What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this… — 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