Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once. Alan Watts More Quotes by Alan Watts More Quotes From Alan Watts Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved. Alan Watts buddhism loyal culture If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. Alan Watts paradox study writing But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent. Alan Watts intelligent men thinking If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside. Alan Watts track grateful people Chaos is always losing, but never defeated Alan Watts chaos defeated losing All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals. Alan Watts consciousness complicated people A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks. Alan Watts clock body culture To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch. Alan Watts inches ego life-is Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen. Alan Watts effort mind long 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. Alan Watts bangs cutting years Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery. Alan Watts normal lonely islands We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy. Alan Watts stars fire running 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 ocean reality moving Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure. Alan Watts perfection games art You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are. Alan Watts trying mean reality What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed. Alan Watts movement people needs If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now! Alan Watts cells organization race You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe. Alan Watts realizing flower long We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Alan Watts suffering feelings people But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. Alan Watts ink men reality
