It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable-it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical"… — 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 as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through… — Alan Watts Copy Share
We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown. And that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship, which could hardly be improved upon. It has got a source of temperature and… — Alan Watts Copy Share
A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted. — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
