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We know so much detail about the probles of life that they resist easy simplification, and seem more complex and shapeless than ever.
— Alan Watts [p14]
...The past century the authority of science has taken the place of the authority of religion...
— Alan Watts [p16]
Yet for all that they [scientists] have done to improve the conditions of life, their picture of the universe seems to leave the indivitual without ultimate hope.
— Alan Watts [p16]
The immediate results of this honesty have been deeply unsettling and depressing. For man seems to be unable to live without myth, that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.
— Alan Watts [p19]
Most atheists and agnostics are neurotic, whereas most simple Catholics are happy and at peace with themselves.
— Alan Watts [p20]
Even if the observation is correct, the reasoning based on it is obsurd. It is as if to say, "You say there is a fire in the basement. You are upset about it. Because you are upset, there is obviously no fire." The agnostic, the sceptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself.
— Alan Watts [p20]
One one hand, there is the anxiety that one may be missing something, so that the mind flits nervously and greedily from one pleasure to another, without finding rest and satisfaction in any.
— Alan Watts [p21]
This "dope" we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction-a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.
To keep up this "standard" most of us are willing to put up with lives that constst largely in doing jobs that are a bore...
— Alan Watts [p21]
... to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for confort rather than follow it.
— Alan Watts [p23]
The word "water" is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called "God."
— Alan Watts [p23]
Most of use believe in order to feel secure, in order to make our individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one's own.
— Alan Watts [p24]
You can only know god through an open mind just and you can only see the sky through a clear window.
— Alan Watts [p25]
Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the "mystery of the universe" only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.
— Alan Watts [p27]
There seems to be no effective way of decreasing the delicacy and perishability of living tissue without also decreasing its vitality and sensitivity.
— Alan Watts [p30]
The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to have the former without the latter.
— Alan Watts [p30]
The further the power of consciousness ventures out into expierence, the more is the price it must pay for it's knowledge
— Alan Watts [p30]
A convention is a social convience, as, for example, money. Money gets rid of the inconveniences of barter. But it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth, because it will do you no good to eat it or wear it for clothing. Money is more or less static, for gold, silver, strong paper, or a bank balance can "stay put" for a long time. But real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may possess all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its crops it will starve.
— Alan Watts [p45]
To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand.
— Alan Watts [p46]
It is convention alone which persuades me that I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time.
— Alan Watts [p49]
The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.
— Alan Watts [p50]
We hunger for the perpetuity of something which never existed.
— Alan Watts [p51]
The scientific way of symbolizing the world is more suited to utilitarian purposes than the religious way, but this does not mean that it has any more "truth". Is it truer to classify rabbits according to their meat or according to their fur? It depends on what you want to do with them.
— Alan Watts [p51]
...tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you can live.
— Alan Watts [p51]
...as a result all the magic of namic and thinking has come to something of a temporary breakdown.
— Alan Watts [p52]
...persuit of illusions...
...can make fixed sense of the universe no longer...
— Alan Watts [p52]
Almost every spiritual tradition recognises that a point comes when two things must happen: man must surrender his seperate-feeling "I," and must face the fact that he cannot know, that is, define the ultimate.
— Alan Watts [p53]
The moment I name it, it is no longer God...
— Alan Watts [p53]
Yet it has always been taught in religion that "God" is something from which one can expect wisdom and guidance...
...it is hard to see how any wisdom can be extracted from something impossible to define.
— Alan Watts [p55]
It was not through statements that we learned how to breathe, swallow, see, circulate the blood, digest food, or resist diseases.
— Alan Watts [p56]
...we have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains. Indeed, the special disease of civilized man might be described as a block of schism between his brain (specificially, the cortex) and the rest of his body.
— Alan Watts [p57]
This is largely due to anxiety, to the knowledge that a constant supply of food is uncertain.
— Alan Watts [p59]
We stimulate our sense organs untill they become insensitive.
— Alan Watts [p59]
...the civilized man does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marrage, fun, to help other people, or to be a "real person." But these are not real wants because they are not actual things.
— Alan Watts [p63]
He wants somehting with a bone structure like a boy's which is supposed to support the exterior curves and smooth undulations of femininity-not a woman but an inflated rubber dream.
— Alan Watts [p65]
...when expierence stops oscillating and writhing, it can again become sensitive to the wisdom of the body, to the hidden depths of its own substance.
