Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Alan Watts, fully Alan Wilson Watts

English-born American Philosopher, Writer, Exponent of Zen Buddhism

"In such a world it is impossible to consider man apart from nature, as an exiled spirit which controls this world by having its roots in another. Man is himself a loop in the endless knot, and as he pulls in one direction he finds that he is pulled from another and cannot find the origin of the impulse."

"In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass, to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are. The question is then whether technical progress actually "gets anywhere in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life. There is certainly a sense of exhilaration or relief at the moment of change-at the first few uses of telephone, radio, television, jet aircraft, miracle drug, or calculating machine. But all too soon these new contrivances are taken for granted, and we find ourselves oppressed with the new predicaments which they bring with them. A successful college president once complained to me, "I'm so busy that I'm going to have to get a helicopter!" "Well," I answered, "you'll be ahead so long as you're the only president who has one. But don't get it. Everyone will expect more out of you.""

"In terms of the great Oriental philosophies, man?s un-happiness is rooted in the feeling of anxiety which attends his sense of being an isolated individual or ego, separate from ?life? or ?reality? as a whole. On the other hand, happiness ? a sense of harmony, completion, and wholeness ? comes with the realization that the feeling of isolation is an illusion. [... This order of happiness] is not a result to be attained through action, but a fact to be realized through knowledge. The sphere of action is to express it, not to gain it.?? The Meaning of Happiness explains that the psychological equivalent of this doctrine is a state of mind called is ?total acceptance,? a ?yes-saying to everything that we experience, the unreserved acceptance of what we are, of what we feel and know at this and every moment."

"In thinking of ourselves as divided into "I" and "me," we easily forget that consciousness also lives because it is moving. It is as much a part and product of the stream of change as the body and the whole natural world. If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness--the thing you call "I"--is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion. But because these experiences include memories, we have the impression that "I" is something solid and still, like a tablet upon which life is writing a record."

"In sum, then, I have tried to show that reincarnation has very strong theoretical probability, without resorting to the paranormal evidence and even without being able to explain the transmission of memories. I have carefully avoided bringing in the moral and retributive arguments, since they have little force, and I do not find a person?s fortunes or misfortunes explained by a former life. I find the explanation postponed, as in all attempts to explain the present by the past. But it is basically an intellectual block to find it incredible that you have more than one life. It is just as incredible that we have this one. It is still more incredible to suppose that what has happened once cannot happen again."

"In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived except in relation to a background."

"In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material."

"In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness."

"Indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho-hydraulics?s."

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit?-to the conquest of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature."

"In this respect, the Chinese written language has a slight advantage over our own, and is perhaps symptomatic of a different way of thinking. It is still linear, still a series of abstractions taken in one at a time. But its written signs are a little closer to life than spelled words because they are essentially pictures, and, as a Chinese proverb puts it, One showing is worth a hundred sayings. Compare, for example, the ease of showing someone how to tie a complex knot with the difficulty of telling him how to do it in words alone."

"Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one?s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world."

"It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description."

"It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. It is in vain that engineers devise faster and easier means of travel if the new sights that we see are merely sorted and understood in terms of old prejudices. It is in vain that we get the power of the atom if we are just to continue in the rut of blowing people up."

"It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present. It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. It is in vain that engineers devise faster and easier means of travel if the new sights that we see are merely sorted and understood in terms of old prejudices. It is in vain that we get the power of the atom if we are just to continue in the rut of blowing people up."

"Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness?an act of trust in the unknown. An ardent Jehovah?s Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency."

"It is easy to see that most of the acts which, in conventional morals, are called evil can be traced to the divided mind. By far the greater part of these acts come from exaggerated desires, desires for things which are not even remotely necessary for the health of mind and body, granting that "health" is a relative term. Such outlandish and insatiable desires come into being because man is exploiting his appetites to give the "I" a sense of security."

