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> 33 quotes tagged "alan-watts"

Don't make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you're doing as play, and don't regard for one minute that you have to be serious about it.

Alan Watts

present-moment simplicity wu-wei practice
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. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.

Alan Watts

present-moment time mind consciousness
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Alan Watts

no-self self mind consciousness
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Alan Watts

self self-knowledge wisdom inquiry
No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

Alan Watts

balance paradox flexibility wisdom
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed.

Alan Watts

trust self acceptance nature
The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

Alan Watts

present-moment acceptance wisdom receptivity
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 live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

Alan Watts

present-moment time wisdom consciousness
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Alan Watts

present-moment simplicity wisdom life
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid.

Alan Watts

present-moment life wisdom simplicity
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Alan Watts

consciousness unity nature no-self
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Alan Watts

acceptance non-duality nature seeing
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.

Alan Watts

trust yielding acceptance faith
What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.

Alan Watts

no-self nature acceptance wu-wei
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money… they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

Alan Watts

wisdom simplicity mind perception
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.

Alan Watts

consciousness nature wonder unity
Everything that happens, everything that I have ever done, everything that anybody else have ever done is part of a harmonious design, that there is no error at all.

Alan Watts

acceptance harmony unity non-duality
Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….

Alan Watts

present-moment time consciousness paradox
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

Alan Watts

non-duality paradox consciousness unity
Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves – mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.

Alan Watts

no-self self consciousness suffering
What happens if you know that there is nothing you can do to be better? It's kind of a relief, isn't it? You say 'Well, now what do I do?' When you are freed from being out to improve yourself, your own nature will begin to take over.

Alan Watts

acceptance wu-wei naturalness practice
Only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results.

Alan Watts

present-moment practice wisdom paradox
The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

Alan Watts

present-moment time mind consciousness
The world is precisely the relationship between the world and its witnesses, and so if there are no eyes in this world, the sun doesn't make any light, nor do the stars.

Alan Watts

consciousness non-duality perception nature
Memory creates the future as well as the past, you wouldn't know that you were going to have anything happen tomorrow if you didn't have something yesterday.

Alan Watts

mind time consciousness present-moment
Every manifestation of life is impermanent. Our quest to make things permanent, to straighten everything out, to get it fixed is an impossible and insoluble problem.

Alan Watts

impermanence acceptance letting-go wisdom
The word 'person' comes from the latin word 'persona' which referred to the masks worn by actors in which sound would come through. The 'person' is the mask — the role you're playing. And all of your friends and relations and teachers are busy telling you who you are and what your role in life is.

Alan Watts

no-self self identity wisdom
Education, in the real sense, is not preparation for life, it is actually living. It is the child participating in adult concerns. And doing it now and realizing that the point of the process in which the child is engaged, is not to prepare the child for the future, but to enjoy doing the thing today.

Alan Watts

present-moment practice wisdom simplicity
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

Alan Watts

present-moment wu-wei paradox wisdom
People who exude love are apt to give things away. They are in every way like rivers; they stream. And so when they collect possessions and things they like, they are apt to give them to other people. Because, have you ever noticed that when you start giving things away, you keep getting more?

Alan Watts

love generosity wisdom naturalness
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith in life, in other people, and in oneself, is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

Alan Watts

love acceptance naturalness wisdom
Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Alan Watts

peace love wisdom present-moment
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Alan Watts

love no-self wisdom acceptance