Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes. — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy? — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol... — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason, the universe, the all, seems… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist,… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or… — Alan 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… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know.… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space… — 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… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use,… — 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… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
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… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
...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