— Alan Watts [p71]
Matter is a word, a noise, which refers to the forms and patterns taken by a process.
— Alan Watts [p71]
If we want to keep the old language, still using such terms as "spiritual" and "material," the spiritual must mean "the indefinable,"
— Alan Watts [p71]
...chasing widly after the phantom of the future.
— Alan Watts [p71]
When the heart is out of order, we are clearly conscious of its beating...
...the brain is not a muscle...
...as if they were trying to push their brains around...
...you do not have to grind and strain to digest food...
— Alan Watts [p72]
...doing somehting about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands.
— Alan Watts [p75]
Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it?
— Alan Watts [p83]
You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling.
— Alan Watts [p85]
...man and his present expierence are one...
...to understand this moment I must not try to be divided from it...
To understand music, you must listen to it.
— Alan Watts [87]
No possibility remains but to be aware of the pain, fear, boredom, or grief in the same complete way that one is aware of pleasure.
— Alan Watts [90]
Had we never known joy, it would be impossible to identify sorrow as sorrow.
Sorrow can only be compared with the memory of joy, which is not at all the same thing as joy itself.
...memories never really succeed in "catching" reality.
— Alan Watts [91]
A guidebook is an admirable tool, but it is hardly to be compared with the country it describes.
— Alan Watts [92]
To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations.
— Alan Watts [93]
If, on the other hand, you are aware of fear, you realize that, because this feeling is now yourself, escape is impossible. You see that calling it "fear" tells you little or nothing about it...
— Alan Watts [94]
The art of living in this "predicament" is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past and the know on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
— Alan Watts [95]
...mastering an opposing force by giving into it.
— Alan Watts [95]
If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain.
— Alan Watts [97]
...pain and the effort to be separate from it are the same thing. Wanting to get out of pain is the pain..
— Alan Watts [98]
We are concerned here with understanding something which is the present moment. This is not a psychological or spiritual discipline for self-improvement. It is simply being aware of the present experience, and realizing that you can neither define it nor divide yourself from it. There is no rule but "Look!"
— Alan Watts [99]
Civilized man knows hardly andy other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous.
— Alan Watts [100]
We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold them to the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.
— Alan Watts [100]
...just as we can enjoy music without knowing either how it is writtn or how the body hears it.
— Alan Watts [101]
I must likewise infer that this theoretical universe is a unity, that my body and the world form a single process.
— Alan Watts [109]
But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no "you" apart from what you sense, feel, and know. This is why the mystics and poets give freqent utterance to the feeling that they are "one with the All", or "united with God"...
— Alan Watts [110]
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that is so.
— Alan Watts [114]
So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom. The more the fly struggles to get out of the honey, the faster he is stuck. Under the pressure of so much strain and futility, it is no wonder at all that men seek release in violence and sensationalism, and in the reckless exploitation of their bodies, their appetites, their material world, and their fellow men. What this must add to the necessary and unavoidable pains of existence is incalculable.
— Alan Watts [115]
When, on the other hand, you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organise, why space, time and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly.
— Alan Watts [115]
Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.
— Alan Watts [117]
If morality is the art of living together, it is clear that the rules, or rather techniques, have a place in it. For many of the problems of a community are technical problems-the distribution of wealth and population, the proper managemnet of natural resources, the organization of family life, the care of the sick and disabled, and the harmonious adaptaion of individual difference.
— Alan Watts [119]
Because he can only feel with his own body, he has little interest in the feelings of other bodies.
— Alan Watts [121]
Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one's own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to bfeel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.
— Alan Watts [121]
I am depressed, and want to get 'I' out of this depression. The opposite of depression is elation, but because depression is not elation, I cannot force myself to be elated. I can, however, get drunk...Very soon I begin to hate myself for getting so drunk, which makes me still more depressed- and so it goes.
— Alan Watts [127]
...I am chained to fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it.
— Alan Watts [130]
Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a univers and the disintegrated mass a community.
— Alan Watts [131]
But is this grace given to all or to a chose few, who, when they receive it, have no choice but to surrender themselves? Some say that it comes to all, but that there are those who accept its aid and those who refuse.
— Alan Watts [146]
The faster things move in circles, the sooner they become indistinguishable blurs. It is obvious that the only interesting people are intersted people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I."
