Alan Watts Wisdom the Book

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Biography ...In his autobiography In My Own Way, Watts writes: "I am an unrepentant sensualist," immoderately loving sex, fine cuisine, wine and other alcohol, cigars and pipes, and beautifully-bound books, and also gardens, oceans and forests. He remained attracted "to being a no-strings attached Taoist wanderer in the mountains." ...

Description ...“You completely miss the point about Alan Watts!” Shunryu Suzuki fumed with a sudden intensity. “You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva”...The role of Alan Watts expired in 1973 and this book is only to help preserve the wisdom of his spirit, so that others may discover their own truth...

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The Alan Watts Story

While many in the 60's played the stock market and paid their mortgages, Alan Watts lived aboard a colorful houseboat, writing, speaking, and inspiring a generation to re-assess their values. For more than forty years, Alan Watts earned a reputation as a foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophies for the West. Beginning at age sixteen, when he wrote essay for the journal of the Buddhist Lodge in London, he developed an audience of millions who were enriched through his books, tape recordings, radio, television, and public lectures. In all, Watts wrote more than twenty-five books and recorded hundreds of lectures and seminars, all building toward a personal philosophy that he shared in complete candor and joy with his readers and listeners throughout the world. His overall works have presented a model of individuality and self-expression that can be matched by few philosophers. His life and work reflects an astonishing adventure: he was an editor, Anglican priest, graduate dean, broadcaster, author, lecturer, and entertainer. He had fascinations for archery, calligraphy, cooking, chanting, and dancing, and still was completely comfortable hiking alone in the wilderness. He held a Master's Degree in Theology from Sudbury-Western Theological Seminary and an Honorary DD from the University of Vermont in recognition of his work in the field of comparative religions. He held fellowships from Harvard University and the Bollingen Foundation, and was Episcopal Chaplain at Northwestern University during the Second World War. He became professor and dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, made the television series "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" for National Educational Television, and served as a visiting consultant for psychiatric institutions and hospitals, and for the United States Air Force. In the mid-sixties he traveled widely with his students in Japan, and visited Burma, Ceylon, and India.

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Alan Watts Wisdom

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Alan Watts: What to tell children about God and The Universe

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. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side by side with white, or white unless side by side with black. In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn’t, for if the world went on and on without rest forever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don’t. So because it doesn’t get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It’s like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it’s always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn’t always hide in the same place. God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, He has no one but himself to play with. But He gets over this difficulty by pretending that He is not Himself. This is His way of hiding from Himself. He pretends that He is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way He has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when He wakes up they will disappear. Now when God plays hide and pretends that He is you and I, He does it so well that it takes Him a long time to remember where and how He hid Himself. But that’s the whole fun of it-just what He wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find Himself out too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be Himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self-the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isn’t shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn’t any outside to Him. . . . The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as ‘He’ and not ’she,’ God isn’t a man or a woman. I didn’t say ‘it’ because we usually say ‘it’ for things that aren’t alive. God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes, and you certainly can’t bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. 5

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that He isn’t really doing this to anyone but Himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

~Alan Watts

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..."And human beings are so unbelievably stupid, that they confused money with wealth. And they don't realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that meters are a measure of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that get into unbelievable trouble, in exactly the same way time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion. And we keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this. And as we sit and watch the clock, supposing you are working, are you watching the clock? If you are, what are you waiting for. Time off. Five o'clock. We can go home and have fun. Yeah, fun. What are you going to do when you get home? Have fun? Or are you going to watch TV, which is an electronic reproduction of life which doesn't even smell of anything. And eat a TV dinner which is a kind of a warmed over airline nastiness until you just get tired and have to go to sleep. You know, the great society. This is our problem, you see. We are not alive, we are not awake. We are not living in the present." ~Alan Watts...

...“As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can't get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says 'That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge'." ~Alan Watts...

..."The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?" ~Alan Watts...

...“You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate 'You'. The only real 'You' is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For 'You' is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.” ~Alan Watts...

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...“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it 'objective,' that is, separate from 'I.' But why are we trying to be separate from fear? Because we are afraid. In other words, fear is trying to separate itself from fear, as if one could fight fire with fire." ~Alan Watts...

...“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.” ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."The snow is falling on the windowsill. Is this the activity of God? Maybe. But if anyone watches it in order to see God he will surely be disappointed. 'No man hath seen God.' No, and in looking for God he may fail to see the snow. 'Thou art Brahman!´ But if you look in yourself in order to find Brahman, you will be very disappointed indeed. Yet all this trouble has started because people have taken a simple device much too far. The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.

Yet how do we arrive at the state where to watch the snow falling is so much one with God that we need no more introduce God than put red paint on the roses? Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already watching the snow? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry. What's wrong with watching the snow or the kettle that anyone should want to arrive at a state? It is possible that any ordinary moron can do this just as well, and why not go him one better? How splendid is his ignorance! Like the stones, the grass, and the wind, he has Enlightenment without knowing it, and cannot appreciate his good fortune. Yet, he too, is a so-whatter, for he asks 'So what?' when others go questioning for God. He is not free to watch the snow because he can do nothing else, and especially because he does not appreciate his freedom.

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But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God in another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street. And you are free not only because you have once been a so-whatter, but also because you have been living in this abandonment all the time, without knowing it. If you had actually to get into it, to arrive at a state of abandonment where you had not previously been, you would not be free for this would involve going somewhere, arriving tomorrow at a place where you were not yesterday. And tomorrow never comes." ~Alan Watts...

..."The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be... The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought...

What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words, but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.

The timid mind shuts this window with a bang, and is silent and thoughtless about what it does not know in order to chatter the more about what it thinks it knows. It fills up the uncharted spaces with mere repetitions of what has already been explored. But the open mind knows that the most minutely explored territories have not really been known at all, but only marked and measured a thousand times over. And the fascinating mystery of what it is that we mark and measure must in the end 'tease us out of thought' until the mind forgets to circle and to pursue its own process, and becomes aware that to be at this moment is pure miracle.

In ways that differ but little, this is the last word of Western and Eastern wisdom alike. The Hindu Upanishads say: 'He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those to do not know him at all.'

Goethe says it in words which, to the modern mind, may be plainer: 'The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher

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can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit'." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom Of Insecurity...

..."Humanity is a species with amnesia, we have not only lost touch with the true roots to BEing human, we have been deceived into believing in systems, religions, and values that go against the very nature of BEing human. Very few of us question the origins of current societies, or even the nature of ourself...We have forgotten to notice that just like in our dreams, most of our life is lead by our UNconsciousness. Only the One who shines a light on their own shadow of darkness, can ever get a glimpse of who they really ARE. We tend to focus on the figure and ignore the background, yet one does not arise without the other. The great mystery of life is not discovered in that which we do not Know, the great mystery lies in SEEing what we ignore." ~DMT...

..."But the reality underneath physical existence, or which really is physical existence--because in my philosophy there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual. These are absolutely out-ofdate categories. It's all process; it isn't 'stuff' on the one hand and 'form' on the other. It's just pattern-life is pattern. It is a dance of energy. And so I will never invoke spooky knowledge. That is, that I've had a private revelation or that I have sensory vibrations going on a plane which you don't have. Everything is standing right out in the open, it's just a question of how you look at it. So you do discover when you realize this, the most extraordinary thing that I never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as you look around you. So far so good. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now that the experience you are having that you call ordinary everyday consciousness--pretending you're not it--that experience is exactly the same thing as 'it.' There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery.

In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating on a skinless drum. No light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a 11

soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything.

But in the mythology that we sold ourselves on at the end of the 19th century, when people discovered how big the universe was, and that we live on a little planet in a solar system on the edge of the galaxy, which is a minor galaxy, everybody thought, 'Uuuuugh, we're really unimportant after all. God isn't there and doesn't love us, and nature doesn't give a damn.' And we put ourselves down. But actually, it's this funny little microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that's way out somewhere, who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe out of what otherwise would be mere quanta. There's jazz going on. But you see, this ingenious little organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism, on this little planet, is what the whole show is growing there, and so realizing it's own presence. Does it through you, and you're IT." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." ~Alan Watts...

..."Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds IT." ~Alan Watts...

..."So then, here's the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there is the central Self, you could call It God, you could call It anything you like. And Its all of us. Its playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever, everywhere and anywhere.

And Its playing the game of hide and seek with Itself. It gets lost, It gets involved in the farthest out adventures, but in the end It always wakes up, and comes back to Itself. And when you're ready to wake 12

up, you're gonna wake up. And if you're not ready, your gonna stay pretending that you're just a poor little me." ~Alan Watts...

..."In the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions we think of God not only as a monarch but as the maker of the world, and, as a result of that, we look upon the world as an artifact, a sort of machine, created by a great engineer. There's a different conception in India, where the world is not seen as an artifact, but as a drama. And therefore God is not the maker and architect of the universe but the actor of it, and is playing all the parts at once, and this connects up with the idea of each one of us as persons, because a person is a mask, from the Latin persona, the mask worn by the actors in Greco-Roman drama. So this is an entirely different conception of the world, and as I think I shall be able to show you, it makes an amazing amount of sense.

So we start with the premise that you are God, and you don't know how you grow your body, how you make your nervous system work, or how you manage to emerge in this environment of nature. All this is unknown to you, the you that is not you, the you that is not the ego. This is God—that is to say, not the cosmic boss, but the fundamental ground of being, the reality that always was, is, and will be, that lies at the basis of reality. That's you." ~Alan Watts, Cosmic Drama...

..."And the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer. The rocket--you know, compensation for the sexually inadequate male. So we're going to conquer space. You know we're in space already, way out. If anybody cared to be sensitive and let outside space come to you, you can, if your eyes are clear enough. Aided by telescopes, aided by radio astronomy, aided by all the kinds of sensitive instruments we can devise. We're as far out in space as we're ever going to get. But, y'know, sensitivity isn't the pitch. Especially in the WASP culture of the United States. We define manliness in terms of aggression, you see, because we're a little bit frightened as to whether or not we're really men. And so we put on this great show of being a tough guy. It's completely unnecessary. If you have what it takes, you don't need to put on that show. And you don't need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature? Because after all, you ARE a symptom of nature. You, as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in exactly the same way an apple grows off an apple tree.

So let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using 'apple' as a verb. And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples. And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in. Just as spots on somebody's skin is symptomatic of chicken pox. Just as hair 13

on a head is symptomatic of what's going on in the organism. But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths--the ceramic and the automatic--not to feel that we belong in the world. So our popular speech reflects it. You say 'I came into this world.' You didn't. You came out of it. You say 'Face facts.' We talk about 'encounters' with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely alien agencies. And the average person has the sensation that he is a someone that exists inside a bag of skin. The center of consciousness that looks out at this thing, and what the hell's it going to do to me? You see? 'I recognize you, you kind of look like me, and I've seen myself in a mirror, and you look like you might be people.' So maybe you're intelligent and maybe you can love, too. Perhaps you're all right, some of you are, anyway. You've got the right color of skin, or you have the right religion, or whatever it is, you're OK. But there are all those people over in Asia, and Africa, and they may not really be people. When you want to destroy someone, you always define them as 'unpeople.' Not really human. Monkeys, maybe. Idiots, maybe. Machines, maybe, but not people. So we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory that you, yourself, exist only inside your skin." ~Alan Watts...

..."If you awake 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. Not conceive but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can really 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. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satchitananda. Which means sat, that which IS, chit, that which is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss. In other words, that which exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy." ~Alan Watts...

..."For when the scientist investigates matter or stuff, he describes what he finds in terms of structured pattern. When one comes to think of it, what other terms could he use? The sensation of stuff arises only when we are confronted with patterns so confused or so closely knit that we cannot make them out. To the naked eye a distant galaxy looks like a solid star and a piece of steel like a continuous and impenetrable mass of matter. But when we change the level of magnification, the galaxy assumes the clear structure of a spiral nebula and the piece of steel turns out to be a system of electrical impulses whirling in relatively vast spaces. The idea of stuff expresses no more than the experience of coming to a limit at which our sense or our instruments are not fine enough to make out the pattern.

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Something of the same kind happens when the scientist investigates any unit of patterns so distinct to the naked eye that it has been considered a separate entity. He finds that the more carefully he observes and describes it, the more he is also describing the environment in which it moves and other patterns to which it seems inseparably related. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has so well expressed it, the isolation of individual atomic patterns 'is merely an intellectual dodge'." ~Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West...

..."The real you is not a puppet, which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe…You are something the whole universe is doing the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing." ~Alan Watts...

..."Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness...The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics and economics, in art, philosophy, and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at the impossible and futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages.

Religious ideas are like words--of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word 'water' is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called 'God'...The reality which corresponds to 'God' and 'eternal life' is honest, above-board, plain, and open for all to see. But the seeing requires a correction of mind, just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes.

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Belief clings, but faith lets go...Our minds have been prepared for it by this very collapse of the beliefs in which we have sought security. From a point of view strictly, if strangely, in accord with certain religious traditions, this disappearance of the old rocks and absolutes is no calamity, but rather a blessing. It almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window.

To discover the ultimate Reality of life--the Absolute, the eternal, God--you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. These idols are not just crude images, such as the mental picture of God as an old gentleman on a golden throne. They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of the mind and heart to reality. The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it.

'Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit'...What religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God. By the same law of reversed effort, we discover the 'infinite' and the 'absolute,' not by straining to escape from the finite and relative world, but by the most complete acceptance of its limitations. Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the 'mystery of the universe' only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."I think of a corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so reassuring—nothing around here but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva,that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I were to step up and say, 'Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool me.' But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be. When people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the unconscious—'You know....You know!'" ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness…

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..."Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don't grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be." ~Alan Watts...

..."So then, in Buddhism, change is emphasized. First, to unsettle people who think that they can achieve permanence by hanging on to life. And it seems that the preacher is wagging his finger at them and saying 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'...So all the preachers together say 'Don't cling to those things.' So then, as a result of that, and now I'm going to speak in strictly Buddhist terms, the follower of the way of buddha seeks deliverance from attachment to the world of change. He seeks nirvana, the state beyond change, which the buddha called the unborn, the unoriginated, the uncreated, and the unformed. But then, you see, what he finds out is in seeking a state beyond change, seeking nirvana as something away from 'samsara', which is the name for the wheel, he is still seeking something permanent. And so, as Buddhism went on, they thought about this a great deal. And this very point was the point of division between the two great schools of Buddhism, which in the south, as I explained, were Theravada, the doctrine of the Thera, the elders, sometimes known, disrespectfully, as the Hinayana. 'Yana' means 'a vehicle, a conveyance, or a ferryboat.' This is a yana, and I live on a ferryboat, because that's my job. Then there is the other school of Buddhism, called the Mahayana. 'Maha' means 'great'; 'hina,' little. The great vehicle and the little vehicle.

Now, what is this? The Mahayanas say 'You're little just get a few people who are very, very tough ascetics, and takes them across the shore to nirvana.' But the great vehicle shows people that nirvana is not different from everyday life. So that when you have reached nirvana, if you think 'Now I have attained it, now I have succeeded, now I have caught the secret of the universe, and I am at peace,' you have only a false peace. You have become a stone buddha. You have a new illusion of the changeless. So it is said that such a person is a pratyeka-buddha. That means 'private buddha.' 'I've got it all for myself.' And in contrast with this kind of pratyeka- buddha, who gains nirvana and stays there, the Mahayanas use the word 'bodhisattva'. 'Sattva' means 'essential principle'; 'bodhi,' awakening. A person whose essential being is awakened. The word used to mean 'junior buddha,' someone on the way to becoming a buddha. But in the course of time, it came to mean someone who had attained buddhahood, who had reached nirvana, but who returns into everyday life to deliver everyday beings. This is the popular idea of a bodhisattva--a savior." ~Alan Watts... 18

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…"Free from clutching at themselves the hands can handle; free from looking after themselves the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself thought can think. IN such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished." ~Alan Watts "The Wisdom of Insecurity"

..."Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever." ~Alan Watts...

..."Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of dreams, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights, of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say 'Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's gonna be.' And you would dig that and come out of that and say 'Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?'. And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today." ~Alan Watts...

..."You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things which 'happen' to us, rather than things that we do. In other words,we don't assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape. You can say to a beautiful girl, 'Gee, you're gorgeous,' and she'd say 'How like a man, all you think about is bodies. My body was given to me by my parents, and I'm not responsible for it, and I'd like to be admired for my self and not for my chassis.' And so I'd tell her 'You poor little chauffeur. You've disowned your own being and identified yourself not being associated with your own body.' I agree that if she had a terrible body with a lousy figure, she might want to feel that way, but if she is a fine-looking human being, she should get with it and not disown herself. But this happens again and again.

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So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator, here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

..."For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit. This idea doesn't work anymore. Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question 'What is matter?' They began that way. They wanted to know, what is the fundamental substance of the world? And the more they asked that question, the more they realized the couldn't answer it, because if you're going to say what matter is, you've got to describe it in terms of behavior, that is to say in terms of form, in terms of pattern. You tell what it does, you describe the smallest shapes of it which you can see. Do you see what happens? You look, say, at a piece of stone, and you want to say, 'Well, what is this piece of stone made of?' You take your microscope and you look at it, and instead of just this block of stuff, you see ever so many tinier shapes. Little crystals. So you say, 'Fine, so far so good. Now what are these crystals made of?' And you take a more powerful instrument, and you find that they're made of molecules, and then you take a still more powerful instrument to find out what the molecules are made of, and you begin to describe atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles. But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff. Because there isn't any.

What happens is this: 'Stuff' is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus. Fuzzy. Stuff--the idea of stuff is that it is undifferentiated, like some kind of goo. And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy. When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern. But when you want to change the level of magnification, and go in closer and closer and closer, you get fuzzy again before you get clear. So every time you get fuzzy, you go through thinking there's some kind of stuff there. But when you get clear, you see a shape. So all that we can talk about is patterns. We never, never can talk about the 'stuff' of which these patterns are supposed to be made, because you don't really have to suppose that there is any. It's enough to talk about the world in terms of patterns. It describes anything that can be described, and you don't really have to suppose that there is some stuff that constitutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the 21

essence of pots. And so for this reason, you don't really have to suppose that the world is some kind of helpless, passive, unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to inform and make into intelligent shapes. So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff-potted clay--but pattern. A self-moving, self-designing pattern. A dance. And our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with this." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. 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. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning— you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr so-and- so, Ms soand-so, Mrs so-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too, but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from IT." ~Alan Watts...

..."What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you 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. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all." ~Alan Watts...

