Quote

The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.

Alan Watts

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Experience
Present
Everyday
Become
Seeing
Entire
States
Existence
Ultimate
Dissolve
Believe
State
Universal
Pretentious
Would
Point
Laughing
Passes
World
Happiness
Consciousness
Immediate
Universe
Joy
Nonsense
Business
Serious
Laughter

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
Alan Watts
Image
For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Image
We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
Alan Watts
Image
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
Alan Watts
Image
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
Alan Watts
Image
Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
Alan Watts
Image
When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
Alan Watts
Image
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
Alan Watts
Image
... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
Alan Watts
Image
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
Alan Watts
Image
There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
Alan Watts
Image
But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.
Alan Watts
Image
The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
Alan Watts
Image
If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
Alan Watts