Quote

The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

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
Ego
Separate
Tests
Stand
Hallucination
Hallucinations
Biological

More quotes by Alan Watts

Image
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
Alan Watts
Image
There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
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
Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?
Alan Watts
Image
How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
Alan Watts
Image
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
Alan Watts
Image
You can't get wet from the word 'water.'
Alan Watts
Image
Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan Watts
Image
Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.
Alan Watts
Image
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
Image
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
Alan Watts
Image
One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Alan Watts
Image
The source of all light is in the eye.
Alan Watts
Image
Everything is perpetually becoming new.
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
The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.
Alan Watts
Image
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Alan Watts
Image
For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts
Image
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts
Image
The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.
Alan Watts