..."Now the great deal of talk about the difficulty of action, or the difficulty of concentration, is sheer nonsense. If we are sitting together at a meal, and I say to you, 'Please pass the salt' –- you just do it, and there is no difficulty about it. You do not stop to consider the right method. You do not trouble yourself with the problem of how, when you have picked the saltshaker up, you are going to be able to concentrate on it long enough to bring it to my end of the table. Now there is absolutely no difference between this and concentrating the mind’s attention to see into the nature of reality. If you can concentrate the mind for two seconds, you can do it for two minutes, and you can do it for two hours. Of course, if you want to *make* this kind of thing horribly difficult, you begin to think about whether you are concentrating, about how long you have concentrated, and about how much longer you are going to keep it up, All this is totally off the point. Concentrate for one second. If, at the end of this time, 22

your mind has wandered off, concentrate for another second, and then another. Nobody ever has to concentrate for more than one second –- this one." ~Alan Watts...

..."On the other hand, the supernatural and absolute world consists of the mysterious reality which we have so named, classified, and divided. This is not a product of the mind. But there is no way of defining or describing what it is. At every moment we are aware of it, and it is our awareness. We feel and sense it, and it is our feelings and sensations. Yet trying to know and define it is like trying to make a knife cut itself. What is this? This is a rose. But 'a rose' is a noise. What is a noise? A noise is an impact of air waves on the eardrum. Then a rose is an impact of air waves on the eardrum? No, a rose is a rose … is a rose is a rose is a rose.…

Definition is simply making a one-to-one correspondence between groups of sense data and noises, but because noises are sense data, the attempt is ultimately circular. The real world which both provides these data and the organs wherewith to sense them remains unfathomably mysterious.

From this point of view we need have no difficulty in making sense of some of the ancient scriptures. The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, begins: 'All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.' This is, in effect, the same statement that opens St. John’s Gospel: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things were made by him (the Word), and without him was not anything made that was made.' By thoughts, or mental words, we distinguish or 'make' things. Without thoughts, there are no 'things'; there is just undefined reality.

If you want to be poetic, you can liken this undefined reality to the Father, because it is the origin or basis of 'things.' You can call thought the Son 'of one substance with the Father'—the Son 'by whom all things were made,' the Son who must be crucified if we are to see the Father, just as we must look at reality without words to see it as it is. Thereafter the Son rises from the dead and returns to heaven, and, likewise, when we see reality as it is we are free to use thought without being fooled by it. It 'returns to heaven' in the sense that we recognize it as part of reality, and not something standing outside it.

Otherwise, we can use the negative, metaphysical language about this undefined reality. It is the infinite, not the definite. It is the eternal, the ever-present, not the past and future, not the conventions 23

of thought and time. It is the unchanging in the sense that the idea of change is but another word, another definition, which the reality called change surpasses. Obviously, if all movement is relative, there is no absolute movement. It would be meaningless to say that all bodies in the universe are moving uniformly at ten thousand miles per minute, because 'all' has excluded any other body with respect to which they could be said to move.

It is easy to see that this kind of language, whether in its religious or metaphysical forms, can lead to all manner of misunderstanding. For when the mind is divided, and 'I' wants to get away from present experience, the whole notion of a supernatural world is its happy hide-out. The 'I' is resisting an unhappy change, and so clings to the 'unchanging' Absolute, forgetting that this Absolute is also the 'unfixed.' When life provides some bitter experience, the 'I' can only support it with the guarantee that it is part of the plan of a loving Father-God. But this very guarantee makes it impossible to realize the 'love of God,' which, as is well known, requires the giving up of 'I.'

The misunderstanding of religious ideas is vividly illustrated in what men have made of the doctrine of immortality, heaven, and hell. But now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone. The moment is the 'door of heaven,' the 'straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life,' because there is no room in it for the separate 'I.' In this experience there is no one experiencing the experience. The 'rich man' cannot get through this door because he carries too much baggage; he is clinging to the past and the future." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."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...

..."We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a

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fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas." ~Alan Watts...

..."Awareness of the 'eternal now' comes about by the same principle as the clarity of hearing and seeing and the proper freedom of the breath. Clear sight has nothing to do with trying to see; it is just the realization that the eyes will take in every detail all by themselves, for so long as they are open one can hardly prevent the light from reaching them. In the same way, there is no difficulty in being fully aware of the eternal present as soon as it is seen that one cannot possibly be aware of anything else– that in concrete fact there is no past or future. Making an effort to concentrate on the instantaneous moment implies at once that there are other moments. But they are nowhere to be found, and in truth one rests as easily in the eternal present as the eyes and ears respond to light and sound." ~Alan Watts...

..."This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves,' the universe 'peoples.' Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated 'egos' inside bags of skin.

The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world 'outside' us is largely hostile. We are forever 'conquering' nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order." ~Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are...

..."This is the typical human problem. The object of dread may not be an operation in the immediate future. It may be the problem of next month’s rent, of a threatened war or social disaster, of being able to save enough for old age, or of death at the last. This 'spoiler of the present' may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the 25

present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been 'cleared up' and the future is bright with promise.

There can be no doubt that the power to remember and predict, to make an ordered sequence out of a helter-skelter chaos of disconnected moments, is a wonderful development of sensitivity. In a way it is the achievement of the human brain, giving man the most extraordinary powers of survival and adaptation to life. But the way in which we generally use this power is apt to destroy all its advantages. For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.

What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become 'now.'

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world." ~Alan Watts...

..."It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved spacetime continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of 'doing it' from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?" ~Alan Watts, THE BOOK On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are...

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..."See, when we were children, we were taught '1, 2, 3,' and 'A, B, C,' but we weren't set down on our mothers' knees and taught the game of black and white. That's the thing that was left out of all our educations, the game that I was trying to explain with these wave diagrams. That life is not a conflict between opposites, but a polarity. The difference between a conflict and a polarity is simply--when you think about opposite things, we sometimes use the expression, 'These two things are the poles apart.' You say, for example, about someone with whom you totally disagree, 'I am the poles apart from this person.' But your very saying that gives the show away. Poles. Poles are the opposite ends of one magnet. And if you take a magnet, say you have a magnetized bar, there's a north pole and a south pole. Okay, chop off the south pole, move it away. The piece you've got left creates a new south pole. You never get rid of the south pole. So the point about a magnet is, things may be the poles apart, but they go together. You can't have the one without the other. We are imagining a diagram of the universe in which the idea of polarity is the opposite ends of the diameter, north and south, you see? That's the basic idea of polarity, but what we're trying to imagine is the encounter of forces that come from absolutely opposed realms, that have nothing in common. When we say of two personality types that they're the poles apart. We are trying to think eccentrically, instead of concentrically. And so in this way, we haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center. They imply each other, so that you wouldn't know the one without the other.

Now I'm not saying that that's bad, that's fun. You're playing the game that you don't know that black and white imply each other. Therefore you think that black possibly might win, that the light might go out, that the sound might never be heard again. That there could be the possibility of a universe of pure tragedy, of endless, endless darkness. Wouldn't that be awful? Only you wouldn't know it was awful, if that's what happened. The point that we all forget is that the black and the white go together, and there isn't the one without the other. At the same time, you see, we forget, in the same way as we forget that these two go together.

The other thing we forget, is that self and other go together, in just the same way as the two poles of a magnet. You say 'I, myself; I am me; I am this individual; I am this particular, unique instance.' What is other is everything else. All of you, all of the stars, all of the galaxies, way, way out into infinite space, that's other. But in the same way as black implies white, self implies other. And you don't exist without all that, so that where you get these polarities, you get this sort of difference, that what we call explicitly, or exoterically, they're different. But implicitely, esoterically, they're one." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."So this doctrine of the void is really the basis of the whole Mahayana movement in Buddhism. It's marvelous. The void is, of course, in Buddhist imagery, symbolized by a mirror, because a mirror has no 27

color and yet reflects all colors. When this man I talked of, Hui-Neng, said that you shouldn't just try to cultivate a blank mind, what he said was this: the void, sunyata, is like space. Now, space contains everything--the mountains, the oceans, the stars, the good people and the bad people, the plants, the animals, everything. The mind in us--the true mind--is like that. You will find that when Buddhists use the word 'mind'--they've several words for 'mind,' but I'm not going into the technicality at the moment- they mean space. See, space is your mind. It's very difficult for us to see that because we think we're IN space, and look out at it. There are various kinds of space. There's visual space--distance-- there is audible space--silence--there is temporal space--as we say, between times--there is musical space--socalled distance between intervals, or distance between tones, rather; quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space. There's tangible space. But all these spaces, you see, are the mind. They're the dimensions of consciousness." ~Alan Watts, The World as Emptiness...

..."I remember when I was almost a child in the Pyrenees in the southwest of France. We went way up in this gorgeous silence of the mountains, but in the distance we could hear the bells on the cows clanking. And somehow those tiny sounds brought out the silence. And so in the same way, slight permanence's bring out change. And they give you this very strange sense. 'Yugen' The mystery of change. You know, in Elliot's poem, 'The Four Quartets,' where he says 'The dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark, distinguished families, members of the book of the director of directors, everybody, they all go into the dark.' Life IS life, you see, because, just because it's always disappearing. Supposing suddenly, by some kind of diabolical magic, I could say 'zzzip!' and every one of you would stay the same age forever. You'd be like Madam Trusseau's wax works. It'd be awful! In a thousand years from now, what beautiful hags you would be.

So, the trouble is, that we have one-sided minds, and we notice the wave of life when it is at its peak or crest. We don't notice it when it's at the trough, not in the ordinary way. It's the peaks that count. Take a buzzsaw: what seems important to us is the tips of the teeth. They do the cutting, not the valleys between the teeth. But see, you couldn't have tips of teeth without the valleys between. Therefore the saw wouldn't cut without both tips and V- shaped valleys. But we ignore that. We don't notice the valleys so much as we notice the mountains. Valleys point down, mountains point up, and we prefer things that point up, because up is good and down is bad.

But seriously, we don't blame the peaks for being high and the valleys for being low. But it is so, you see, that we ignore the valley aspect of things, and so all wisdom begins by emphasizing the valley aspect as distinct from the peak aspect. We pay plenty of attention to the peak aspect, that's what captures out attention, but we somehow screen out the valley aspect. But that makes us very uncomfortable. It

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seems we want and get pleasure from looking at the peaks, but actually this denies our pleasure, because secretly we know that every peak is followed by a valley. The valley of the shadow of death.

And we're always afraid, because we're not used to looking at valleys, because we're not used to living with them, the represent to us the strange and threatening unknown. Maybe we're afraid the principle of the valley will conquer, and the peaks will be overwhelmed. Maybe death is stronger than life, because life always seems to require an effort; death is something into which you slide effortlessly. Maybe nothing will overcome something in the end. Wouldn't that be awful? And so we resist change, ignorant of the fact that change is life, and that 'nothing' is invariably the adverse face of 'something'." ~Alan Watts, The World as Emptiness...

..."Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit--to the 'conquest' of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. The result is that we are eroding and destroying our environment, spreading Los Angelization instead of civilization. This is the major threat overhanging Western, technological culture, and no amount of reasoning or doom-preaching seems to help. We simply do not respond to the prophetic and moralizing techniques of conversion upon which Jews and Christians have always relied. But people have an obscure sense of what is good for them-call it 'unconscious self-healing,' 'survival instinct,' 'positive growth potential,' or what you will. Among the educated young there is therefore a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole 'hip' subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young people to correct the self-destroying course of industrial civilization." ~Alan Watts...

..."But we're afraid, you see, to know that we don't go wrong, because we think that if we do that, we will lose our morals. But the only reason why people lose their morals is that they're scared. They can't trust life, or they can't trust others. They think that if you die or something like that, it will be terrible, it will be awful, it will be the end. So the fights. So the desperate efforts to make it all in one life, and that's greed. That's excessive protections of one's security. But if you are really open, and you start looking around, you suddenly see that you're in a world where everything is absolutely incredible. Not simply lovely things like these blossoms here, but also the dust on the floor, little wiggles, cracks, and the 29

quality of light in things. That's what's so fascinating, the reflection of light on everything, because everything that exists is really a reflection of everything else. Reflection is ultimate. The reflection is a mirror, here, and when the curtain is drawn, it suddenly looks as if the Chrysler building is across the other side of the East River. You say, 'Well, it isn't really there, that's just a reflection.' But the Chrysler building on THAT side of the river is a reflection. Some reflection, but that's what it is. The whole world is just energy bouncing. What exists if it's not reflecting? That's the clue: reflection. The reflective life, the contemplatory life, is therefore wisdom." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

..."Now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone. The moment is the 'door of heaven,' the 'straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life,' because there is no room in it for the separate 'I'...Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between 'I' and 'now' has vanished-when there is just this 'now' and nothing else." ~Alan Watts...

..."The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe." ~Alan Watts...

...“Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death. To observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up— never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation. It’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.” ~Alan Watts...

..."For Gautama the “Awakened One” or Buddha (died c. 545 B.C.) lived at a time when the major Upanishads were already in existence, and their philosophy must be seen as the point of departure for his own teaching. It would be a serious mistake, however, to look upon the Buddha as the 'founder' or 'reformer' of a religion which came into being as some kind of organized revolt against Hinduism. For we are speaking of a time when there was no consciousness of 'religions,' when such terms as 'Hindu-ism' or 'Brahman-ism' would have meant nothing. There was simply a tradition, embodied in the orally transmitted doctrine of the Vedas and Upanishads, a tradition that was not specifically 'religious' in that 30

it involved a whole way of life and concerned everything from the methods of agriculture to the knowledge of the ultimate reality. The Buddha was acting in full accord with this tradition when he became a rishi or 'forest sage,' who had abandoned the life of the householder and divested himself of caste in order to follow a way of liberation. As with every other rishi, the method of his way of liberation had certain characteristic features,and his doctrine contained criticisms of men’s failure to practice the tradition which they professed.

Furthermore, he was being entirely traditional in his abandonment of caste and in accepting a following of casteless and homeless students. For the Indian tradition, even more than the Chinese, specifically encourages the abandonment of the conventional life at a certain age, after the duties of family and citizenship have been fulfilled. Relinquishment of caste is the outward and visible sign of the realization that one’s true state is 'unclassified' that one’s role or person is simply conventional and that one’s true nature is 'no-thing' and 'no-body.'

This realization was the crux of the Buddha’s experience of awakening (bodhi) which dawned upon him one night, as he sat under the celebrated Bo Tree at Gaya, after seven years of meditation in the forests. From the standpoint of Zen, this experience is the essential content of Buddhism, and the verbal doctrine is quite secondary to the wordless transmission of the experience itself from generation to generation. For seven years Gautama had struggled by the traditional means of yoga and tapas, contemplation and ascesis, to penetrate the cause of man’s enslavement to maya, to find release from the vicious circle of clinging-to-life (trishna) which is like trying to make the hand grasp itself. All his efforts had been in vain. The eternal atman, the real Self, was not to be found. However much he concentrated upon his own mind to find its root and ground, he found only his own effort to concentrate. The evening before his awakening he simply 'gave up,' relaxed his ascetic diet, and ate some nourishing food. Thereupon he felt at once that a profound change was coming over him. He sat beneath the tree, vowing never to rise until he had attained the supreme awakening, and-according to a tradition-sat all through the night until the first glimpse of the morning star suddenly provoked a state of perfect clarity and understanding. This was anuttara samyak sambodhi, 'unexcelled, complete awakening,' liberation from maya and from the everlasting Round of birth-and-death (samsara), which goes on and on for as long as a man tries in any way whatsoever to grasp at his own life." ~Alan Watts, The Way of Zen...

...“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” ~Alan Watts...

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..."In thinking of ourselves as divided into 'I' and 'me,' we easily forget that consciousness also lives because it is moving. It is as much a part and product of the stream of change as the body and the whole natural world. If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness—the thing you call 'I'—is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion. But because these experiences include memories, we have the impression that 'I' is something solid and still, like a tablet upon which life is writing a record.

Yet the 'tablet' moves with the writing finger as the river flows along with the ripples, so that memory is like a record written on water—a record, not of graven characters, but of waves stirred into motion by other waves which are called sensations and facts. The difference between 'I' and 'me' is largely an illusion of memory. In truth, 'I' is of the same nature as 'me.' It is part of our whole being, just as the head is part of the body. But if this is not realized, 'I' and 'me,' the head and the body, will feel at odds with each other. 'I,' not understanding that it too is part of the stream of change, will try to make sense of the world and experience by attempting to fix it.

We shall then have a war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. This war must be utterly futile and frustrating—a vicious circle—because it is a conflict between two parts of the same thing. It must lead thought and action into circles which go nowhere faster and faster. For when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake, who tries to eat his own tail. Ouroboros is the perennial symbol of all vicious circles, of every attempt to split our being asunder and make one part conquer the other.

Struggle as we may, 'fixing' will never make sense out of change. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."In its own way, each one of the arts which Zen has inspired gives vivid expression to the sudden or instantaneous quality of its view of the world. The momentariness of sumi paintings and haiku, and the total presence of mind required in cha-no-yu and kendo, bring out the real reason why Zen has always called itself the way of instantaneous awakening. It is not just that satori comes quickly and unexpectedly, all of a sudden, for mere speed has nothing to do with it. The reason is that 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.

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Until this has become clear, it seems that our life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than the infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the sensation of 'having no time,' of a world which hurries by so rapidly that it is gone before we can enjoy it. But through 'awakening to the instant' one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it is rather the past and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only through a series of grasps, one after another. Yet the superficiality of this consciousness is seen in the fact that it cannot and does not regulate even the human organism. For if it had to control the heartbeat, the breath, the operation of the nerves, glands, muscles, and sense organs, it would be rushing wildly around the body taking care of one thing after another, with no time to do anything else. Happily, it is not in charge, and the organism is regulated by the timeless 'original mind,' which deals with life in its totality and so can do ever so many 'things' at once.

However, it is not as if the superficial consciousness were one thing, and the 'original mind' another, for the former is a specialized activity of the latter. Thus the superficial consciousness can awaken to the eternal present if it stops grasping. But this does not come to pass by trying to concentrate on the present–an effort which succeeds only in making the moment seem ever more elusive and fleeting, ever more impossible to bring into focus. Awareness of the 'eternal now' comes about by the same principle as the clarity of hearing and seeing and the proper freedom of the breath. Clear sight has nothing to do with trying to see; it is just the realization that the eyes will take in every detail all by themselves, for so long as they are open one can hardly prevent the light from reaching them. In the same way, there is no difficulty in being fully aware of the eternal present as soon as it is seen that one cannot possibly be aware of anything else–that in concrete fact there is no past or future. Making an effort to concentrate on the instantaneous moment implies at once that there are other moments. But they are nowhere to be found, and in truth one rests as easily in the eternal present as the eyes and ears respond to light and sound." ~Alan Watts, The Way of Zen...

