#ALAN WATTS QUOTES FULL#

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us. However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. Alan Watts, Alan Watts Teaches Meditation So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion. Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.Ī person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment-from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies-how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being? If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering.

The universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.Īs it is, we are merely bolting our lives-gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in-because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

#ALAN WATTS QUOTES FULL#

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. There is no way of controlling what you’re experiencing because what you’re experiencing is you.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Alan watts quotes