Alan Watts

January 6, 1915 620a Chislehurst, Kent, SE London - November 16, 1973
Druid Heights, California
Path: zen, taoism, advaita wikipedia, birthchart
Enlightened: A sincere student

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.

And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light.
~ Alan Watts On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Awakening is to know what reality is not. It is to cease identifying oneself with any object of knowledge whatsoever. Just as every assertion about the basic substance or energy of reality must be meaningless, any assertion as to what “I am” at the very roots of my being must also be the height of folly. Delusion is the false metaphysical premise at the root of common sense; it is the average man’s unconscious ontology and epistemology, his tacit assumption that he is a “something.” The assumption that “I am nothing” would, of course, be equally wrong since something and nothing, being and non-being, are related concepts, and belong equally to the “known".

Civilized man knows of hardly any other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous. Without passport, birth certificate, or membership in some nation, one’s existence is not recognized...We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.
~ Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Heart is only another name for the Self. Doubts arise only when you identify it with something tangible and physical. The Heart is not a concept nor an object for meditation, but is the seat of meditation – it is the Self and stands alone. A baby has for a long time been part of its mother and has floated in the ocean of the womb. So it has the sense from the beginning of what is really to an enlightened person totally obvious—that the universe is one single organism.

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.

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.

It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium is what there is to life. And the more that i look at things, I can not get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird. When you consider man as a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves around about an insignificant star on the outer edges on one of the small galaxies. God what a put down that was. But on the other hand if you think about it for a few minutes, I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball, rotating around this spherical fire. It’s a very odd situation.

It is said that to be enlightened we must live in the eternal. Now, that infinitely small and therefore infinitely great point of time is called the present moment. The Universe exists only in that moment, and it is said that the wise man moves with it, clinging neither to the past nor to the future, making his mind like the mirror that reflects everything instantly as it comes before it, yet making no effort to retain the reflection when the object is removed. “The perfect man,” says Chuang-tzu, “employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep".

No amount of talk could persuade anybody that his ego is an illusion, because he knows it’s there. He knows 'I am I,' and simply won’t believe you if you tell him that this is nothing but posthypnotic suggestion.

No work or 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.

Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.

Popularly, Amitabha is somebody else. He is some great compassionate being who looks after you. Esoterically, Amitabha is your own nature; Amitabha is your real self, the inmost boundless light that is the root and ground of your own consciousness (Buddha-nature).

You don’t need to do anything to be that. You are that, and saying Nembutsu (Namu-Amida-Butsu) is simply a symbolical way of pointing out that you don’t have to become this, because you are it.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

So then, here's the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there is the central Self, you could call it God you could call it anything you like. And its all of us. Its playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere.
And its playing the game of hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest out adventures but in the end it always wakes up, and comes back to itself. And when you're ready to wake up, you're gonna wake up. And if you're not ready you're gonna stay pretending that you're poor little me.

The feeling of self is no longer confined to the inside of the skin. Instead, my individual being seems to grow out from the rest of the universe like a hair from a head or a limb from a body, so that my center is also the center of the whole. I find that in ordinary consciousness I am habitually trying to ring myself off from this totality, that I am perpetually on the defensive. But what am I trying to protect?

The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

The task of a liberated person is not to scold the world and preach to it but to delight it back to its senses.

There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

There is no time in nature. There is rhythm in nature, yes. There is motion in nature. But the clock as a measure of motion is a human artifact. The world, as it spins on its axis, doesn’t tick.

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.

Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world.

We have been hypnotized—literally hypnotized—by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside of our skins… That we are not the original big bang, but just something out on the end of it. And therefore, everybody feels unhappy and miserable.

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

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.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

You are like a dewdrop, on a multidimensional spider's web in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully, you will see that in every dewdrop the reflections of all the other dewdrops. So the way that dewdrop looks goes with the way all the other ones look, you see.

You never know when [enlightenment] may happen. But one day, the I will disappear into the heart during your waking state, and you will see your omnipresence with your spiritual eye. You will feel a joy, a happiness, that's beyond understanding. You will be free.

You yourself are the eternal energy which appears as this universe. You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.