who used to cure ringworm on cows just by pointing at the scars
and laughing. Truly religious people always make jokes about their
religion; their faith is so strong that they can afford it. Much of the
secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to
breathe.
o p. 6
 In an autobiography one must surely be allowed to boast, just for fun. I
have, at a range of twenty feet, shot the tobacco out of a cigarette and
left the paper intact. At a range of thirty feet, I have split a target, edge
towards me, with an air pistol. I am also the world's champion in a game
called "You Are the Target," in which anyone better than I would be
dead. The game is to shoot an arrow straight up and see how near to
you it can be allowed to land. You have to watch its fall very carefully,
but I have had it hit the ground exactly between my feet. Of course,
there were no witnesses. Had there been, they would forcefully have
discouraged the experiment. I was using a fifty-five pound bow.
o p. 18
 Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be
a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic
fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many
different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not
formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no
particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary
zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any
particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost
irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with
religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as
a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and
experience than as conception and theory.
o p. 61
 At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and
Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated
Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen
because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own
culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While
other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain
climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain.
I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or
vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret
doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with
ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea,
with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with
sonorous gongs.
o p. 63-64
 Over the years it has become my firm opinion that sexual activity (even
if only through masturbation) is "requisite and necessary, as well for the
body as for the soul"; for men and women alike. It stimulates your
glands, exercises your pelvis, thrills your nerves, brings mind and body
together as one, and culminates in an ecstasy in which there is neither
past nor future nor separation between self and other. We need that as
we need vitamins, proteins, water, and air.
o p. 122
 everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is
impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions
(or intuitions) about existence and the good life.
o p. 123
 Unbelievably, there is still here [in Los Angeles] one of my most favorite
places—the home of Henry and Ruth Denison at the very top of the hill,
at the end of a road going nowhere, hanging above a reservoir-lake
surrounded with pines. They have a sundeck under a eucalyptus tree
where I have slept some memorably deep sleeps, and awakened very
early in the morning, before sunrise, with stars still showing through the
branches. In this house I have made some of my greatest friendships, so
much so that I cannot think of it without that curious pleasure-pain
which the Japanese call aware—the sense of echoes in the
courtyards of the mind after the sun has left and the people have
gone their ways forever.
o p. 224
Ways of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of
Self (1983)[edit]
 We say in popular speech that we come into this world, but we do
nothing of the kind. We come out of it. In the same way as the fruit
comes out of the tree, the egg from the chicken, and the baby from the
womb, we are symptomatic of the universe. Just as in the retina there
are myriads of little nerve endings, we are the nerve endings of the
universe.
o p. 25
Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)[edit]

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.
So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
 A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about
except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in
a world of illusion.
 The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is
frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I,
my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual
oneupmanship, and Guru competitions.
 [Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer
this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you
are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you
see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if
the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see,
but it's still now — and the universe is still beginning now, and it's
trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so
does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the
explanation disappears. You'll never find it there. ... Things are not
explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That
Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility.
o On deep meditation and enlightenment that transcends temporal
experiences and most notions of selfhoody
 If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it
really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you
wake up and discover that you're God.
The Spectrum of Love[edit]
 We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the
brain. Which isn't always the best place for it.
 The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching.
Preaching is moral violence.
 Love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity. Everybody has it.
Existence is love. But it's like water flowing through a hose. It depends
in which direction you point it. So everybody has the force running. And
maybe, the way in which you find the force of love operating in you, is
that you have a passionate like of booze, or ice cream, or automobiles, or
good-looking members of the opposite sex or the same sex, but there is
love operating. And people, of course, tend to distinguish between
the various kinds of love, there are good kinds, such as divine
charity, and allegedly bad kinds, such as, in quotes, animal lust. But
it should be understood I think, that they are all forms of the same
thing. But they differ, in rather the same way that the colors of
white light divide into the spectrum when passed through a prism.
So we might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr.
Freud's libido. And the violet end of the spectrum of love is agape,
what is called divine love or divine charity. And that in the middle
the various yellows, blues, and greens, are friendship, human
endearment, consideration, and all that sort of fellow-feeling. But
it's all the same thing.
Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of
Hide-and-Seek (2017)[edit]
 Additionally, in the United States, we define manliness in terms of
aggression. I think it must be because we're frightened. We put on a
show of being tough guys, but it's completely unnecessary, you know. If
you have what it takes, you don't need to put on an act, and you
certainly don't need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to
nature?
o p. 8
 Have you really looked at a seashell? There's not an aesthetic fault in it
anywhere - it's absolutely perfect. Now, do you think that shells look at
each other and critique each other's appearance? "Well, your markings
are a little crooked and not very well spaced." Of course not, but that's
what we do. Every one of us is marvellous and complicated and
interesting and gorgeous just as we are. Really take a look at another
person's eyes. They are jewelry beyond compare - just beautiful!
o p. 42

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