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Alan Wilson Watts, né le 6 janvier 1915 à Chislehurst dans le Kent et mort le 16 novembre 1973 à Mont Tamalpais en Californie , est un philosophe, écrivain et conférencier anglo-américain autodidacte, auteur de vingt-cinq livres et de nombreux articles sur la spiritualité, les religions et philosophies d'Orient et d'Occident .

Chroniqueur réputé de radio et de télévision en Californie, intéressé par les nouvelles tendances apparaissant en Occident à son époque, il se fit l'apôtre d'un certain changement des mentalités à propos de la société, la nature, les styles de vie et l'esthétique, et il est considéré comme l'un des pères de la contre-culture aux États-Unis. C'est un des personnages des Clochards célestes de Jack Kerouac.

La suppression de la collection Denoël/Gonthier a interrompu la traduction de son œuvre en français, avant qu'elle ne reprenne chez d'autres éditeurs. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. janvier 1915 – 16. novembre 1973
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Alan Watts: 107   citations 0   J'aime

Alan Watts: Citations en anglais

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

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Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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Alan Watts

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

“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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Alan Watts

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

“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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Alan Watts

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)

“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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Alan Watts

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)

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

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Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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Alan Watts

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

“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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Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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Alan Watts

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

“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.”

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Alan Watts

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

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

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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

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

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Alan Watts livre The Wisdom of Insecurity

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

“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”

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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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