..."The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of-- Well, we'll call it mystical experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the world. And for a person who cannot contain it, it's like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyeka buddha 'private buddha'. He is one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again. And he's made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The 'Bodhisattva', you see, who doesn't go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes 34

back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too, he doesn't come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious act. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton's, 'but now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies the million masks of god.' And it's fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They're 'IT'. They're faces of the divine. And they look at you, and they say 'oh no, but I'm not divine. I'm just ordinary little me.' You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it's not, and saying it quite sincerely. And that's why, when you get up against a great guru, the Zen master, or whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say 'I have a problem, guru. I'm really mixed up, I don't understand,' he looks at you in this queer way, and you think 'oh dear me, he's reading my most secret thoughts. He's seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.' He isn't doing anything of the kind; he isn't even interested in such things. He's looking at, if I may use Hindu terminology, he's looking at Shiva, in you, saying 'my god, Shiva, won't you come off it?'" ~Alan Watts...

..."I think this is the most important thing in Jung, that he was able to point out, that to the degree you condemn others and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself, or at least of the potentiality of it. There can be Eichmanns and Hitlers and Himmlers just because there are people who are unconscious of their own dark sides, and they project that darkness outward into, say, Jews or Communists or whatever the enemy may be, and say there is the darkness, it is not in me, and therefore because the darkness is not in me i am justified, in annihilating the enemy weather it be with atom bombs or gas chambers or what not. But to the degree that a person becomes conscious that the evil is as much in himself as in the other, to this same degree he is not likely to project it on to some scapegoat, and commit the most criminal acts of violence upon other people. Now this is to my mind the primary thing that Jung saw, that in order to admit and really accept and understand the evil in oneself, one had to be able to do it without being an enemy to it. As he put it, you had to accept your own dark side...

This is a very striking example of Jung's power to comprehend and integrate points of view as well as psychological attitudes that seem on the surface to be completely antithetical. For example, even in his own work, when he was devoting himself to the study of eastern philosophy, he had some difficulty in comprehending the, let's say the Buddhistic, denial of the reality of the ego. But you can see that in practice, in what he was actually trying to get at, he was moving toward the same position which is intended in both the Hindu and the Buddhist philosophy about the nature of the ego. Just for example as the Hindu will say, that the 'I' principle in man is not really a separate ego but an expression of the universal life of Brahman or the god-head, so Jung is saying here that the development of ego in man is a true will of god, and that it is only by following the ego, and developing it to it's full extend that one 35

fulfills the function of this, you might say, temporary illusion in man's psychic life. For he goes on, he says here:

'When one has several times seen this development at work, one can no longer deny that what was evil has turned to good and that what seemed good kept alive the forces of evil. The arch-demon of egoism leads us along the royal road to that in-gathering which religious experience demands. What we observe here is a fundamental law of life: enantiodromia or 'conversion into the opposite'. And it is this that makes possible the reunion of the waring halves of the personality, and thereby brings the civil war to an end.'

In other words he was seeing that, as Blake said: 'a fool who persists in his folly will become wise.' That the development of egoism in man is not something to be overcome or better integrated by opposition to it, but by following it. It's almost, isn't it, the principle of judo: not overcoming what appears to be a hostile force by opposing it, but by swinging with the punch or rolling with the punch. And so by following the ego, the ego transcends itself, and in this moment of insight, the great westerner who comes out of a whole tradition of human personality which centers it upon the ego, upon individual separateness, by going along consistently with this principle comes to same position as the easterner. That is to say, to the point of view where one sees conflict which at first sight had seemed absolute, as resting a primordial unity and thereby attaining a profound, unshakable peace of the heart, which can nevertheless contain conflict. Not a peace that is simply static and lifeless but a peace that passes understanding." ~Alan Watts...

..."The pain of losing a loved one is something we all wish to never have to experience, yet it is apart of human nature, it is the life pulse and cycle of birth and death. Yet when a loved one is taken away from us prematurely, it can feel like a piece of our-self has also died with that person, as we are all continuous with the universe as a wave is continuous with the sea, and that pain we go through is a extension of that connection we FEEL. No words can make sense of tragedies such as the one that claimed many lives today, as a father of two small children my heart goes out to those parents who are feeling this pain, which is echoing across the world today and penetrating deep within the hearts of many. Yet many will start jumping on the bandwagon and start pointing fingers of blame in the outer world, as they search for solutions to eliminate tragedies like this from re-occurring. Yet we could get rid of all the guns in the world and this would do nothing to eliminate violence from our societies, for it is the unconscious mind which governs our actions and impulses. We cannot DO anything to stop random acts of violence, just as we cannot stop sharks from eating dolphins, but there is One thing we can do on the individual level, and that is to awaken to the unconscious currents which bind us. As long as we carry this force which blinds us from truth, it will continue to reflect it-self in the outer world as chaos. We all want peace and 36

we all want harmony in our lives, but to reach this state requires us to begin on the path inside, for only that leads us to the truth about our-selves. Society is violent, society is made by humankind, you are not separate from this as we are all apart of this creation, so collectivity we will ALL expand or decay. Which path will we choose? That answer must begin within us today, if we are ever to SEE any change in our world of reflection." ~Alistar Valadez, Alan Watts Wisdom Administrator...

..."The ancient paths of mysticism and occultism resolved the problem of the Unconscious from the very beginning, even before it became a problem, for their first requirement was that man should know himself. Whereat he very quickly found that the huge, brute forces of Nature had their counterparts in his soul, that his being was not a simple unit but a pantheon of gods and demons. In fact, all the deities of the ancient theologies were known to the initiated as the inhabitants not of Olympus but of the human soul. They were not mere products of man's imagination any more than his heart, lungs and stomach are products of his imagination. On the contrary, they were very real forces belonging both to Nature, the macrocosm, and man, the microcosm. Occultism was thus the art of living with one's gods and demons, and you had to know how to deal with them in yourself before you could deal with them in the universe. The ancients understood the laws which man must follow in order to live with them, how by love the gods would become your friends and the demons your servants. In every initiation rite it was necessary to pass through that valley of the shadow where the neophyte comes face to face with the 'Dweller on the Threshold' and all the most terrible powers of the psyche. But the rite could only be successful if he faced them with love, recognising them as manifestations of the same Divinity which was his own true Self. By this love he broke their spell and became a true initiate.

But man became over rational and forgot the gods and demons, relegating them to the realm of outworn superstitions. He looked for them in the skies and found only infinite spaces, dead rocks and orbs of burning gas. He looked for them in thunder and wind and found only unintelligent forces of atmosphere. He looked for them in woods and caverns and found only scuttling animals, creaking branches, shadows and draughts. He thought that the gods were dead, but in fact they became much more alive and dangerous because they were able to work unrecognized. For whereas the old occultists began with the principle "know thyself," the rationalists began with "rule thyself." They chose what they considered to be a reasonable pattern of character and strove to impose it on their lives without any preliminary exploration. They forgot that it is impossible for man to behave like a sage until he has first come to terms with his inner pantheon; as a result he could only achieve a poor imitation of the sage's behavior because he had not done the necessary groundwork. For this reason the rationalist, puritanic mind is a veneer about a muck-heap, an attempt to copy greatness by wearing its clothes.

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But when psychologists began to have the idea of the Unconscious this was simply man's fumbling rediscovery of the lost gods and demons. Naturally experienced occultists of both East and West were inclined to smile, for to them this New Force called the Unconscious had never existed as such. And when people started talking about the Unconscious as if it were just a repository of repressed sexuality, the occultists laughed outright, knowing that it contained far more powerful divinities than Libido, who was just a little imp dancing upon the surface. It must have seemed funnier still to hear the Unconscious discussed as if it were a sort of individual with secret, dark designs and an unfortunate habit of wanting and thinking in direct opposition to the conscious. For the Unconscious is not an individual; it is simply that about himself which man does not know. As such it is a purely relative term, because some people know more about themselves than others. Symbolically it may be represented as an individual, for in dreams the unknown aspect of men presents itself as a woman and vice versa with women. But actually when it is said that the Unconscious does this or that, it means that certain particular aspects of your internal universe are on the move without your conscious knowledge.

The concept of the Unconscious is nevertheless important to modern students of religion and occultism in that it is a reminder of the forgotten gods and of the place where they are to be found. Too many would-be mystics and occultists try to follow the rationalist technique of imposing a discipline upon themselves without first understanding the nature of the thing to be disciplined. You have to come to terms with the gods before you can ignore them, and those who jump straight from ordinary ways of living into the complex disciplines of occultism are inviting trouble. For until those terms have been made, the gods rule us although we have a way of persuading ourselves that their often unreasonable dictates are our own free and considered choice. Thus imitation of the sage is often a device put up by the demons for our own destruction, for modern man simply does not realise that until he has been through the valley of the shadow his life is not his own. Until he looks within himself, seeks out his hidden pantheon and overcomes it by love (or what psychologists call 'acceptance'), he remains its unwitting tool. In all the old philosophies — Yoga, Buddhism, the Greek Mysteries, the Egyptian Mysteries — this exploring of the unknown self was the essential first step and now the same thing is attempted by the psycho-analyst, using a different technique and terminology. That there are failures and mistakes is only to be expected, for here are men trying to work out the divine science on their own with little recourse to the experience of the ages, though to this there are a few notable exceptions. And though students of religion may be offended when religion is ascribed to repressed sexuality, it must be remembered that in many cases this may actually be true and that psychologists have had insufficient opportunities to study that comparatively rare phenomenon the genuine mystic or occultist. For what would such a person want with psycho-analysis? The warning to the beginner, however, still stands, for unless you really know yourself how can you say that your apparently noble aspirations are what they seem to be? Thoughts are often wolves in sheep's clothing." ~Alan Watts, Is There an Unconscious?...

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..."Now this is the Buddhist trick: the Buddha said 'We suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won't suffer.' But he didn't say that as the last word; he said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that to someone, they're going to come back after a while and say 'Yes, but now I'm desiring not to desire.' And so the Buddha will answer, 'Well at last you're beginning to understand the point.' Because you can't give up desire. Why would you try to do that? It's already desire. So in the same way you say 'You ought to be unselfish' or to give up you ego. Let go, relax. Why do you want to do that? Just because it's another way of beating the game, isn't it? The moment you hypothesize that you are different from the universe, you want to get one up on it. But if you try to get one up on the universe, and you're in competition with it, that means you don't understand you ARE it. You think there's a real difference between 'self' and 'other.' But 'self,' what you call yourself, and what you call 'other' are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They're really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it's all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all one. If you try to make the south pole defeat the north pole, or get the mastery of it, you show you don't know what's going on." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."I do not know whether it is true, but it is said that some of the great sages and 'holy men' have an apparently supernatural power over beasts and reptiles which are always dangerous to ordinary mortals. If this is true, it is certainly because they are able to live at peace with the 'beasts and reptiles' in themselves. They need not call the wild elephant Behemoth or the sea-monster Leviathan; they address them familiarly as 'Long-Nose' and 'Slimy.'

The sense of unity with the 'All' is not, however, a nebulous state of mind, a sort of trance, in which all form and distinction is abolished, as if man and the universe merged into a luminous mist of pale mauve. Just as process and form, energy and matter, myself and experience, are names for, and ways of looking at, the same thing—so one and many, unity and multiplicity, identity and difference, are not mutually exclusive opposites: they are each other, much as the body is its various organs. To discover that the many are the one, and that the one is the many, is to realize that both are words and noises representing what is at once obvious to sense and feeling, and an enigma to logic and description...

The feeling that we stand face-to-face with the world, cut off and set apart, has the greatest influence on thought and action. Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. 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.

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In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To 'know' reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it." ~Alan Watts...

..."We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them. The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves. For intractable nature is both around and within us. The exasperating “life” which is at once lovable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and a curse, is also the life of our own bodies.

It is as if we were divided into two parts. On the one hand there is the conscious “I,” at once intrigued and baffled, the creature who is caught in the trap. On the other hand there is “me,” and “me” is a part of nature—the wayward flesh with all its concurrently beautiful and frustrating limitations. “I” fancies itself as a reasonable fellow, and is forever criticizing “me” for its perversity—for having passions which get “I” into trouble, for being so easily subject to painful and irritating diseases, for having organs that wear out, and for having appetites which can never be satisfied—so designed that if you try to allay them finally and fully in one big “bust,” you get sick.

Perhaps the most exasperating thing about “me,” about nature and the universe, is that it will never “stay put.” It is like a beautiful woman who will never be caught, and whose very flightiness is her charm. For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness. This is why the poets are so often at their best when speaking of change, of “the transitoriness of human life.” The beauty of such poetry lies in something more than a note of nostalgia which brings a catch in the throat...

For the poets have seen the truth that life, change, movement, and insecurity are so many names for the same thing. Here, if anywhere, truth is beauty, for movement and rhythm are of the essence of all things lovable. In sculpture, architecture, and painting the finished form stands still, but even so the eye

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finds pleasure in the form only when it contains a certain lack of symmetry, when, frozen in stone as it may be, it looks as if it were in the midst of motion.

Is it not, then, a strange inconsistency and an unnatural paradox that “I” resists change in “me” and in the surrounding universe? For change is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in. Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer. The human body lives because it is a complex of motions, of circulation, respiration, and digestion. To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."Supposing I say to you: each one of you is really the Great Self, the Brahman. And you say, ‘All you’ve said up to now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually. But I don’t really feel it. What must I do to feel it really?’ My answer to you is this: you ask me that question because you don’t want to feel it really. You’re frightened of it. And therefore what you’re going to do is you’re going to get a method of practice so you can put it off. So you can say, ‘Well, I can be a long time on the way of getting this thing, then maybe I’ll be worthy of it after I have suffered enough. See, because we are brought up in a social scheme where we have to deserve what we get and the price one pays for all good things is suffering. But all that is precisely postponement because one is afraid, here and now to see it." ~Alan Watts...

..."A lot of people say, you know, 'I understand what you say intellectually, but that's not enough. I don't really understand it.' But I often think that when people say that, they don't fully understand it intellectually. If you can get something quite clear, really clear in your head, I don't think that our mind is compartmentalized so that the intellect's over here, and the feelings are over here, and the intuition is over there, and the sensations are over there. I don't think Jung meant that when he made that classification. I think every faculty of the mind is continuous with all the others.

And so what you're saying when you say 'I understand it intellectually, but I don't get it intuitively,' or 'I don't feel it in my bones,' is that you understand it in the sense of being able to repeat a form of words. Now it's true that there's lots of debates and problems that are purely verbal. A great deal of what goes on as theological or philosophical discussion is absolutely nothing except a war of words. A logical positivist, for example, can show conclusively that all metaphysical statements are meaningless. But so 42

what? That's just talk. People have, on the other hand, experienced, say, mystical states, and these experiences are quite as real as the experience of swimming in water, or lying in the sun,or eating a steak, or dying. And you can't talk them away. They're THERE, in a very concrete sense. But there is a very close connection between your conceptual understanding of the world and how you actually see the world.

In other words, let's take for example this problem: there are people who don't have number systems going beyond three. They count 'One, two, three, many.' So anything above three is a heap, or many. Now those people cannot know that a square table has four corners. It has many corners. But once you're able to count beyond four, you can extend your counting system indefinitely. You have a different feeling about nature. It's not only you know more, but you feel more. You feel more clearly. So my point is simply that the intellect is not something cut off from every other kind of experience, existing in a kind of abstract vacuum which has nothing to do with anything else. The intellect is part and parcel of the whole fabric of life. It goes along with your fingers; it goes along with being able to touch. After all, what an intellectual thing in a way the human hand is. It can do things that other hands can't do. No other mammal can have thumb-finger contact. The monkey doesn't achieve it.

So the hand is intellectual. So, as a matter of fact, a plant is intellectual. This thing is a gorgeous pattern. If you look into it and realize how this is designed to absorb light and moisture and so on, and to expose itself in different ways and to propagate its species, that it's in alliance with bees and other insects, so that the bees and the plants, since they go together and are found together, they're all one continuous form of life. This doesn't exist except in a world where bees are floating around. I mean, you can bring it into an apartment, but you can't expect it to propagate beyond that point. It's decorative here. But in it's natural habitat, this goes along with being bees, and bees go with their being something else. So this form that you see here is inseparable from all kinds of other forms which must exist if this is to exist. And the bees have language, if you've read Von Frisch's book about bees and their marvelous intelligence. But you see that the intelligence of the plant is the same as the pattern of the plant. You shouldn't think that I would say the plant is the result of intelligence. The shape of it is the same as its intelligence. The shape of your brain, the shape of your face, the whole structure of the culture you live in, the human interrelationships that go on-- it's that pattern which is intelligence.

Now what I'm trying to talk about is a deeper understanding of the pattern in which we live, and if you understand that, it suddenly hits you so that you feel, right in your guts, this new kind of existence that is NOT yourself alone facing an alien world, but yourself as an expression of the world in the same way as the wave is the expression of the ocean." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

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..."Now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone. The moment is the 'door of heaven,' the 'straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life,' because there is no room in it for the separate 'I'...Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between 'I' and 'now' has vanished-when there is just this 'now' and nothing else.

The timid mind shuts this window with a bang, and is silent and thoughtless about what it does not know in order to chatter the more about what it thinks it knows. It fills up the uncharted spaces with mere repetition of what has already been explored. But the open mind knows that the most minutely explored territories have not really been known at all, but only marked and measured a thousand times over. And the fascinating mystery of what it is that we mark and measure must in the end 'tease us out of thought' until the mind forgets to circle and to pursue its own processes, and becomes aware that to be at this moment is pure miracle." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."Now existence you see is something that is spontaneous, the Chinese word for nature (Tian ran), means that which happens of itself. Your hair grows by itself. Your heart beats by itself. You breathe pretty much by itself. Your glands secrete their essences pretty much by themselves. You don’t have voluntary control over these things, so we say it happens spontaneously. So when you go to sleep and you try to go to sleep, you interfere with the spontaneous process of going to sleep. Try to breathe real hard and you find you get balled up in your breathing. So if you go to be human, you just have to trust yourself to have bowel movements, go to sleep, and digest your food; of course if something goes seriously wrong and you need a surgeon that’s another matter. But by and large, the healthy human being doesn’t right from the start of life need surgical interference. And he lets it happen by itself. And so with the whole picture that is fundamental, you have got to let go and let it happen. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be all clutched up. You’re going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only if you don’t try. But we have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don’t interfere then it won’t happen.

Now that’s the root of an enormous amount of trouble. The basis of it all is this then. If we say you must survive, or I must survive, life is earnest and I’ve got to go on. Then your life is a drag and not a game. Now it’s my contention and my personal opinion (this is my basic metaphysical axiom, shall we put it that way) that existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. So then, in music though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition – the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, 45

because that’s the end. Say when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room – that’s where you should arrive; the whole point of the dancing is the dance." ~Alan Watts...

