Alan Watts

Alan Watts

(1915-1973) Philosopher and religious scholar

• Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
  • Buddhism : The Religion of No-Religion

• 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.
  • The Wisdom of Insecurity

• There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. 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.
  • The Wisdom of Insecurity

• 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.
  • Intellectual Yoga

Attributed:

• 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.

• I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

• Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

• Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

• People often say to me, ‘I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don’t really feel it, I don’t realize it,’ and I am apt to reply, ‘I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'

• Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

• Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

• We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

• When no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.

• Light shines in darkness because what else could it shine in?

• Life is a game, the first rule of which is that it is not a game.