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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan Watts
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Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
Author
Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
Videographer
Writer
Kent
England
Metaphysical
Exploring
Buddhism
Yoga
Looking
Universe
Inspirational
Aperture
Life
Wellness
More quotes by Alan Watts
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
Alan Watts
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
Alan Watts
You can't have something without nothing.
Alan Watts
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Alan Watts
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
Alan Watts
That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
Alan Watts
They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.
Alan Watts
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
Alan Watts
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
Alan Watts
To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
Alan Watts
We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self.
Alan Watts
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 instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
Alan Watts
Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
Alan Watts
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan Watts
To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Alan Watts
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
Alan Watts
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
Alan Watts
I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
Alan Watts