..."All the ways of liberation offered release from the endless cycle of reincarnation- Vedanta and Yoga through the awakening of the true Self, and Buddhism through the realization that the process of life is not happening to any subject, so that there no longer remains anyone to be reincarnated. They agree, in other words, that the individual soul with its continued reincarnation from life to life and even moment to moment is maya, a playful illusion. Yet all popular accounts of these doctrines, both Western and Asian, state that so long as the individual remains unliberated he will in fact continue to be reincarnated. Despite the Buddhist anatman doctrine of the unreality of the substantial ego, the Milindapanha records Nagasena's complex efforts to convince the Greek king Menander that reincarnation can occur, without any actual soul, until at last nirvana is attained. The vast majority of Asian Hindus and Buddhists continue to believe that reincarnation is a fact, and most Westerners adopting Vedanta or Buddhism adopt belief in reincarnation at the same time. Western Buddhists even find this belief consoling, in flat contradiction to the avowed objective of attaining release from rebirth.

It is, however, logical to retain the belief in reincarnation as a fact if one also believes that maya is the physical world as distinct from ideas about the physical world. That is to say, one will continue to believe in this Indian cosmology until one realizes that it is a social institution. I wish, therefore, to commend what to many students of these doctrines may seem to be a startling thesis: Buddhists and Vedantists who understand their own doctrines profoundly, who are in fact liberated, do not believe in reincarnation in any literal sense. Their liberation involved, among other things, the realization that the Hindu cosmology was a myth and not a fact. It was, and remains, a liberation from being taken in by social institutions; it is not liberation from being alive. It is consistent with this view that, in India, liberation went hand in hand with renunciation of caste; the individual ceased to identify himself with his socially defined identity, his role. He underlined this ritually by abandoning family responsibilities when his sons were able to assume them, by discarding clothes, or, as in the case of Buddhists, by donning the ocher robes which marked the criminal outcaste, and by retiring to the forests and mountains. Mahayana Buddhism later introduced the final and logical refinement-the Bodhisattva who returns to society and adopts its conventions without 'attachment', who in other words plays the social game instead of taking it seriously.

If this thesis is true, why was it not stated openly, and why have the majority of Buddhists and Vedantists been allowed to go on thinking of the reincarnation cosmology as a fact? There are two reasons. First, liberation is not revolution. It is not going out of one's way to disturb the social order by casting doubt upon the conventional ideas by which people hold together. Furthermore, society is 46

always insecure and thus hostile to anyone who challenges its conventions directly. To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the victim of other people's anxiety requires considerable tact. Second, the whole technique of liberation requires that the individual shall find out the truth for himself. Simply to tell it is not convincing. Instead, he must be asked to experiment, to act consistently upon assumptions which he holds to be true until he finds out otherwise. The guru or teacher of liberation must therefore use all his skill[s] to persuade the student to act upon his own delusions, for the latter will always resist any undermining of the props of his security. He teaches, not by explanation, but by pointing out new ways of acting upon the student's false assumptions until the student convinces himself that they are false. [Teachers dig holes into which students fall. In climbing out of the hole, the student learns.]

Herein, I feel, is the proper explanation of the esotericism of the ways of liberation. The initiate is one who knows that certain social institutions are self-contradictory or in actual conflict with the form of nature. But he knows also that these institutions have the strongest emotions invested in them. They are the rules of communication whereby people understand one another, and they have been beaten into the behavior patterns of impressionable children with the full force of social anxiety. At the same time, those who are taken in by such institutions are suffering from them-suffering from the very ideas which they believe to be vital to sanity and survival. There is therefore no way of disabusing the sufferer directly, by telling him that his cherished disease is a disease. If he is to be helped at all, he must be tricked into insight. If I am to help someone else to see that a false problem is false, I must pretend that I am taking his problem seriously. What I am actually taking seriously is his suffering, but he must be led to believe that it is what he considers as his problem...

Let us suppose then that someone who is suffering from a social institution imagines that he is suffering because of an actual conflict in life, in the very structure of the physical world-that nature threatens his presumably physical ego. The healer then must appear to be a magician, a master of the physical world. He must do whatever is necessary to convince the sufferer that he can solve what seems to the latter to be a physical problem, for there is no other way of convincing him to do what is necessary for acting consistently upon his false assumption. He must above all convince the sufferer that he, the guru, has mastered the imaginary problem, that his ego is not disturbed by pain or death or worldly passions. Moreover, because the disease was engendered by social authority, the guru must appear to have equal or superior social authority to the parents, relatives, and instructors of the patient. In all this, the Eastern ways of liberation have been astonishingly ingenious; their masters, whom society would have felt to be utterly subversive, have convinced society that they are its very pillars. It is thus that the guru who has a bad temper, or who likes to smoke or drink sake, gives the impression that he indulges in these 'little vices' deliberately-in order to remain in his bodily manifestation, for if he were consistently unattached to the physical world he would cease to appear in it.

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Of course the guru is human like everyone else. [Of course they are NOT humans anymore than anyone else is human.] His advantage, his liberation, lies in the fact that he is not in conflict with himself for being so; he is not in the double bind of pretending that he is an independent agent without knowing that he is pretending, of imagining that he is an ego or subject which can somehow manage to be permanently 'one up' on its correlative object-the changing panorama of experiences, sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts. The guru accepts himself; more exactly, he does not think of himself as something other than his behavior patterns, as something which performs them. On the one hand, social conditioning as we know it depends entirely on persuading people not to accept themselves, and necessary as this stratagem, this 'as if', may be for training the young, it is a fiction of limited use. The more it succeeds, the more it fails. Civilization attained at the price of inculcating this fiction permanently is necessarily self-destructive." ~Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West...

..."But as Aristotle pointed out long ago--and this is one of the good things about Aristotle. He said 'the goal of action is contemplation.' In other words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what's it all about? Especially when people are busy because they think they're GOING somewhere, that they're going to get something and attain something. There's quite a good deal of point to action if you know you're not going anywhere. If you act like you dance, or like you sing or play music, then you're really not going anywhere, you're just doing pure action, but if you act with a thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to arrive at someplace where everything will be alright. Then you are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call 'samsara', the round, or rat-race of birth and death, because you think you're going to go somewhere. You're already there. And it is only a person who has discovered that he is already there who is capable of action, because he doesn't act frantically with the thought that he's going to get somewhere. He acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point, you see, where we walk not because we are in a great, great hurry to get to a destination, but because the walking itself is great. The walking itself is the meditation. And when you watch Zen monks walk, it's very fascinating. They have a different kind of walk from everybody else in Japan. Most Japanese shuffle along, or if they wear Western clothes, they race and hurry like we do. Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk, and you have the feeling they walk rather the same way as a cat. There's something about it that isn't hesitant; they're going along all right, they're not sort of vagueing around, but they're walking just to walk. And that's walking meditation.

But the point is that one cannot act creatively, except on the basis of stillness. Of having a mind that is capable from time to time of stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first, because if you sit in the Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners start to fidget; they find it very boring to sit for a long time, but the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most 48

ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them. Because say when a person says 'I see a leaf,' immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves--leaves are not green. That's why Lao-Tzu said 'the five colors make a man blind, the five tones make a man deaf,' because if you can only see five colors, you're blind, and if you can only hear five tones in music, you're deaf. You see, if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you're blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it." ~Alan Watts...

..."All those people who try to realize Zen by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately to find it, and they're on the wrong track. There is another Zen poem which says, 'You cannot attain it by thinking, you cannot grasp it by not thinking.' Or you could say, you cannot catch hold of the meaning of Zen by doing something about it, but equally, you cannot see into its meaning by doing nothing about it, because both are, in their different ways, attempts to move from where you are now, here, to somewhere else, and the point is that we come to an understanding of this, what I call suchness, only through being completely here. And no means are necessary to be completely here. Neither active means on the one hand, nor passive means on the other. Because in both ways, you are trying to move away from the immediate now. But you see, it's difficult to understand language like that. And to understand what all that is about, there is really one absolutely necessary prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking.

Now, I am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual, because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and am a sort of half-baked scholar. But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word 'think,' talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called, so delightfully, 'the unspeakable world,' that is to say, the nonverbal world. Some people would call it the physical world, but these words 'physical,' 'nonverbal,' are all conceptual, not a concept either, it's (bangs stick).

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So when you are awake to that world, you suddenly find that all the so-called differences between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain, are all conceptual, and they're not there. They don't exist at all in that world which is (bangs stick). In other words, if I hit you hard enough, 'ouch' doesn't hurt, if you're in a state of what is called no-thought. There is a certain experience, you see, but you don't call it 'hurt.' It's like when you were small children, they banged you about, and you cried, and they said 'Don't cry' because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry at the same time. People are rather curious about the things the do like that. But you see, they really wanted you to cry, the same way if you threw up one day. It's very good to throw up if you've eaten something that isn't good for you, but your mother said 'Eugh!' and made you repress it and feel that throwing up wasn't a good thing to do. Because then when you saw people die, and everybody around you started weeping and making a fuss, and then you learned from that that dying was terrible. When somebody got sick, everybody else got anxious, and you learned that getting sick was something awful. You learned it from a concept.

So the reason why there is in the practice of Zen, what we did before this lecture began, to practice Zazen, sitting Zen. Incidentally, there are three other kinds of Zen besides Za-zen. Standing Zen, walking Zen, and lying Zen. In Buddhism, they speak of the three dignities of man. Walking, standing, sitting, and lying. And they say when you sit, just sit. When you walk, just walk. But whatever you do, don't wobble. In fact, of course, you can wobble, if you really wobble well. When the old master *Hiakajo was asked 'What is Zen?' he said 'When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep,' and they said, 'Well isn't that what everybody does? Aren't you just like ordinary people?' 'Oh no,' he said, 'they don't do anything of the kind. When they're hungry, they don't just eat, they think of all sorts of things. When they're tired, they don't just sleep, but dream all sorts of dreams'." ~Alan Watts...

..."We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece. In the same way, we do not see that 'I' as the knower and controller am the same fellow as 'myself' as something to be known and controlled. The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body—a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it." ~Alan Watts...

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..."And this is the human problem: we know that we know. And so, there came a point in our evolution where we didn't guide life by distrusting our instincts. Suppose that you could live absolutely spontaneously. You don't make any plans, you just live like you feel like it. And you say 'What a gas that is, I don't have to make any plans, anything. I don't worry; I just do what comes naturally.'

The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we're worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence. When we lost this thing that the cats and the flowers have, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation and so on, and then we worry. Once you start thinking about things, you worry as to if you thought enough. Did you really take all the details into consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And by jove, the more you think about it, the more you realize you really couldn't take everything into consideration, because all the variables in every decision are incalculable, so you get anxiety. And this, though, also, is the price you pay for knowing that you know. For being able to think about thinking, being able to feel about feeling. And so you're in this funny position.

Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage? What has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness, a certain kind of reflexive consciousness-being aware of being aware. Being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols, such as words, such as numbers. You put, as it were, two lives together at once, one representing the other. The symbols representing the reality, the money representing the wealth, and if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary, it doesn't have the same value. People go to the supermarket, and they get a whole cartload of goodies and they drive it through, then the clerk fixes up the counter and this long tape comes out, and he'll say '$30, please,' and everybody feels depressed, because they give away $30 worth of paper, but they've got a cartload of goodies. They don't think about that, they think they've just lost $30. But you've got the real wealth in the cart, all you've parted with is the paper. Because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth. It represents power, potentiality, whereas the wealth, you think oh well, that's just necessary; you've got to eat. That's to be really mixed up.

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. Not conceive, but FEEL yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone 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 52

existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, 'Satchitananda.' Which means 'sat,' that which is, 'chit,' that which is consciousness; that which is 'ananda' is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy. Wowee! And all those stars, if you look out in the sky, is a firework display like you see on the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for celebration; the universe is a celebration, it is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is...Wowee." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth -urgent as they are – will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit.

For, as things stand, we have nothing to give.

If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love.

No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." ~Alan Watts...

..."When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory, 53

which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now,and therefore it is spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but of course we don't really know what randomness is.What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth.

That is the world, that is the tao, but perhaps that makes us feel afraid. We may ask, 'If all that is happening spontaneously, who's in charge? I am not in charge, that is pretty obvious, but I hope there is God or somebody looking after all this.' But why should there be someone looking after it, because then there is a new worry that you may not of thought of, which is, 'Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care?' Who guards the guards? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God? You may say 'God doesn't need looking after' Oh? Well, nor does this.

The tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we arrange everything geometrically in boxes, or in rows. That is a very crude kind of order, but when you look at a plant it is perfectly obvious that the plant has order. We recognize at once that is not a mess, but it is not symmetrical and it is not geometrical looking. The plant looks like a Chinese drawing, because they appreciated this kind of non-symmetrical order so much that it became an integral aspect of their painting. In the Chinese language this is called li, and the character for li means the markings in jade. It also means the grain in wood and the fiber in muscle. We could say, too, that clouds have li, marble has li, the human body has li. We all recognize it, and the artist copies it whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, an abstract painter, or a non-objective painter. They all are trying to express the essence of li. The interesting thing is, that although we all know what it is, there is no way of defining it. Because tao is the course, we can also call li the watercourse, and the patterns of li are also the patterns of flowing water. We see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, as sculpture in the grain in wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles. All these things are patterned according to the basic principles of flow. In the patterns of flowing water you will all kind of motifs from Chinese art, immediately recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle of yang-yin.

So li means then the order of flow, the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid, because Lao-tzu likens tao to water:

'The great tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right, It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.'

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For as he comments elsewhere, water always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor, because we are always trying to play games of one-upmanship, and be on top of each other. But Lao-tzu explains that the top position is the most insecure. Everybody wants to get to the top of the tree, but then if they do the tree will collapse. That is the fallacy of American society." ~Alan Watts, Taoism...

..."So then, when you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, and sort of undergo that. But one of the interesting things in the world is--this is a yoga, this is a realization--try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children think about it. It's one of the great wonders of life. What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You will find out, among other things, it will pose the next question to you. What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see, you can't have an experience of nothing; nature abhors a vacuum. So after you're dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience as when you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after other people die, other people are born. And they're all you, only you can only experience it one at a time. Everybody is I, you all know you're you, and wheresoever all being 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.

You know that very well, only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland, or whatever else it is in your organism. You don't have to know how to shine the sun. You just do it, like you breath. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all this and you never had any education in how to do it? Never learned, but you're this miracle? The point of it is, from a strictly physical, scientific standpoint, this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that's going on. And if I am my foot, I am the sun. Only we've got this little partial view. We've got the idea that 'No, I'm something IN this body.' The ego. That's a joke. The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. It's like the radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter. Is there anything in the way? And conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any troublemaking changes. But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. And the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, we realize first thing how harmonious it all is. Because your organism is a miracle of harmony. All these things functioning together. Even those creatures that are fighting each other in the blood stream and eating each other up. If they weren't doing that, you wouldn't be healthy." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

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..."What, finally, of the strong impression delivered both by the psychedelics and by many forms of mystical experience that the world is in some way an illusion? A difficulty here is that the word 'illusion' is currently used pejoratively, as the negative of everything real, serious, important, valuable, and worthwhile. Is this because moralists and metaphysicians are apt to be personality types lacking the light touch? Illusion is related etymologically to the Latin ludere, to play, and thus is distinguished from reality as the drama is distinguished from 'real life.' In Hindu philosophy, the world is seen as a drama in which all the parts—each person, animal, flower, stone, and star—are roles or masks of the one supreme Self, which plays the lila or game of hide and seek with itself for ever and ever, dismembering itself as the Many and remembering itself as the One through endless cycles of time, in the spirit of a child tossing stones into a pond through a long afternoon in summer. The sudden awakening of the mystical experience is therefore the one Self remembering itself as the real foundation of the seemingly individual and separate organism.

Thus the Hindu maya, or world illusion, is not necessarily something bad. Maya is a complex word signifying the art, skill, dexterity, and cunning of the supreme Self in the exercise of its playful, magical, and creative power. The power of an actor so superb that he is taken in by his own performance. The Godhead amazing itself, getting lost in a maze...

Our difficulty in accepting for ourselves so important a part in the actual creation or manifestation of the world comes, of course, from this thorough habituation to the feeling that we are strangers in the universe—that human consciousness is a fluke of nature, that the world is an external object which we confront, that its immense size reduces us to pitiful unimportance, or that geological and astronomical structures are somehow more real (hard and solid?) than organisms. But these are actually mythological images of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—ideas which, for a while, seemed extremely plausible, mostly for the reason that they appeared to be hard-boiled, down to earth and tough-minded, a currently fashionable posture for the scientist. Despite the lag between advanced scientific ideas and the common sense of even the educated public, the mythology of man as a hapless fluke trapped in a mindless mechanism is breaking down. The end of this century may find us, at last, thoroughly at home in our own world, swimming in the ocean of relativity as joyously as dolphins in the water." ~Alan Watts...

..."Ecologists often speak of the 'evolution of environments' over and above the evolution of organisms. For man did not appear on earth until the earth itself, together with all its biological forms, had evolved to a certain degree of balance and complexity. At this point of evolution the earth 'implied' man, just as the existence of man implies that sort of a planet at that stage of evolution. The balance of nature, the

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'harmony of contained conflicts', in which man thrives is a network of mutually interdependent organisms of the most astounding subtlety and complexity.

Teilhard de Chardin has called it the 'biosphere,' the film of living organisms which covers the original 'geosphere,' the mineral planet. Lack of knowledge about the evolution of the organic from the 'inorganic,' coupled with misleading myths about life coming 'into' this world from somewhere 'outside,' has made it difficult for us to see that the biosphere arises, or goes with, a certain degree of geological and astronomical evolution. 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.

If I first see a tree in the winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. But when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, 'Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all.' Imagine, then, that a billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as 'Just a bunch of old rocks!' But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: 'Well - you were peopling rocks after all!'

You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong. I have tried to explain that the relation between an organism and its environment is mutual, that neither one is the 'cause' or determinant of the other since the arrangement between them is polar. If, then, it makes sense to explain the organism and its behavior in terms of the environment, it will also make sense to explain the environment in terms of the organism. (Thus far I have kept this up my sleeve so as not to confuse the first aspect of the picture.) For there is a very real, physical sense in which man, and every other organism, creates his own environment.

Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure. Surgical alterations of the nervous system, or, in all probability, sense-organs of a different structure than ours, give different types of perception - just as the microscope and telescope change the vision of the naked eye. Bees and other insects have, for example, polaroid eyes which enable them to tell the position of the sun by observing any patch of blue sky. In other words because of the different structure of their eyes, the sky that they 58

see is not the sky that we see. Bats and homing pigeons have sensory equipment analogous to radar, and in this respect see more 'reality' than we do without our special instruments." ~Alan Watts, The Book...

..."You can't get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego. Sorry, but it can't be done . . . If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle. You'd be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry." ~Alan Watts...

..."Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced." ~Alan Watts...

