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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
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