"Individual feelings about death are conditioned by social attitudes, and it is doubtful that there is any one natural and inborn emotion connected with dying. For example, it used to be thought that childbirth should be painful, as a punishment for Original Sin or for having had so much fun conceiving the baby. For God had said to Eve and all her daughters, "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." Thus when everyone believed that in having a baby it was a woman's duty to suffer, women did their duty, and many still do. We were much surprised, therefore, to find women in "primitive" societies who could just squat down and give birth while working in the fields, bite the umbilical cord, wrap up the baby, and go their way. It wasn't that their women were tougher than ours, but just that they had a different attitude. For our own gynecologists have recently discovered that many women can be conditioned psychologically for natural and painless childbirth. The pains of labor are renamed "tensions," and the mother-to-be is given preparatory exercises in relaxing to tension and cooperating with it. Birth, they are told, is not a sickness. One goes to a hospital just in case anything should go wrong, though many avant-garde gynecologists will let their patients give birth at home."

"It is even now being recognized in the United States that the real danger of psychedelics is not so much neurological as political?-that ?turned-on? people are not interested in serving the power games of the present rulers. Looking at the successful men, they see completely boring lives."

"Isn?t it easy to see that this line is imaginary, and that it, and the witness behind it, are the same old faking process automatically learned in childhood? The same old cleft between the knower and the known? The same old split between the organism/environment and the organism?s feedback, or self-conscious mechanism?"

"It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions."

"It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I"."

"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance ? lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt."

"It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity."

"It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of symbols-words, numbers, signs, simple images (like squares and triangles), musical notes, letters, ideographs (as in Chinese), and scales for dividing and distinguishing variations of color or of tones. Such symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are the labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label. Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail."

"It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid."

"It just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious."

"It?s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way."

"Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they?ll say you?re crazy and you?re blasphemous, and they?ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ?My goodness, I?ve just discovered that I?m God,? they?ll laugh and say, ?Oh, congratulations, at last you found out."

"It seems that I know that I know. What I would like to see is the 'I' that knows me when I know that I know that I know."

"It?s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it?s dense, isn?t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you?re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don?t feel that we?re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually?if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning? you?re not something that?s a result of the big bang. You?re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as ?Mr. so-and- so, Ms. so-and-so, Mrs. so-and-so? I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I?m that, too. But we?ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it."

"Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency."

"Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior."

"Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time."

"Lao-tzu didn?t actually say very much more about the meaning of Tao. The Way of Nature, the Way of happening self-so, or, if you like, the very process of life, was something which he was much too wise to define. For to try to say anything definite about the Tao is like trying to eat your mouth: you can?t get outside it to chew it. To put it the other way round: anything you can chew is not your mouth."

"Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself."

"Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination."

"Let?s say (since in writing a book one has to say something) that reality or existence is a multidimensional and interwoven system of varying spectra of vibrations, and that man?s five senses are attuned only to very small bands of these spectra. That sounds very profound and may mean nothing at all, but in reading it one should attend to the sound of the words rather than their meaning. Then you will get my point."

"Life is a game, the first rule of which is that IT IS NOT A GAME."

"Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever."

"Let?s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfil all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could perceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say ?Well, that was pretty great. But now let?s have a surprise. Let?s have a dream which isn?t under control. Where something is going to happen to me that I don?t know what it?s going to be.? And you would dream that and come out and say ?Wow, that was a close shave, wasn?t it?? And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."

"Life is a series of urgent choices demanding firm commitment to this or to that."

"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present."

"Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death, and in which victory equals defeat."

"Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished."

"Life seems to resolve itself down to a tiny germ or nipple of sensitivity. I call it the Eenie-Weenie?a squiggling little nucleus that is trying to make love to itself and can never quite get there. The whole fabulous complexity of vegetable and animal life, as of human civilization, is just a colossal elaboration of the Eenie-Weenie trying to make the Eenie-Weenie. I am in love with myself, but cannot seek myself without hiding myself. As I pursue my own tail, it runs away from me. Does the amoeba split itself in two in an attempt to solve this problem?"

"Like a mighty army moves the Church of God. But this is no way for a gentle-man."

"Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves ? mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus"

"Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated."

"Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music?the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words?all evoking and playing upon each other."