..."Buddhism is not saying that the Self, the great atman, or what not, it isn't denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable. What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things, your liable to become attached to them. You're liable to start believing instead of knowing. So they say in Zen Buddhism, 'The doctrine of Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.' Or so we might say in the West, the idea of God is a finger pointing at God, but what most people do is instead of following the finger, they suck it for comfort. And so buddha chopped off the finger, and undermined all metaphysical beliefs. There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the buddha into a metaphysical position. 'Is the world eternal?' The buddha says nothing. 'Is the world not eternal?' And he answers nuttin'. 'Is the world both eternal and not eternal?' And he don't say nuttin'. 'Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?' And STILL he don't say nuttin'. He maintains what is called the noble silence. Sometimes called the thunder of silence, because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void. It is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people. It's better to destroy people's beliefs than to give them beliefs. I know it hurts, but it is The Way." ~Alan Watts, The World As Emptiness...

..."It cannot be stressed too strongly that liberation does not involve the loss or destruction of such conventional concepts as the ego; it means seeing through them-in the same way we can use the idea of 59

the equator without confusing it with a physical mark upon the surface of Earth. Instead of falling below the ego, liberation surpasses it. Writing without apparent knowledge of Buddhism or Vedanta, A. F. Bentley put it thus:

'Let no quibble of skepticism be raised over this questioning of the existence of the individual. Should he find reason for holding that he does not exist in the sense indicated, there will in that fact be no derogation from the reality of what does exist. On the contrary, there will be increased recognition of reality. For the individual can be banished only by showing a plus of existence, not by alleging a minus. If the individual falls. it will be because the real life of men, when it is widely enough investigated, proves too rich for him, not because it proves too poverty-stricken.'

Our mistake has been to suppose that the individual is honored and his uniqueness enhanced by emphasizing his separation from the surrounding world, or his eternal difference in essence from his Creator. As well honor the hand by lopping it from the arm! But when Spinoza said that 'the more we know of particular things, the more we know of God', he was anticipating our discovery that the richer and more articulate our picture of man and the world becomes, the more we are aware of its relativity and the interconnection of all its patterns in an undivided whole. The psychotherapist is perfectly in accord with the ways of liberation in describing the goal of therapy as individuation (Jung), selfactualization (Maslow), functional autonomy (Allport), or creative selfhood (Adler), but every plant that is to come to its full fruition must be embedded in the soil, so that as its stem ascends the whole Earth reaches up to the sun." ~Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West...

...“Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion. And we have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible.

And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word 'now'; we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline on the watch. And as a result of this fabulous idea, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because the present is instantly vanishing - it goes so quickly. It is always becoming past. And we have the sensation, therefore, of our lives as something that is constantly flowing away from us. We are constantly losing time. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to be wasted. Time is money. And

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so, because of the tyranny of this thing, we feel that we have a past, and we know who we are in terms of our past. Nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were.

And we think we also have a future. And that is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply what we are looking for. You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.” ~Alan Watts...

..."We always get this division of experience into one-half known, one-half unknown. We would like to know, if we could, this always unknown. If we examine the brain and the structure of the nerves behind the eyes, we're always looking at somebody else's brain. We're never able to look at our own brain at the same time we're investigating somebody else's brain.

So there is always this blank side of experience. What I'm suggesting is that the blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side as the off principle of vibration has to the on principle. There's a fundamental division. The Chinese call them the yang, the positive side, and the yin, the negative side. This corresponds to the idea of one and zero. All numbers can be made of one and zero as in the binary system of numbers which is used for computers.

And so it's all made up of off and on, and conscious and unconscious. But the unconscious is the part of experience which is doing consciousness, just as the trough manifests the wave, the space manifests the solid, the background manifests the figure. And so all that side of life which you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable, is unconscious, unknown, impenetrable because it's really you. In other words, the deepest you is the nothing side, is the side which you don't know." ~Alan Watts, Nothingness...

..."Another thing that goes along with all this is that it's perfectly obvious that the universe is a system which is aware of itself. In other words, we, as living organisms, are forms of the energy of the universe just as much as the stars and the galaxies, and, through our sense organs, this system of energy becomes aware of itself.

But to understand this we must again relate back to our basic contrast between on and off, something and nothing, which is that the aspect of the universe which is aware of itself, which does the awaring, 61

does not see itself. In other words, you can't look at your eyes with your eyes. You can't observe yourself in the act of observing. You can't touch the tip of a finger with the tip of the same finger no matter how hard you try. Therefore, there is on the reverse side of all observation a blank spot; for example, behind your eyes from the point of view of your eyes. However you look around there is blankness behind them. That's unknown. That's the part of the universe which does not see itself because it is seeing." ~Alan Watts, Nothingness...

"My whole work in religion and philosophy has been to convey this feeling to others, to show that our apparent separateness from what there is and all there is arises, in the main, from our failure to notice space as a vital reality; Which is just as important as the negative pole in an electric circuit. Although this feeling has not protected me from a vast amount of folly and confusion, just as it would not restore sight to a blind man, it has nevertheless delivered me from basic, existential anxiety. It is simply that I think people would be much happier and more at home in the world if they felt as I do, that I have no other self than this whole universe." ~ Alan Watts

..."Now, there are some psychologists who have struck, rather clumsily perhaps, upon an important truth—namely that there is a serious mistake in not responding to our feelings, or in trying to feel in some other way than we feel actually. They are speaking here, it should be noted, of inward feelings, and not of overt action. In other words, if you, as a mother, hate your child, don't try to pretend to yourself that you love him. But—put in this rather oversimplified way—this insight degenerates into another precept: 'Accept your feelings: go along with your emotions.' It is not that simple, because our feelings conflict with one another—as for example, when we are too proud to cry, or too frightened to fall in love. In this case, which feeling do we accept—the sorrow or the pride, the fear or the love?

Now, this is a most instructive example of the difficulty of self-acceptance, for in such a situation we find that we can accept neither. The conflict will not allow itself to be resolved by a decision for one of the two sides—and we are stuck, helplessly, with the conflict.

But the real importance of what these psychologists are trying to say is that there is an almost uncanny wisdom in the spontaneous and natural reactions of our organism to the course of events. The extraordinary capacity to feel an event inwardly, as distinct from bursting into precipitate action to avoid the tension of feeling—this capacity is in fact a wonderful power of adaptation to life, not unlike the instant responses of flowing water to the contours of the ground over which it flows. I hope this is 62

clear. I am not talking at the moment of responses in terms of action, but only of our inward, subjective responses of feeling. The point is that our feelings are not really a kind of resistance, a kind of fight with the course of events. They are a harmonious and intelligent response. A person who did not feel frightened at the threat of danger would be like a tall building with no 'give' to the wind. A mind which will not melt—with sorrow or love—is a mind which will all too easily break.

Now, the reason why I am talking of feeling rather than outward action is that I am considering the predicament of man in the face of events about which nothing can be done—events toward which our sole response is a response of feeling. I am thinking of the ultimate certainty of death, the overall helplessness of man within the vast tide of life, and, finally, of the very special feelings which arise when we are faced with a conflict of feelings which cannot be resolved. All these situations evoke feelings which, in the long run, are as irresistible as the situations themselves are insoluble. They are the ultimate feelings—and much of what is called philosophy is the fruitless attempt to talk oneself out of them.

Thus what I have called the death of the ego transpires in the moment when it is discovered and admitted that these ultimate feelings are irresistible. They are ultimate in two senses: one, that they sometimes have to do with very fundamental and cataclysmic events, and, two, that they are sometimes our deepest, most radical feeling with respect to a given situation—such as the basic frustration provoked by a conflict between sorrow and shame. The point is that these ultimate feelings are as wise as all the rest, and their wisdom emerges when we give up resisting them— through the realization that we are simply unable to do so. When, for example, life compels us at last to give in, to surrender to the full play of what is ordinarily called the terror of the unknown, the suppressed feeling suddenly shoots upward as a fountain of the purest joy. What was formerly felt as the horror of our inevitable mortality becomes transformed by an inner alchemy into an almost ecstatic sense of freedom from the bonds of individuality. But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work; we try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation which, like birth, begins as a pain and turns into a child.

I hope it is possible to say all this without tying it up with the atmosphere of 'ought-ness,' without giving anyone the notion that this kind of self-surrender is something which one should or can do. This willful, compulsive, moralistic approach to man's transformation always obstructs it—for it still implies that very illusion of self-mastery which stands in the way. But it is just when I discover that I cannot surrender myself that I am surrendered; just when I find that I cannot accept myself that I am accepted. For in reaching this hard rock of the impossible one reaches sincerity, where there can no longer be the masked hide-and-seek of I and Me, 'good I' trying to change 'bad Me,' who is really the same fellow as 'good I.' In the expressive imagery of Zen, all this striving for self-surrender is like trying to put legs on a snake—or, shall I say, like a naked man trying to lose his shirt. To quote from that genial Taoist, Chuang63

tzu: From the standpoint of the sage, 'The joined is not united, nor the separated apart, nor the long in excess, nor the short wanting. For just as a duck's legs, though short, cannot be lengthened without pain to the duck, and a crane's legs, though long, cannot be shortened without misery to the crane—so that which is long in man's moral nature cannot be cut off, nor that which is short be lengthened'." ~Alan Watts, The Paradox of Self Denial...

..."Since at least 1500 B.C. men have, from time to time, held the view that our normal vision of the world is a hallucination, a dream, a figment of the mind, or, to use the Hindu word which means both art and illusion, a maya. The implication is that, if this is so, life need never be taken seriously. It is a fantasy, a play, a drama, to be enjoyed. It does not really matter, for one day (perhaps in the moment of death) the illusion will dissolve, and each one of us will awaken to discover that he himself is what there is and all that there is, the very root and ground of the universe, or the ultimate and eternal space in which things and events come and go.

This is not simply an idea which someone 'thought up,' like science fiction or a philosophical theory. It is the attempt to express an experience in which consciousness itself, the basic sensation of being 'I', undergoes a remarkable change. We do not know much about these experiences. They are relatively common, and arise in every part of the world. They occur to both children and adults. They may last for a few seconds and come once in a lifetime, or they may happen repeatedly and constitute a permanent change of consciousness. With baffling impartiality they may descend upon those who never heard of them, as upon those who have spent years trying to cultivate them by some type of discipline. They have been regarded, equally, as a disease of consciousness with symptoms everywhere the same, like measles, and as a vision of higher reality such as comes in moments of scientific or psychological insight. They may turn people into monsters and megalomaniacs, or transform them into saints and sages. While there is no sure way of inducing these experiences, a favorable atmosphere may be created by intense concentration, by fasting, by sensory deprivation, by hyper-oxygenation, by prolonged emotional stress, by profound relaxation, or by the use of certain drugs.

Experiences of this kind underlie some of the great world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in particular, and, to a much lesser extent, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As expressed in the doctrines of these religions, they purport to be an account of 'the way things are' and therefore invite comparison with descriptions of the universe and of man given by physicists and biologists. They contradict common sense so violently and are accompanied with such a powerful sense of authenticity and reality (more real than reality is a common description) that

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men have always wondered whether they are divine revelations or insidious delusions." ~Alan Watts, A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy?...

..."This is what you could call the transaction rather than interaction, between the individual and the world. Just like for example in buying and selling. There cannot be an act of buying unless there is simultaneously and act of selling, and vice versa. So the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional. The environment grows the organism and organism in turn creates the environment. The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. Now the answer to it all is they are all one process. And it isn’t that organisms by chance came into this world, but rather that this world is sort of the environment which grows organisms. It was that way from the beginning. The organisms made in time have arrived in the scene or out of the scene later than the beginning of the scene. But from the moment it went bang in the beginning (if that’s the way it started) organisms like, us sitting here, were involved in it.

You see, let’s take the propagation of an electric current. I can have an electric current running through a wire that goes all the way around the earth. And here we have our power source and here we have our switch. Now, before that switch closes; the current doesn’t behave exactly like water in a pipe. There isn’t current here waiting to jump the gap as soon as the switch is closed. The current doesn’t even start until the switch is closed. It never starts unless the point of arrival is there. Now it will take an interval for that current to get going, but the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning. In a similar way although in the development of any physical system there may be billions of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life, that billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of the current through the wire; it takes a little time but it’s already implied. It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn. So in any lump of rock, floating about in space, there is implicit human intelligence – sometime, somehow, somewhere. They all go together. So don’t differentiate yourself and stand up against this and say I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks, and stuff. It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks, what are you going to stand on?” ~Alan Watts, The Human Game...

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..." How would you feel if you saw everything as really one basic reality? Well, a lot of people think that it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of vision suddenly became vague and melted away and we saw only a kind of luminous sea of light.

However, rather advisedly, the Vedanta philosophy does not seriously use the word 'one' of the supreme self because the word and idea 'one' has its opposite 'many' on one side, and another opposite, 'none', on the other. It is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither one nor many, but as they say, non-dual, and they express that in this word 'advita'. A is a negative word like non. Dvita is from dva, same as the Latin duo, two. So advita is non-dual. At first this is a difficult conception because naturally, a Western logician would say, 'But the non-dual is the opposite of the dual. Therefore, it has an opposite.' This is true, but the Hindu is using this term in a special sense. On a flat surface I have only two dimensions in which to operate so that everything drawn in two dimensions has only two dimensions. How, therefore, on a two-dimensional level, can I draw in three dimensions? How, in logic, is it humanly rational to think in terms of a unity of opposites?

All rational discourse is talk about the classification of experiences, of sensations, of notions, and the nature of a class is that it is a box. If a box has an inside, it has to have an outside. 'Is you is or is you ain't?' is fundamental to all classifications, and we cannot get out of it. We cannot talk about a class of all classes and make any sense of it. However, on this two-dimensional level, we can create, by using a convention of perspective, the understanding of a third dimension. If I draw a cube, you are trained to see it in three dimensions, but it is still in two. However, we have the understanding that the slanting lines are going out through the back to another square, which is behind the first one, even though we are still on two dimensions.

The Hindu understands this term advita as distinct from the term 'one' to refer to that dimension. So when you use the word advita, you are speaking about something beyond duality, as when you use those slanting lines you are understood to be indicating a third dimension which cannot really be reproduced on a two-dimensional surface. That is the trick.

It is almost as if whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference on the surface covering an implicit unity. Only it is very difficult to talk about what it is that unifies black and white. (Of course, in a way the eyes do. Sound and silence are unified by the ears). If you cannot have one without the other, it is like the north and south poles of a magnet. You cannot have a one-pole magnet. True, the poles are quite different; one is north and the other is south, but it is all one magnet.This is what the Hindu is moving into when he is speaking of the real basis or ground of the universe as being non-dual. Take, for example, the fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel, between self and other – I and thou – 67

I and it. There is something that is me; there is an area of my experience that I call myself. And there is another area of my experience which I call not myself. But you will immediately see that neither one could be realized without the other. You would not know what you meant by self unless you experience something other than self. You would not know what you meant by other unless you understood self. They go together. They arise at the same time. You do not have first self and then other, or first other and then self; they come together.

And this shows the sneaky conspiracy underneath the two, like the magnet between the two different poles. So it is more or less that sort of what-is-not-classifiable (that which lies between all classes). The class of elephants opposite the class of non-elephants has, as it were, the walls of the box joining the two together, just, as your skin is an osmotic membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all the tubes in it, and the nerve ends, and the way in which the external energies flow through your skin into your insides and vice versa." ~Alan Watts...

..."It is like the mask of Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, a multiple mask which illustrates the fact that the one who looks out of my eyes and out of everyone's eyes is the same center. So, when I look at another human being, and I look straight into their eyes, I don't like doing that, there's something embarrassing about looking into someone's eyes too closely. Don't look at me that closely because I might give myself away! You might find out who I really am! And what do you suppose that would be? Do you suppose that another person who looks deeply into your eyes will read all the things you're ashamed of, all your faults, all the things you are guilty of? Or is there some deeper secret than that?

The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you. 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, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many- faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts." ~Alan Watts...

..."I saw then that my sense of me being me was exactly the same thing as my sensation of being one with the whole cosmos. I did not need to have some sort of different, odd kind of experience to feel in total connection with everything. Once you get the clue you see that the sense of unity is inseparable 68

from the sense of difference. You would not know yourself, or what you meant by self, unless at the same time you had the feeling of other.

Now the secret is that 'the other' eventually turns out to be you. The element of surprise in life is when suddenly you find the thing most alien turns out to be yourself. Go out at night and look at the stars and realize that they are millions and billions of miles away, vast conflagrations far out in space. You can lie back and look at that and say, 'Well, surely I hardly matter. I am just a tiny little speck aboard this weird spotted bit of dust called earth, and all that was going on out there billions of years before I was born and will still be going on billions of years after I die.' Nothing seems stranger to you than that, or more different from you, yet there comes a point, if you watch long enough, when you will say, 'Why that's me!' It is 'the other' that is the condition of your being yourself, as the back is the condition of being the front, and when you know that, you know you never die." ~Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life...

..."So in Zen, a duality between a higher self and a lower self is not made. Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self. If you believe that there is no really lower self, there is only the higher self but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through, the very fact that you think it has to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self. If you think you have a lower self, or an ego to get rid of, then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that. So this tremendous schizophrenia in humans beings, of thinking that they are rider and horse, soul in command of body, or will in command of passions – wrestling with them; all that kind of split thinking simply aggravates the problem, and we get more and more split. And so we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict which they will never resolve. Because the true self either you know it, or you don’t. If you do know it, then you know it’s the only one and the other so called lower self just ceases to be a problem. It becomes something like a mirage, and you don’t go around hitting at mirages with a stick, or trying to put reigns on them. You just know that they are mirages and walk straight through them. But if you were brought up to believe yourself split, I remember my mother used to say to me when I used to do naughty things. She would say - Alan that’s not like you. So I had some conception of what was like me in my better moments that is to say, in my moments where I remembered what my mother would like me to do. And so that split is embedded in us all." ~Alan Watts...

..."You can’t catch a wave in a bucket and walk off with it, and so, you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you persist in trying to." ~Alan Watts...

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..."And at the end of the kali-yuga, the great destroyer of the worlds, God manifested as the destructive principle Shiva, does a dance called the tandava, and he appears, blue-bodied with ten arms, with lightning and fire appearing from every pore in his skin, and does a dance in which the universe is finally destroyed. The moment of cosmic death is the waking up of Brahma, the creator, for as Shiva turns round and walks off the stage, seen from behind, he is Brahma, the creator, the beginning of it all again. And Vishnu is the preserver, that is to say, the going on of it all, the whole state of the godhead being manifested as many, many faces. So, you see, this is a philosophy of the role of evil in life which is rational and merciful.

If we think God is playing with the world, has created it for his pleasure, and has created all these other beings and they go through the most horrible torments—terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through how is that possibly justifiable? We try by saying, 'Well, some God must have created it; if a God didn't create it, there's nobody in charge and there's no rationality to the whole thing. It's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a ridiculous system and the only out is suicide.'

But suppose it's the kind of thing I've described to you, supposing it isn't that God is pleasing himself with all these victims, showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them, supposing it's quite different from that. Suppose that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm. There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt, are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation.

