Alan Watts Quotes
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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.
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If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.
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The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.
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The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.