Alan Watts
c/alan-watts
The largest collection of talks by Alan Watts — the British-American philosopher who made Eastern wisdom accessible through witty and profound teachings.
c/alan-watts
The largest collection of talks by Alan Watts — the British-American philosopher who made Eastern wisdom accessible through witty and profound teachings.
Memorable moments captured from Alan Watts transcripts and documents
“So then, if you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death, or shall I say death implies life, you can conceive yourself. You can not conceive but feel yourself not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on sufferance on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”
“I remember when I was a boy we had a common saying: talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Now obviously if I talk all the time I don't hear what anyone else has to say. And so in exactly the same way if I think all the time that is to say if I talk to myself all the time I don't have anything to think about except thoughts and I'm never in relationship with reality. All right now that's the first basic reason for meditation.”
“It's usually and popularly understood that what happens to you, either fortunate or unfortunate, is the result of good or bad deeds in a previous life. Well that's popular superstition. The real meaning of karma, the word in sanskrit means simply doing, and if I say of an event it is your karma it is saying it is your doing.”
“And this is not an anti intellectual attitude. The ordinary simple person is just as bamboozled by thinking. As a university professor, you can think intellectually in a no think way. That's the art. It doesn't mean not to any thoughts at all. It means not to be fooled by thoughts, not to be hypnotized by the forms of speech and images that we have for the world, not to be hypnotized by them into thinking that that is the way the world really is. So if I say this is a fan, it isn't to begin with fan is a noise and this doesn't make the noise fan but just whoosh. But it can be many other things than a fan. It could be a backscratcher, very well, all sorts of things. Don't let words limit the possibilities of life. Actually this fan has an inscription on it written by a Zen master who is a hundred years old and it says: I don't understand, I don't know anything about it.”
“That belief is as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith, because belief is really wishing it's from the anglo Saxon root Leif to wish and belief, stated, say in the creed, is a fervent hope that the universe will turn out to be thus and so. And in this sense therefore belief precludes the possibility of faith, because faith is openness to truth, to reality, whatever it may turn out to be.”