Curiously enough, there is something parallel to this in Christianity. There's a passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians in which he says a very curious thing: 'Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not think identity with God a thing to be clung to, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross.' Here you have exactly the same idea, the idea of God becoming human, suffering all that human beings can suffer, even death. And St. Paul is saying, 'Let this mind be in you,' that is to say, let the same kind of consciousness be in you that was in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ knew he was God.

Wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy or you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in the nut house (which is the same thing). But if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out'." ~Alan Watts... 71

..."I find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter of this seminar is going to be, because it's too fundamental to give it a title. I'm going to talk about what there is. Now, the first thing, though, that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about the basic ideas which, as Westerners living today in the United States, influence our everyday common sense, our fundamental notions about what life is about. And there are historical origins for this, which influence us more strongly than most people realize. Ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use, and of our ideas of logic, and of what makes sense altogether.

And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word 'myth' to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word 'myth' in a more powerful sense. A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. Now, for example, a myth in a way is a metaphor. If you want to explain electricity to someone who doesn't know anything about electricity, you say, well, you talk about an electric current. Now, the word 'current' is borrowed from rivers. It's borrowed from hydraulics, and so you explain electricity in terms of water. Now, electricity is not water, it behaves actually in a different way, but there are some ways in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricity, and so you explain it in terms of water. Or if you're an astronomer, and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved space, you say, 'well, it's as if you have a black balloon, and there are white dots on the black balloon, and those dots represent galaxies, and as you blow the balloon up, uniformly all of them grow farther and farther apart.' But you're using an analogy--the universe is not actually a black balloon with white dots on it.

So in the same way, we use these sort of images to try and make sense of the world, and we at present are living under the influence of two very powerful images, which are, in the present state of scientific knowledge, inadequate, and one of the major problems today are to find an adequate, satisfying image of the world. Well that's what I'm going to talk about. And I'm going to go further than that, not only what image of the world to have, but how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of the world that we can manage to conceive." ~Alan Watts...

..."Always have a large pinch of salt handy when you meet the fellow who talks about trying to renounce himself, to overcome his ego. I am reminded of the appcryphal conversation between Confucius and Lao-tzu, when the former had been prating of universal love without the element of self. 'What stuff!' cried Lao-tzu. 'Does not universal love contradict itself? Is not your elimination of self a positive manifestation of Self? Sir, if you would cause the world not to lose its source of nourishment: there is the universe, its regularity is unceasing; there are the sun and moon, their brightness is unceasing; there are the stars, their groupings never change; there are the birds and beasts, they flock together without varying; there are trees and shrubs, they grow upward without exception. Like these, accord with the 72

Tao—with the way of things—and be perfect. Why, then, these vain struggles after charity and duty to one's neighbor, as though beating a drum in search of a fugitive. Alas, sir, you have brought much confusion into the mind of man!'...

Why, then, does this whole idea so commonly wear the form of a precept, of advice to be followed, of a method to be applied? For obviously there is a vital contradiction in the very notion of self-renunciation, and just as much is self-acceptance. People try to accept themselves in order to be different, and try to surrender themselves in order to have more self-respect in their own eyes—or to attain some spiritual experience, some exaltation of consciousness the desire for which is the very form of their self-interest. We are really stuck with ourselves, and our attempts to reject or to accept are equally fruitless, for they fail to reach that inaccessible center of our selfhood which is trying to do the accepting or the rejecting. The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be changed; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point.

But the reason why the idea of self-renunciation appears in the impossible form of a precept is that it is a form of what Buddhists would call upaya—a Sanskrit term meaning 'skillful means,' and more particularly the skillful means employed by a teacher to awaken his student to some truth which can only be reached in a roundabout way. For the selfishness of the self thrives on the notion that it can command itself, that it is the lord and master of its own processes, of its own motives and desires. Thus the one important result of any really serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. And this precisely is that death to oneself which is the improbable source of a way of life so new and so alive that it feels like having been born again. In this metaphorical sense, the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity, its inability to make any difference to itself that is really important. That is why, in Zen Buddhism, the task of self-transcendence is likened to a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull, and, in the words of one of the old masters, the transforming death comes about at the very moment when the iron hide of the bull finally and absolutely rejects the mosquito's frail proboscis." ~Alan Watts...

..."What happens when any great musician plays a certain piece of music? He plays it today, and then he plays it again tomorrow. Is it the same piece of music, or is it another? In the Pali language, they say 'naja-so, naja-ano[?]' which means 'not the same, yet not another.' So, in this way, the Buddhist is able to speak of reincarnation of beings, without having to believe in some kind of soul entity that is reincarnated. Some kind of atman, some kind of fixed self, ego principle, soul principle that moves from one life to another. And this is as true in our lives as they go on now from moment to moment as it would be true of our lives as they appear and reappear again over millions of years. It doesn't make the 73

slightest difference, except that there are long intervals and short intervals, high vibrations and low vibrations. When you hear a high sound, high note in the musical scale, you can't see any holes in it--it's going too fast--and it sounds completely continuous. But when you get the lowest audible notes that you can hear on an organ, you feel the shaking. You feel the vibration, you hear that music [throbbing] on and off.

So in the same way as we live now from day to day, we experience ourselves living at a high rate of vibration, and we appear to be continuous, although there is the rhythm of waking and sleeping. But the rhythm that runs from generation to generation and from life to life is much slower, and so we notice the gaps. We don't notice the gaps when the rhythm is fast. So we are living, as it were, on many, many levels of rhythm.

So this is the nature of change. If you resist it, you have duhkha, you have frustration and suffering. But on the other hand, if you understand change, you don't cling to it, and you let it flow, then it's no problem. It becomes positively beautiful, which is why in poetry, the theme of the evanescence, of the world is beautiful." ~Alan Watts...

..."For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit. This idea doesn't work anymore. Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question 'What is matter?' They began that way. They wanted to know, what is the fundamental substance of the world? And the more they asked that question, the more they realized the couldn't answer it, because if you're going to say what matter is, you've got to describe it in terms of behavior, that is to say in terms of form, in terms of pattern. You tell what it does, you describe the smallest shapes of it which you can see. Do you see what happens? You look, say, at a piece of stone, and you want to say, 'Well, what is this piece of stone made of?' You take your microscope and you look at it, and instead of just this block of stuff, you see ever so many tinier shapes. Little crystals. So you say, 'Fine, so far so good. Now what are these crystals made of?' And you take a more powerful instrument, and you find that they're made of molecules, and then you take a still more powerful instrument to find out what the molecules are made of, and you begin to describe atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles. But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff. Because there isn't any.

What happens is this: 'Stuff' is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus. Fuzzy. Stuff--the idea of stuff is that it is undifferentiated, like some kind of goo. And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy. When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern. But when you want to change the level of magnification, and go in closer and closer and closer, 74

you get fuzzy again before you get clear. So everytime you get fuzzy, you go through thinking there's some kind of stuff there. But when you get clear, you see a shape. So all that we can talk about is patterns. We never, never can talk about the 'stuff' of which these patterns are supposed to be made, because you don't really have to suppose that there is any. It's enough to talk about the world in terms of patterns. It describes anything that can be described, and you don't really have to suppose that there is some stuff that constitutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the essence of pots. And so for this reason, you don't really have to suppose that the world is some kind of helpless, passive, unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to inform and make into intelligent shapes. So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff-potted clay--but pattern. A self-moving, self-designing pattern. A dance. And our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with this." ~Alan Watts...

..."But love is not a sort of rare commodity---everybody has it. Existence is love. But its like water flowing through a hose, it depends on what direction you point it. Everybody has the force running. Perhaps the way in which you find the force of love operating in you, is as a passionate like for booze or ice cream or automobiles or good-looking members of the opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But there is love is operating. People, of course, tend to distinguish between the various kinds of love. There are 'good' kinds, such as divine charity, and there are allegedly 'bad' kinds, such as 'animal lust.' But it should be understood they are all forms of the same thing. They differ in much the same way as the colors of white light divide into the spectrum when passed through a prism. We might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud’s 'libido', and the violet end of the spectrum of love is 'agape', the divine love or divine charity. In the middle, the various yellows, blues, and greens are friendship, human endearment, consideration and all that sort of fellow feeling, but its all the same thing." ~Alan Watts...

..."The thing that is so characteristic, then, of this new or different kind of consciousness, is that it starts from or has its foundation in awareness of relationship, of 'go withness,' that the inside of a situation goes with the outside, and although you may think from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, that they work independently from each other; in this state of consciousness you see that they don't. In other words, it's slowly beginning to penetrate our ordinary consciousness. That what any individual does, and we ascribe to him as his behavior and praise him for it or blame him for it, everything that he does goes with what happens outside him. The behavior of the environment, and the behavior of that organism within that environment, is one behavior, and you mustn't think of this deterministically. That is to say, as if the organism were something merely subservient to the environment. Nor must you think the opposite way, that the environment is something that can be pushed around by the organism. When an organism starts looking as if it were pushing its environment around, it simply means that the environment/organism, the total field, is changing itself. 75

So there is no determinism in this, just as there is no idea of old-fashioned free will. You learn to see that there is simply one behavior pattern working, which we will call the organism-environment, and if you understand that, you understand that you are this totality organism-environment, and so you are moving with it in the same way that all the organs of your physical body are moving together. As all the cells of the brain cooperate. You don't have to make them cooperate, you don't have to tell them to; you don't have to arrange a treaty of some kind, they just do so. So when birds fly, you notice particularly birds like sandpipers, when they turn suddenly in the air, they turn as if they were all one bird. Although when they land on the sand, they become individuals, and they run about independently looking for worms. Then suddenly you shout at them, and they shoot into the air, and they're all one creature, moving as if it had a single mind." ~Alan Watts...

..."Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I." ~Alan Watts...

..."Begin with the practice of concentration, that is, of attentive looking. It is as if to say, 'If you want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. Therefore to see it clearly, your mind must be free from wandering words and from the floating fantasies of memory.'

Now the great deal of talk about the difficulty of action, or the difficulty of concentration, is sheer nonsense. If we are sitting together at a meal, and I say to you, 'Please pass the salt' –- you just do it, and there is no difficulty about it. You do not stop to consider the right method. You do not trouble yourself with the problem of how, when you have picked the saltshaker up, you are going to be able to concentrate on it long enough to bring it to my end of the table. Now there is absolutely no difference between this and concentrating the mind’s attention to see into the nature of reality. If you can concentrate the mind for two seconds, you can do it for two minutes, and you can do it for two hours. Of course, if you want to *make* this kind of thing horribly difficult, you begin to think about whether you are concentrating, about how long you have concentrated, and about how much longer you are going to keep it up, All this is totally off the point. Concentrate for one second. If, at the end of this time, your mind has wandered off, concentrate for another second, and then another. Nobody ever has to concentrate for more than one second –- this one.

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If you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into reality, you have stopped concentrating. Real concentration is therefore a rather curious and seemingly paradoxical state, since it is at once the maximum of consciousness and the minimum of ego-feeling...The only way to enter into this state is precipitately –- without delay or hesitation, just to do it." ~Alan Watts, Become What You Are...

..."So this doctrine of the void is really the basis of the whole Mahayana movement in Buddhism. It's marvelous. The void is, of course, in Buddhist imagery, symbolized by a mirror, because a mirror has no color and yet reflects all colors. When this man I talked of, Hui-Neng, said that you shouldn't just try to cultivate a blank mind, what he said was this: the void, sunyata, is like space. Now, space contains everything--the mountains, the oceans, the stars, the good people and the bad people, the plants, the animals, everything. The mind in us--the true mind--is like that. You will find that when Buddhists use the word 'mind'--they've several words for 'mind,' but I'm not going into the technicality at the moment- they mean space. See, space is your mind. It's very difficult for us to see that because we think we're IN space, and look out at it. There are various kinds of space. There's visual space--distance-- there is audible space--silence--there is temporal space--as we say, between times--there is musical space--socalled distance between intervals, or distance between tones, rather; quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space. There's tangible space. But all these spaces, you see, are the mind. They're the dimensions of consciousness." ~Alan Watts...

..."There seems to me a strong possibility that the psychedelics (as a medicine rather than a diet) may help us to 'trigger' a new sense of identity, providing the initial boost to get us out of the habit of restricting 'I' to a vague center within the skin. That they make us aware that our whole knowledge of the external world is a state of our own bodies is not a merely technical and trivial discovery. It is the obverse of the fact that our own bodies are functions, or behaviors, of the whole external world. This— at first—weird and mystical sensation of 'unity with the cosmos' has been objectively verified. The mystic's subjective experience of his identity with 'the All' is the scientist's objective description of ecological relationship, of the organism/environment as a unified field." ~Alan Watts...

...“Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses. In time, the sense of relief wears off-but not the awakening, unless one has confused it with the sense of relief and has attempted to exploit it by indulging in ecstasy. Awakening is thus only 77

incidentally pleasant or ecstatic, only at first an experience of intense emotional release. But in itself it is just the ending of an artificial and absurd use of the mind. Above and beyond that it is wu-shih-nothingspecial-since the ultimate content of awakening is never a particular object of knowledge or experience. The Buddhist doctrine of the 'Four Invisibles' is that the Void (sunya) is to a Buddha as water to a fish, air to a man, and the nature of things to the deluded-beyond conception. It should be obvious that what we are, most substantially and fundamentally, will never be a distinct object of knowledge. Whatever we can know—life and death, light and darkness, solid and empty—will be the relative aspects of something as inconceivable as the color of space. Awakening is not to know what reality is. As a Zenrin poem says: 'As butterflies come to the newly planted flowers, Bodhidharma says, I know not.' Awakening is to know what reality is not. It is to cease identifying oneself with any object of knowledge whatsoever.” ~Alan Watts, The Way of Zen...

..."Man is often too proud to examine the self-evident things which are closest to him. Zen found the followers of the Mahayana looking for truth to scriptures, to holy men and Buddhas, believing that they would reveal it to them if they lived the good life. For man’s apparent humility in thinking that wisdom is something too sublime to reveal itself in the ordinary affairs of his life is a subtle form of pride. Inwardly he feels that he must be so great as to be removed from the things of the world before he can receive truth, and such is his pride that he will only deign to receive it from the lips of sages and from the pages of sacred scriptures. He does not see it in human beings or in the incidents of everyday life; he does not see it in himself, for again he is too proud to see himself as he is. So far from seeking for truth he hides his imperfections under his ‘meritorious deeds’ and approaches the Buddhas from behind their mask." ~Alan Watts, The Spirit of Zen...

..."So because you define your position in opposition to another position, then you know who you are courtesy of the outsider, and so you can say to the outsider--if this suddenly strikes you, you start laughing, because you realize that you're indebted to the outsider, whom you defined as awful, because you know where he is, you know where you are. Well now it's the same thing in philosophy and religion. There are all sorts of schools of thought, and they disagree with each other, they debate with each other, but so far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't know what I thought unless there were people who had different opinions than mine. Therefore, instead of saying to those people, 'You ought to agree with me,' I'd say to them, 'Thank you so much for disagreeing, because now I know where I am.' I wouldn't 78

know otherwise. In other words, the in goes with the out; the solid with the space. It's a very funny thing.

Take any highly organized system of life. Take the way a garden exists. It's full of, in a sense, competitive species. Snails and thrushes and various insects that are supposed to be at war with each other. And because their fights keep going on, the life of the garden as a whole is maintained. And so I can't say 'All snails in this garden should be abolished, so that the lettuces should thrive,' because if there aren't some snails around there, the birds won't come around, because they like the snails. And the birds do all sorts of things for my garden, not to mention supplying it with manure and all kinds of things. So I need them around. So the price of having birds is snails that eat your lettuces. And so on. I mean, this is merely an instance, an example of this.

The funny thing is, though, that when you realize this, and you suddenly see for the first time that you and your point of view, and everything that you stand for and believe in--and you think 'Boy, I'm going to stand for that and I'm going to fight for that!'--that it depends on its opposite. When you get that, it starts giving you the giggles, and you begin to laugh at yourself, and this is one of the most amazing forces in life, the creative force is human. Because when you are in a state of anxiety, and you are afraid that black may win over white, that darkness may conquer light, that non-being may conquer being, you haven't seen this point. When it strikes you that the two go together, the trembling emotional feeling which we call anxiety is given another value, and it's called laughter." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

..."While eyes and ears actually register and respond to both the up-beat and the down-beat of these vibrations, the mind, that is to say our conscious attention, notices only the up-beat. The dark, silent, or 'off' interval is ignored. It is almost a general principle that consciousness ignores intervals, and yet cannot notice any pulse of energy without them. If you put your hand on an attractive girl's knee and just leave it there, she may cease to notice it. But if you keep patting her knee, she will know you are very much there and interested. But she notices and, you hope, values the on more than the off. Nevertheless, the very things that we believe to exist are always on/offs. Ons alone and offs alone do not exist.

Many people imagine that in listening to music they hear simply a succession of tones, singly, or in 23 clusters called chords. If that were true, as it is in the exceptional cases of tone-deaf people, they would hear no music, no melody whatsoever--only a succession of noises. Hearing melody is hearing the intervals

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between the tones, even though you may not realize it, and even though these particular intervals arc not periods of silence but 'steps' of varying length between points on the musical scale. These steps or intervals are auditory spaces, as distinct from distance-spaces between bodies or time-spaces between events.

Yet the general habit of conscious attention is, in various ways, to ignore intervals. Most people think, for example, that space is 'just nothing' unless it happens to be filled with air. They are therefore puzzled when artists or architects speak of types and properties of space, and more so when astronomers and physicists speak of curved space, expanding space, finite space, or of the influence of space on light or on stars. Because of this habit of ignoring space-intervals, we do not realize that just as sound is a vibration of sound/silence, the whole universe (that is, existence) is a vibration of solid/space. For solids and spaces go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion." ~Alan Watts...

..."So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. And you begin to realize that, and you begin to be aware too, that the discords of your life and the discords of people's lives, which are a discord at one level, at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything you are and do is at that level as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves. The markings in marble. The way a cat moves. And that this world is really OK. Can't be anything else, because otherwise it couldn't exist. And I don't mean this in a kind of Pollyanna Christian Science sense. I don't know what it is or why it is about Christian Science, but it's prissy. It's got kind of a funny feeling to it; came from New England.

But the reality underneath physical existence, or which really is physical existence--because in my philosophy there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual. These are absolutely out-ofdate categories. It's all process; it isn't 'stuff' on the one hand and 'form' on the other. It's just pattern-life is pattern. It is a dance of energy. And so I will never invoke spooky knowledge. That is, that I've had a private revelation or that I have sensory vibrations going on a plane which you don't have. Everything is standing right out in the open, it's just a question of how you look at it. So you do discover when you realize this, the most extraordinary thing that I never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as you look around you. So far so good. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having that you call ordinary everyday consciousness--pretending you're not it--that experience is exactly the same thing as 'IT.' There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery." ~Alan Watts... 80

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..."So what are you doing Brahman? You're playing on and off with yourself, hide and seek with yourself. You're just passing eternal time with adventure. You forget who you are really. Every now and then You make like you're just a John Doe or a Mary Smith, or a butterfly, or a worm, or a star and that you're lost in the middle of a big, big, outside world that isn't you, that you don't understand and that you don't control. Of course! There has to be something else ... something other ... to bring out the feeling that You are you.

