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Alan Watts Quotes
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Alan Wilson Watts was a British writer who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy and religion for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen , one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West , Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He considered Nature, Man and Woman to be, "from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written." He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in the essay "The New Alchemy" and in the book The Joyous Cosmology .

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity." Wikipedia  

✵ 6. January 1915 – 16. November 1973
Alan Watts photo
Alan Watts: 107   quotes 25   likes

Alan Watts Quotes

“Camus [five_questions]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?”

Alan Watts

Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle

Question , Thinking , Suicide

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 78

God , World , History , Fish

“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.”

Alan Watts

Inside Information p. 7
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

Men , People , Disease , Art

“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.”

Alan Watts

The Spectrum of Love

Love , Friendship , People , Sex

“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.”

Alan Watts

The Essence of Alan Watts (1977)

Back To Work , Life , Secret

“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.”

Alan Watts

Inside Information
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

“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.”

Alan Watts

The Nature of Consciousness http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_alan_article1.shtml; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)

Way , Feeling , Thinking , Learning

“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.”

Alan Watts

Inside Information p. 4
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

World , Disease

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 107-108

World , Sense

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: Psychotherapy, East and West (1961), p. 7

“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.”

Alan Watts

Audio lecture Ramakrishna, Ramana, and Krishnamurti (in part three of four)

Death , Way , Time

“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.”

Alan Watts

Inside Information.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

Life , Light , Time

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 73

World , Behavior , Understanding , Time

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 111

Women , Men , Money , Children

“Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.”

Alan Watts

Inside Information p. 4
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

Sex

“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.”

Alan Watts

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)

World , Thinking , Reality , Time

“We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the best place for it.”

Alan Watts

The Spectrum of Love

Sex

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962), p. 91

Love , Friendship , Feeling

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 14

Love , Life , Money , God

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 70-71

Food , Feeling , Nature , Study

“The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), p. 32

Change , Joy , Parting

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 112

Wisdom , Men , Beauty , Girl

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 90

Music , Way

“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.”

Alan Watts

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)

God , Sense , Personality

“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.”

Alan Watts

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)

Game , Thinking

“I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.”

Alan Watts

The Two Hands of God : The Myths of Polarity (1963), p. 29

Game

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972), p. 18

World , Game , Dead

“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.”

Alan Watts

The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)

God , Idea , Reality , Sense

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 94

World , Art , Nature , Sense

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972), p. 123

Life , Religion

“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.”

Alan Watts

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 60

Death , Tree , Universe

“It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.”

Alan Watts

Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel

Christ , Understanding

“For several years I have referred to this, hitherto, rare and inaccessible work as the I-told-you-so-book, because it has often been implied that I have invented my explanations of Buddhism out of thin air, thus falsifying its authentic teachings... Yet, despite the occultist flavor of its title, The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects is the most direct, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth explanation of Mahayana Buddhism which has thus far been written.”

Alan Watts

Watts' Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel

Secret , Books

“We say in popular speech that we come into this world, but we do nothing of the kind. We come out of it.”

Alan Watts

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.
Source: Ways of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of Self (1983), p. 25

World

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

Alan Watts book The Wisdom of Insecurity

Source: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Pleasure , Pain

“I realized that the difference that I saw between things was the same thing as their unity, because differences (borders, lines, surfaces, boundaries) don't really divide things from each other at all, they join them together, because all boundaries are held in common”

Alan Watts

http://archive.today/2020.09.13-043207/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GOmmIxmXJg&feature=youtu.be&t=3017
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