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 a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present.… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
“The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and untruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the… — Alan Watts Copy Share
The more we try to catch hold of the present moment the more elusive it becomes. It is like trying to clutch water in… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me… — Alan Watts Copy Share
...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters. — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests. — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity,… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
“As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted. — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