And so that You can feel really you, that outside world has to feel really strange, different, weird. You old trickster ... deep down in, You know the whole bit. And therefore, what You want is a surprise.

So you have to let things get out of control. You have to feel lost and lonely to know You is you. You play the thing out by inventing lusts and loves, fears and terrors, gnawing anxieties and screaming meemees. Also, you can imagine, 'It's not really me ... it's IT that runs the show.'

But our secret is ... as we say ... Tatvamasi ... You Are IT. You are running the show, by not letting your right hand know what your left is doing. By making life as a whopping great split between what You DO and what happens to You. And this is what we call Maya, the great illusion ... and Lila, the play, the big act.

And You don't just play your game with such simple elements as on and off, black and white, or life and death. To seem as real as real can be, this world that You are playing must be so complicated that you can't figure IT out ... especially if you are using figures to figure IT. So between black and white, there is a whole range of colors, between thunder and silence, the whole scale of tones, and between something and nothing, between a smashing fist on the face, and trying to touch air, there are all the textures of feeling; burning, throbbing, pushing, hugging, fondling, tickling, kissing, brushing, and light wind on the skin. Your world is all these elements of light and sound; of tastes, smell and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain ... the most complicated thing in the world, which you ... Yourself ... grew ... without even thinking about it. " ~Alan Watts...

..."OHMMMM ... Listen ... Listen ... Down ... Down with that sound!

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WHAT IS IT? A current of air? Vibrating vocal cords? Your own ear drums? Something running in your head? It’s all of these. But goes so deep. This sound is You vibrating. And who are you?

Don't give me your name, address and occupation ... You know that's just a mask ... a front ... a big act. Who puts it on? Who puts it on ... your body? Huh! What an act that is! And who puts that on? Your father and mother? Did they put you on? Come off it. You know very well who You are, but you won't admit it. Deep in there in the middle, middle of your heart, You know it. You've always been around and always will be. And the You in you is the same as the You in me.

You're not some sort of tourist just visiting in this world for a short time. You belong here, like the apple on the tree. And as the apple is the energy of the tree, you, yes You, are the energy of the world.

You don't know who You are do you? You can't really get at yourself, just as the fingertip can't touch itself and the teeth can't bite themselves. And that's because You ... the far in you ... is what we call Brahman, the Self of the Universe. The Which that which there is no whicher. The Heart and Foundation of all that's going on." ~Alan Watts...

..."We have difficulty in communicating with each other unless we can identify ourselves in terms of roles– father, teacher, worker, artist, 'regular guy,' gentleman, sportsman, and so forth. To the extent that we identify ourselves with these stereotypes and the rules of behavior associated with them, we ourselves feel that we are someone because our fellows have less difficult in a certain us- that is in identifying us and feeling that we are 'under control.' A meeting of two strangers at a party is always somewhat embarrassing when the host has not identified their roles in introducing them, for neither knows what rules of conversation and action should be observed.

Once again, it is easy to see the conventional character of roles. For a man who is a father may also be a doctor and an artist, as well as an employee and a brother. And it is obvious that even the sum total of these role labels will be far from supplying an adequate description of the man himself, even though it may place him in certain general classifications. But the conventions which govern human identity are more subtle and much less obvious than these. We learn, very thoroughly though far less explicitly, to identify ourselves with an equally conventional view of 'myself.' For the conventional 'self' or 'person' is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, 83

and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real 'me' than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually IS!" ~Alan Watts, The Way of Zen...

…He [the Buddha] maintains what is called a noble silence. Sometimes later called the thunderous silence.. because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is NOT a void. It is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can SEE; not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol and you misdirect people. It is better to destroy people's beliefs than to give them beliefs. I know it hurts, but it is The Way." ~ Alan Watts…

..."Let's say we take as the basic supposition- -which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it--that this now moment in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity. That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed. This is it. So you don't need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn't try and not do anything, because that's doing something. It's just the way it is. In other words, what's required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it's not ordinary relaxation. It's not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you're heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It's not like that. It's being with yourself as you are without altering anything. And how to explain that? Because there's nothing to explain. It is the way it is now. See? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up." ~Alan Watts...

..."So it is Zen that, if I may put it metaphorically, Chung-Tzu said 'The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep.' And another poem says of wild geese flying over a lake, 'The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has no mind to retain their image.' In other words this is to be--to put it very strictly into our modern idiom-this is to live without hang-ups, the word 'hang- up' being an almost exact translation of the Japanese 'bono' and the Sanskrit 'klesa', ordinarily translated 'worldly attachment,' though that sounds a little bit-you know what I mean--it sounds pious, and in Zen, things that sound pious are said to stink of Zen.

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But to have no hang-ups, that is to say, to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like water, seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion, a plane of energy, and that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Fundamentally. You will be afraid on the surface. You will be afraid of putting your hand in the fire. You will be afraid of getting sick, etc. But you will not be afraid of fear. Fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud will be reflected in the mirror. But of course, the mirror isn't quite the right illustration; space would be better. Like a black cloud flows through space without leaving any track. Like the stars don't leave trails behind them. And so that fundamental--it is called 'the void' in Buddhism; it doesn't mean 'void' in the sense that it's void in the ordinary sense of emptiness. It means void in that is the most real thing there is, but nobody can conceive it.

It's rather the same situation that you get between the speaker, in a radio and all the various sounds which it produces. On the speaker you hear human voices, you hear every kind of musical instrument, honking of horns, the sounds of traffic, the explosions of guns, and yet all that tremendous variety of sounds are the vibrations of one diaphragm, but it never says so. The announcer doesn't come on first thing in the morning and say 'Ladies and gentlemen, all the sounds that you will hear subsequently during the day will be the vibration of this diaphragm; don't take them for real.' And the radio never mentions its own construction, you see?

And in exactly the same way, you are never able, really, to examine, to make an object of your own mind, just as you can't look directly into your own eyes or bite your own teeth, because you ARE that, and if you try to find it, and make it something to possess, why that's a great lack of confidence. That shows that you don't really know your 'IT'. And if you're 'IT', you don't need to make anything of it. There's nothing to look for. But the test is, are you still looking? Do you know that?

I mean, not as kind of knowledge you possess, not something you've learned in school like you've got a degree, and 'you know, I've mastered the contents of these books and remembered it.' In this knowledge, there's nothing to be remembered; nothing to be formulated. You know it best when you say 'I don't know it.' Because that means, 'I'm not holding on to it, I'm not trying to cling to it' in the form of a concept, because there's absolutely no necessity to do so. That would be, in Zen language, putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch, or as we would say, gilding the lily." ~Alan Watts...

...“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~Alan Watts...

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..."Resistance to allowing use of psychedelic drugs originates in both religious and secular values. The difficulty in describing psychedelic experiences in traditional religious terms suggests one ground of opposition. The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or moksha from the Hindus, or satori or kensho from the Japanese, to describe the experience of oneness with the universe. We have no appropriate word because our own Jewish and Christian theologies will not accept the idea that man's inmost self can be identical with the Godhead, even though Christians may insist that this was true in the unique instance of Jesus Christ. Jews and Christians think of God in political and monarchical terms, as the supreme governor of the universe, the ultimate boss. Obviously, it is both socially unacceptable and logically preposterous for a particular individual to claim that he, in person, is the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the world-to be accorded suitable recognition and honor.

Such an imperial and kingly concept of the ultimate reality, however, is neither necessary nor universal. The Hindus and the Chinese have no difficulty in conceiving of an identity of the self and the Godhead. For most Asians, other than Muslims, the Godhead moves and manifests the world in much the same way that a centipede manipulates a hundred legs-spontaneously, without deliberation or calculation. In other words, they conceive the universe by analogy with an organism as distinct from a mechanism. They do not see it as an artifact or construct under the conscious direction of some supreme technician, engineer, or architect.

If, however, in the context of Christian or Jewish tradition, an individual declares himself to be one with God, he must be dubbed blasphemous (subversive) or insane. Such a mystical experience is a clear threat to traditional religious concepts. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has a monarchical image of God, and monarchs, who rule by force, fear nothing more than insubordination. The Church has therefore always been highly suspicious of mystics, because they seem to be insubordinate and to claim equality or, worse, identity with God. For this reason, John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart were condemned as heretics. This was also why the Quakers faced opposition for their doctrine of the Inward Light, and for their refusal to remove hats in church and in court. A few occasional mystics may be all right so long as they watch their language, like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, who maintained, shall we say, a metaphysical distance of respect between themselves and their heavenly King. Nothing, however, could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven-and such alarm would be shared equally by Catholics, Jews, and fundamentalist Protestants." ~Alan Watts, Psychedelics and Religious Experience...

..."Now then, it therefore becomes the great enterprise of our time from this point of view so this technology shall not go awry, and that it shall not be a war with the cosmos, that we aquire a new sense 87

of identity. It isn't just a theoretical thing that we know about, as ecologists, for example, know about the identity of the organism with its environment, but becomes something that we actually experience. And I feel that this is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility for an enormous number of people. For a simple reason. Let me draw a historical analogy. Several hundred years ago, it seemed absolutely incomprehensible for most people that the world could be round, or that the planets and stars should be up in the sky unsupported, or even that the Earth itself should be floating freely in space. The Earth is falling through space, but it seems stable, and therefore it was supposed in ancient mythologies that the Earth rested on a giant turtle. Nobody asked too carefully what the turtle rested on, but just so that there was some sense of solidity under things. So in the same way that the stars were supposed to be suspended in crystal spheres, and just as people know that the Earth is flat because you can look at it and see that it is, so people looked into the sky and they could see the crystal spheres. Of course you could see the crystal spheres: you could see right through them. So when the astronomers cast doubts on the existence of crystal spheres, everybody felt threatened, that the stars were going to fall on their heads. Just as when they talked about a round Earth, people felt a danger of if you went around to the other side, you'd drop off, or feel funny and upside-down, a rush of brains to the head, and all sorts of uncomfortable feelings. But then since then, we have got quite used to the idea that the stars float freely in space in gravitational fields, that you can go around the Earth without falling off, and now everybody realizes this and feels comfortable with it.

Likewise, in our day when Einstein propounded the theories of relativity, people said they couldn't understand it. It used to be something at a cocktail party to be introduced to somebody who understands Einstein. Now every young person understands Einstein and knows what it's about. You've got even one year of college, you know what relativity is. And you know it not only in an intellectual way, you know this as a feeling, just as you have a feeling of the roundness of the world, especially if you travel a lot on jet planes. So I feel that in just that way, within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."When we say that all things in the universe are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection on a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God's activity to draw attention to it in a particular way. But the trouble is that people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street. Really we should need to say no more than this, but it is sometimes called the activity of God to point out a certain understanding to the sort of person who might retort, 'The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street---so what?' 88

So what? Well, what else are you looking for? Here is someone who eats out the grocer's store and still complains that he is starving. But the word and concept God, Brahmin, Tao or what you will, was really introduced for such unappreciative stomachs. It is a way of emphasizing actual life to draw attention to it in much the same way as we underline words or put them in italics. Thus we call the universe the activity of God to induce the so-whatever to pay some attention and reverence to it, because he always bolts his life instead of rolling it appreciatively round his tongue. He always thinks of the second and third piece of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion. This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes." ~Alan Watts...

…. "There is an absolute concordant relationship between what goes on inside of you and outside of you. It isn't that what goes on outside of you is so powerful that it pushes around and controls what's going on inside. Equally so, it isn't that what goes on inside that is so strong that it succeeds in pushing around what's going on outside. It is very simply that the two processes, the two behaviors, are one. What you do is what the Universe does. And what the Universe does is also what you do. Not you in the sense of your superficial ego, which is a very small little tiny area of your conscious sensitivity. But you in the total psycho-physical organism, conscious as well as unconscious." ~ Alan Watts ….

..."This is, as I have said, a record not of one experiment with consciousness-changing drugs, but of several, compressed for reasons of poetic unity into a single day. At the same time I have more or less kept to the basic form which every individual experiment seems to take---a sort of cycle in which one's personality is taken apart and then put together again, in what one hopes is a more intelligent fashion. For example, one's true identity is first of all felt as something extremely ancient, familiarly distant --with overtones of the magical, mythological, and archaic. But in the end it revolves back to what one is in the immediate present, for the moment of the world's creation is seen to lie, not in some unthinkably remote past, but in the eternal now. Similarly, the play of life is at first apprehended rather cynically as an extremely intricate contest in one-upmanship, expressing itself deviously even in the most altruistic of human endeavors. Later, one begins to feel a 'good old rascal' attitude toward the system; humor gets the better of cynicism. But finally, rapacious and all-embracing cosmic selfishness turns out to be a disguise for the unmotivated play of love.

But I do not mean to generalize. I am speaking only of what I have experienced for myself, and I wish to repeat that drugs of this kind are in no sense bottled and predigested wisdom. I feel that had I no skill as 89

a writer or philosopher, drugs which dissolve some of the barriers between ordinary, pedestrian consciousness and the multidimensional super consciousness of the organism would bring little but delightful, or sometimes terrifying, confusion. I am not saying that only intellectuals can benefit from them, but that there must be sufficient discipline or insight to relate this expanded consciousness to our normal, everyday life...

The mystical experience, whether induced by chemicals or other means, enables the individual to be so peculiarly open and sensitive to organic reality that the ego begins to be seen for the transparent abstraction that it is. In its place there arises (especially in the latter phases of the drug experience) a strong sensation of oneness with others, presumably akin to the sensitivity which enables a flock of birds to twist and turn as one body. A sensation of this kind would seem to provide a far better basis for social love and order than the fiction of the separate will." ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

..."Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall...Smash! And all that ink spread, and in the middle it's dense...and as it gets out on the edge the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns...So in the same way there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread, and you and I sitting here in this room as complicated human beings are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting, but...we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique way out on the edge of that explosion, way out in space, and way out in time. 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. Depends how you define yourself.

You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning—you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You ARE still the process. You ARE the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you ARE." ~Alan Watts...

..."When you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn’t be 90

brighter. Only they’re hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don’t blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it’s like a hand beating on a skinless drum. No light. You evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It’s your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness in everything." ~Alan Watts...

..."So you see, when you ask 'How to I obtain the knowledge of God, how do I obtain the knowledge of liberation?' All I can say is it's the wrong question. Why do you want to obtain it? Because the very fact that you're wanting to obtain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there. You already have it. But of course, it's up to you. It's your privilege to pretend that you don't. That's your game; that's your life game; that's what makes you think your an ego. And when you want to wake up, you will, just like that. If you're not awake, it shows you don't want to. You're still playing the hide part of the game. You're still, as it were, the self pretending it's not the self. And that's what you want to do. So you see, in that way, too, you're already there. So when you understand this, a funny thing happens, and some people misinterpret it. You'll discover as this happens that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior disappears. You will realize that what you describe as things under your own will feel exactly the same as things going on outside you. You watch other people moving, and you know you're doing that, just like you're breathing or circulating your blood. And if you don't understand what's going on, you're liable to get crazy at this point, and to feel that you are god in the Jehovah sense. To say that you actually have power over other people, so that you can alter what you're doing. And that you're omnipotent in a very crude,literal kind of bible sense. You see? A lot of people feel that and they go crazy. They put them away. They think they're Jesus Christ and that everybody ought to fall down and worship them. That's only they got their wires crossed. This experience happened to them, but they don't know how to interpret it. So be careful of that. Jung calls it inflation. People who get the Holy Man syndrome, that I suddenly discover that I am the lord and that I am above good and evil and so on, and therefore I start giving myself airs and graces. But the point is, everybody else is, too. If you discover that you are that, then you ought to know that everybody else is.

For example, let's see in other way, so you might realize this. Most people think when they open their eyes and look around, that what they're seeing is outside. It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes, and that behind the eyes there is a blank you can't see at all. You turn around and there's something else in front of you. But behind the eyes there seems to be something that has no color. It isn't dark, is isn't light. It is there from a tactile standpoint; you can feel it with your fingers, but you can't get inside it. But what is that behind your eyes? Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around, that's how it feels inside your head. The color of this room is back here 91

in the nervous system, where the optical nerves are at the back of the head. It's in there. It's what you're experiencing. What you see out here is a neurological experience. Now if that hits you, and you feel sensuously that that's so, you may feel therefore that the external world is all inside my skull. You've got to correct that, with the thought that your skull is also in the external world. So you suddenly begin to feel 'Wow,what kind of situation is this? It's inside me, and I'm inside it, and it's inside me, and I'm inside it.' But that's the way it is." ~Alan Watts, Nature of Consciousness...

..."The realization of the self fundamentally depends on 'coming off it'. You know the sort of, when we say to people who put on some kind of an act and we say, 'Oh, come off it'. And some people can 'come off it'. They laugh and say they suddenly realize that they’re making fools of themselves and they laugh at themselves and they, 'come off it'. So, in exactly the same way the Guru, (the teacher) is trying to make you 'come off it'. Now if he finds that he can’t make you 'come off it' he’s gonna put you through all these exercises. So that you for the last time, when you’ve got enough discipline, enough suffering and enough frustration, you’ll give it all up. And realize you were there from the beginning and there was nothing to realize." ~Alan Watts...

..."Everybody can be a buddha, everybody has in himself the capacity to wake up from the illusion of being simply this separate individual." ~Alan Watts...

..."In Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying 'Now.' There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously- this means you escape karma and the devil.

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So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the reputation of being the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his students. If some teacher or some guru says, 'Really, this isn't difficult at all-it's perfectly easy,' some people will say, 'Oh, he's not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult.' When we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that's very weird and rigid, people think, 'Now there is the thing. That man means business.' So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students, whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort, because that's what IT IS. Taoism is, in that sense, what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle." ~Alan Watts...

…This - the immediate, everyday, & present experience - is IT, the entire & ultimate point for the existence of a Universe. ~Alan Watts…

..."Most of us are in a constant state of tension about whether we are going to survive or not. Every minute of driving on the freeway you wonder whether you are going to survive. Take an airplane and you wonder whether you are going to survive. You wonder where the money is going to come from to buy groceries tomorrow. We are absolutely absorbed by this need to survive. We are 'tired of livin' and scared of dyin'.

Suppose you realize that it does not matter whether you survive or not. Do you really need to survive? Would you not feel much better if you gave up the need to survive? Would you not feel freer? Would you not have more energy available for glorious things? Would you not be able to love others more if you were no longer concerned about whether you are going to survive?

We have been taught that we must go on, it is our duty. It is not.

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All these ideas of the spiritual, the godly, and the dutiful are not the only way of being religious. There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe, and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do." ~Alan Watts...

