“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,… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“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. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“There is, then, an analogy–and perhaps more than mere analogy–between central vision and conscious, one-at-a-time thinking, and between peripheral vision and the… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead.… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“But it is not that you are something which is just watching what happens. “What happens” is just using your organism to watch itself. It is the universe centering as a particular being, though it is not necessary to use or insist on this concept, for what is important here is not the idea but the feeling of it. The… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“Read Theodore Schwenk’s marvelous book Sensitive Chaos (London, Rudolph Steiner Press, 1965),” — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes. So protected from life, man becomes a sort of mollusc encrusted in a hard shell of “tradition,” so that when at last reality breaks through,… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them.… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share
“When you no longer make the distinction between the universe and how you are acting upon it, you are really on your own and… — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
“My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.” — Alan Wilson Watts Copy Share Image