..."Of course, the separate observer, the thinker of the thoughts, is an abstraction which we create out of memory. We think of the self, the ego, rather, as a repository of memories, a kind of safety deposit box, or record, or filing cabinet place where all our experiences are stored. Now, that's not a very good idea. It's more that memory is a dynamic system, not a storage system. It's a repetition of rhythms, and these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience. In other words, first of all, how do you distinguish between something known now, and a memory? Actually, you don't know anything at all until you remember it. Because if something happens that is purely instantaneous--if a light flashes, or, to be more accurate, if there is a flash, lasting only one millionth of a second, you probably wouldn't experience it, because it wouldn't give you enough time to remember it.

We say in customary speech, 'well, it has to make an impression.' so in a way, all present knowledge is memory, because you look at something, and for a while the rods and cones in your retina respond to that, and they do their stuff--jiggle, jiggle, jiggle--and so as you look at things, they set up a series of echoes in your brain. And these echoes keep reverberating, because the brain is very complicated. But you then see--first of all, everything you know is remembered, but there is a way in which we distinguish between seeing somebody here now, and the memory of having seen somebody else who's not here now, but whom you did see in the past, and you know perfectly well, when you remember that other person's face, it's not an experience of the person being here. How is this? Because memory signals have a different cue attached to them than present time signals. They come on a different kind of vibration. Sometimes, however, the wiring gets mixed up, and present experiences come to us with a memory cue attached to them, and then we have what is called a 'deja vu' experience: we're quite sure we've experienced this thing before.

But the problem that we don't see, don't ordinarily recognize, is that although memory is a series of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them so we don't confuse them with present experience, they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience, they are all part of this constantly flowing life process, and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process, watching it go by. You're all involved in IT." ~Alan Watts, The World as Emptiness...

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...“I think what we’re doing is we are understanding it in terms of languages, numbers, in terms of a logic which is too simple for the job, too crude for the job. To begin with, we understand everything in words or numbers and they’re stretched out in rows and lines and our eyes have to scan those lines in order to understand them; but when I scan this view, I don’t do it line by line by line, I see the whole thing at once. I take it in with, as it were, a wide-angle lens. But when I try to understand the world through literature and mathematics, I have to scan lines. You know that’s why it takes us so long to get educated in school, because our eyes have to scan and organize miles and miles of print; and that takes us 20 years or more to get through it. But life happens, changes go on too rapidly for that because you see in the world everything is happening all together everywhere in the world at once. And meanwhile we with our myopic little minds are working it out step by step -of course we are greatly assisted by the rapidity of the computer- but even so the computer is still looking at things in rows as the magnetic tape goes through and is scanned by the computer. It’s still all going along in a single track. And I suppose then that our difficulty is that we have, lamentably one-track minds in an infinitely many-tracked universe; and we may have to come to the alarming conclusion that the universe is smarter than we are.” ~Alan Watts...

..."'Individual' is the Latin form of the Greek 'atom'—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent 'thing-events' which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.

Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a 'real person'; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. 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. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that 96

excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.

Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do—that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused." ~Alan Watts, The Book...

..."I want you to think of the curious sensation of nothing that lies behind ourselves. Think of the blank space behind the eyes, about the silence out of which all sound comes, and about empty space, out of which all the stars appear. I liken this curious emptiness behind everything to God, an image- less, nonidolatrous God of which we can have no conception at all. Basically, when you really get down to it, that emptiness is yourself.

Now it sounds very odd in our civilization to say, 'Therefore, I am God,' or for that matter, 'You are God.' But this is exactly what Jesus Christ felt. And he was crucified for it, because in his culture God was conceived as the royal monarch of the universe, and anybody who got up and said, 'Well, I am God,' was blasphemous. He was subversive. He was claiming to be, if not the boss himself, at least the boss' son, and that was a put-down for everybody else. But Jesus had to say it that way because, in his culture, they did not have, as the Hindus have, the idea that everybody, not only human beings, but animals and plants, all sentient beings whatsoever, are God in disguise.

Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly. I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with continuous with one with the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe. If the universe is made up of stars a star is a center from which energy flows. In other words there's the middle and all the rays come out from it. And so I feel that as the image of the whole thing all energy is a center from which rays come out and, therefore, each one of us is an expression of what is basically the whole thing." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Superficially, the public and official fear of psychedelic drugs is based on uninformed association with such addictive poisons as heroin, amphetamines, and barbiturates. But drinking coffee or whisky is also 'using drugs,' and this is allowed even though the effects may be harmful and the creative results negligible. Psychedelic drugs are feared, basically, for the same reason that mystical experience has been feared, discouraged, and even condemned in the Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic orthodoxies. It leads to disenchantment and apathy toward the approved social rewards of status and success, to chuckles at pretentiousness and pomposity, and, worse, to disbelief in the Church-and-State dogma that we are all God's adopted orphans or fluky little germs in a mechanical and mindless universe. No authoritarian government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, can tolerate the apprehension that each one of us is God in disguise, and that our real inmost, outmost, and utmost Self cannot be killed. That's why they had to do away with Jesus.

Thus the possibility that even a preliminary glimpse of this apprehension is available through taking a pill or chewing a plant threatens mystical experience for the millions---that is, masses of people who will be difficult to rule by force of 'authority.' It is even now being recognized in the United States that the real danger of psychedelics is not so much neurological as political---that 'turned-on' people are not interested in serving the power games of the present rulers. Looking at the successful men, they see completely boring lives.

In the Epilogue I shall make it clear that psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.

Furthermore, speaking quite strictly, mystical insight is no more in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the microscope. There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these three drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge. As an escape, an isolated and dissociated ecstasy, they may have the same sort of value as a rest cure or a good entertainment. But this is like using a giant computer to play tick-tack-toe, and the hours of heightened perception are wasted unless occupied with sustained reflection or meditation upon whatever themes may be suggested." ~Alan Watts... 99

..."What, finally, of the strong impression delivered both by the psychedelics and by many forms of mystical experience that the world is in some way an illusion? A difficulty here is that the word 'illusion' is currently used pejoratively, as the negative of everything real, serious, important, valuable, and worthwhile. Is this because moralists and metaphysicians are apt to be personality types lacking the light touch? Illusion is related etymologically to the Latin 'ludere', to play, and thus is distinguished from reality as the drama is distinguished from 'real life.' In Hindu philosophy, the world is seen as a drama in which all the parts—each person, animal, flower, stone, and star—are roles or masks of the one supreme Self, which plays the lila or game of hide and seek with itself for ever and ever, dismembering itself as the Many and remembering itself as the One through endless cycles of time, in the spirit of a child tossing stones into a pond through a long afternoon in summer. The sudden awakening of the mystical experience is therefore the one Self remembering itself as the real foundation of the seemingly individual and separate organism.

Thus the Hindu maya, or world illusion, is not necessarily something bad. Maya is a complex word signifying the art, skill, dexterity, and cunning of the supreme Self in the exercise of its playful, magical, and creative power. The power of an actor so superb that he is taken in by his own performance. The Godhead amazing itself, getting lost in a maze." ~Alan Watts...

..."When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication." ~Alan Watts...

..."Our difficulty in accepting for ourselves so important a part in the actual creation or manifestation of the world comes, of course, from this thorough habituation to the feeling that we are strangers in the universe—that human consciousness is a fluke of nature, that the world is an external object which we confront, that its immense size reduces us to pitiful unimportance, or that geological and astronomical structures are somehow more real (hard and solid?) than organisms. But these are actually mythological images of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—ideas which, for a while, seemed extremely plausible, mostly for the reason that they appeared to be hard-boiled, down to earth and tough-minded, a currently fashionable posture for the scientist. Despite the lag between advanced scientific ideas and the common sense of even the educated public, the mythology of man as a hapless fluke trapped in a mindless mechanism is breaking down. The end of this century may find us, at last, thoroughly at home

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in our own world, swimming in the ocean of relativity as joyously as dolphins in the water." ~Alan Watts...

...“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually IS. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” ~Alan Watts...

..."Spiritual freedom, however, involves much more than going on living exactly as you have lived before. It involves a particular kind of joyousness, or what the Buddhists term bliss (ananda). It is the discovery that to accord with the universe, to express the Tao, one has but to live, and when this is fully understood it becomes possible to live one's life with a peculiar zest and abandon. There are no longer any obstacles to thinking and feeling; you may let your mind go in whatever direction it pleases, for all possible directions are acceptable, and you can feel free to abandon yourself to any of them. Nowhere is there any possibility of escape from the principle of non-duality, for 'you yourself as you are--that is Buddha Dharma.' In this state there can be no spiritual pride, for union or identity with the Buddha principle is not something achieved by man; it is achieved for him from the beginning of time, just as the sun has been set on high to give him light and life." ~Alan Watts, The Middle Way-The Problem of Faith and Works in Buddhism...

..."So, the discovery of our inseparability from everything else is something that I don't think will have to come by the primitive methods of difficult yoga meditations, or even through the use of psychedelic chemicals. I think it's something that's within the reach of very many people's simple comprehension. Once you get the point. Just in the same way you can understand that the world is round and you experience it as such. You could call this a kind of yana yoga, in Hindu terms. But I don't think it's going to be necessary for our culture to get this point by staring at it's navel, or by spending hours practicing Za-Zen, not that I've got anything against it, because after all, to sit still can be an extraordinarily pleasant thing to do, and it's important for us to have more quiet. But I think this is essentially a matter of intuitive comprehension that will dawn upon us and suddenly hit us all in a heap, and you suddenly 101

see that this is totally common sense, and that your present feeling of how you are is a hoax. You know how Henry Emerson Foster wrote a book called 'How to be a Real Person'? Translated into it's original terms, that means 'How to be a Genuine Fake.' Because the person is the mask, the 'persona' worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama. They put a mask on their face which had a megaphone-shaped mouth which projected the sound in an open- air theater. So the 'dramatis persona' at the beginning of a play is the list of masks, and the word 'person,' which means 'mask,' has come to mean the real you. 'How to be a Real Person.' Imagine

But I think we'll get over it, and discover the thing that we simply don't let our children in on, that we don't let ourselves in on. Let me emphasize this point again. It is not at the moment common sense, not plausible, because of our condition, but we can very simply come to see that YOU are not some kind of accident that pops up for a while and then vanishes - but that deep inwards, you are what there is and all that there is, which is eternal, and that which there is no whicher. That's you. Now, you don't have to remember that all the time, as you don't have to remember how to beat your heart. You could die and forget everything you ever knew in this lifetime, because it's not necessary to remember it. You're going to pop up as somebody else later on, just as you did before, without knowing who you were. It's as simple as that. You were born once, you can get born again. If there was a cosmic explosion once that blew everything into existence and is going to fizzle out, if it happened once, it can happen again, and it goes on..." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

..."But the point is that a human represents a certain kind of development, wherein a maximal sense of his oneness with the whole universe goes hand in hand with the maximum development of his personality as somebody unique and different. Whereas the people who are of course trying to develop their personality directly and taking a Dale Carnegie course on how to win friends and influence people, or how to become successful - all those people come out as if they came from the same cookie cutter. They don't have any personality.

Now then, it therefore becomes the great enterprise of our time from this point of view so this technology shall not go awry, and that it shall not be a war with the cosmos, that we aquire a new sense of identity. It isn't just a theoretical thing that we know about, as ecologists, for example, know about the identity of the organism with its environment, but becomes something that we actually experience. And I feel that this is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility for an enormous number of people. For a simple reason. Let me draw a historical analogy. Several hundred years ago, it seemed absolutely incomprehensible for most people that the world could be round, or that the planets and stars should be up in the sky unsupported, or even that the Earth itself should be floating freely in space. The Earth is falling through space, but it seems stable, and therefore it was supposed in ancient mythologies that the 102

Earth rested on a giant turtle. Nobody asked too carefully what the turtle rested on, but just so that there was some sense of solidity under things. So in the same way that the stars were supposed to be suspended in crystal spheres, and just as people know that the Earth is flat because you can look at it and see that it is, so people looked into the sky and they could see the crystal spheres. Of course you could see the crystal spheres: you could see right through them. So when the astronomers cast doubts on the existence of crystal spheres, everybody felt threatened, that the stars were going to fall on their heads. Just as when they talked about a round Earth, people felt a danger of if you went around to the other side, you'd drop off, or feel funny and upside-down, a rush of brains to the head, and all sorts of uncomfortable feelings. But then since then, we have got quite used to the idea that the stars float freely in space in gravitational fields, that you can go around the Earth without falling off, and now everybody realizes this and feels comfortable with it.

Likewise, in our day when Einstein propounded the theories of relativity, people said they couldn't understand it. It used to be something at a cocktail party to be introduced to somebody who understands Einstein. Now every young person understands Einstein and knows what it's about. You've got even one year of college, you know what relativity is. And you know it not only in an intellectual way, you know this as a feeling, just as you have a feeling of the roundness of the world, especially if you travel a lot on jet planes. So I feel that in just that way, within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."What I think an awakening really involves is a re-examination of our common sense. We've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious. And our speech reflects them; its commonest phrases. 'Face the facts.' As if they were outside you. As if life were something they simply encountered as a foreigner. 'Face the facts.' Our common sense has been rigged, you see? So that we feel strangers and aliens in this world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because this is what we are used to. That's the only reason. But when you really start questioning this, say 'Is that the way I have to assume life is? I know everybody does, but does that make it true?' It doesn't necessarily. It ain't necessarily so. So then as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture, you find you get a new kind of common sense. It becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe." ~Alan Watts...

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..."When Bodidharma, the legendary founder of Zen, came to China, a disciple came to him and said 'I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.' And Bodhidharma said 'Bring out your mind here before me and I'll pacify it.' 'Well,' he said, 'when I look for it, I can't find it.' So Bodhidharma said 'There, it's pacified.' See? Because when you look for your own mind, that is to say, your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else, you won't be able to find it. But the only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look for it hard enough, to find out that it isn't there. And so everybody says 'All right, know yourself, look within, find out who you are.' Because the harder you look, you won't be able to find it, and then you'll realize it isn't there at all. There isn't a separate you. You're mind is what there is. Everything. But the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible.

That's one way. I haven't said the only way, but it is one way. So almost all spiritual disciplines, meditations, prayers, etc, etc, are ways of persisting in folly. Doing resolutely and consistently what you're doing already. So if a person believes that the Earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that. He knows it's flat. Look out the window and see; it's obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him it isn't is to say 'Well let's go and find the edge.' And in order to find the edge, you've got to be very careful not to walk in circles, you'll never find it that way. So we've got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually when we get back to where we started from, you've convinced the guy that the world is round. That's the only way that will teach him. Because people can't be talked out of illusions.

There is another possibility, however. But this is more difficult to describe. Let's say we take as the basic supposition- -which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it--that this now moment in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity. That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed. This is it. So you don't need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn't try and not do anything, because that's doing something. It's just the way it is. In other words, what's required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it's not ordinary relaxation. It's not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you're heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It's not like that. It's being with yourself as you are without altering anything. And how to explain that? Because there's nothing to explain. It is the way it is now. See? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up." ~Alan Watts...

..."So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of 105

nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union. In other words, look at the number of people we know who are terrified of silence, and who have to have something going all the time, some noise streaming into their ears. They're doing that because of their intense sense of loneliness. And so when they feel silent, they feel lonely and they want to escape from it. Or people who just want to get together. As we say, they want to escape from themselves. More people spend more time running away from themselves. Isn't that wretched? What a definition. What an experience of self if it's something you've always got to be running away from and forgetting. Say you read a mystery story. Why? So you forget yourself. You join a religion. Why? To forget yourself. You get absorbed in a political movement. Why? To forget yourself. Well it must be a pretty miserable kind of self if you have to forget it like that. Now for a person who doesn't have an isolated sense of self, he has no need to run away from it, because he knows." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

..."There is a Zen poem that talks about 'IT,' meaning the mystical experience, satori, the realization that you are, as Jesus was, the eternal energy of the universe. The poem says, 'You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you speak, it is silent. When you are silent, it speaks.'

This phrase—not being able to get it, you get it—is the feel­ing Krishnamurti tries to convey to people when he says, 'Why do you ask for a method? There is no method. All methods are simply gimmicks for strengthening your ego.' How do we not ask for a method? He answers, 'In asking that, you are still asking for a method.' There is no method. If you really understand what your 'I' is, you will see there is no method. We think this is so sad, but it is not. This is the gospel, the good news, because if you cannot achieve it, if you cannot transform yourself, that means that, the main obstacle to mystical vision has collapsed. That obstacle was you. What happens next? By now you are at your wit's end, but what are you going to do—commit suicide? Suppose you just put that off for a little while, and wait and see what happens. You can­not control your thoughts, and you cannot control your feelings, because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feel­ings, and they are running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go. You are still breathing, aren't you? Still growing your hair; still seeing and hearing. Are YOU doing that? Is breathing something that YOU do? Do you see? Do you organize the operations of your eyes, and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It happens, and it is a happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening. Your hearing, your seeing, the clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue; the sun is happening shining. There it is: all this happening.

May I introduce you? This is yourself. This is a vision of who you really are, and the way you really function. You function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence. This is not a state of 106

affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach about it to you, because the minute you start thinking, 'I should understand that,' the stupid notion that 'I' should bring it about arises again, when there is no 'you' to bring it about. That is why I am not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is talk about what is." ~Alan Watts, Spontaneous Occurrence...

..."So, the Taoist trick is simply, 'Live now and there will be no problems.' That is the meaning of the Zen saying, 'When you are hungry, eat. When you are tired, sleep. When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit.' Rinzai, the great Tung dynasty master, said, 'In the practice of Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Sleep when you're tired, move your bowels, eat when you're hungry-that's all. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.' The meaning of the wonderful Zen saying 'Every day is a good day' is that they come one after another, and yet there is only this one. You don't link them. This, as I intimated just a moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they do. The flower goes puff, and people go this way and that way, and so on, and that is what is happening. It has no meaning, no destination, no value. It is just like that. When you see that, you see it's a great relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are firmly established in suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again to play with the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don't haunt you, because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on from moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die sometime in the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities. This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains: 'To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters.' In other words, they have dissolved into the point instant, the tsbana. 'But for the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters'." ~Alan Watts, The Philosophies of Asia...

..."But Brahman as One Reality is all-inclusive, for the Upanishads say, 'It is made of consciousness and mind: It is made of life and vision. It is made of the earth and the waters: It is made of air and space. It is made of anger and love: It is made of virtue and vice. it is made of all that is near: It is made of all that is afar. It is made of all.'

What, then, is nonduality in terms of a state of mind? How does the mystic who has realized his identity with the One reality think and feel? Does his consciousness expand from out of his body and enter into all other things, so that he sees with others' eyes, and thinks with others' brains? Only figuratively, for the Self which is in him and in all others does not necessarily communicate to the physical brain of John 107

Smith, mystic, what is seen by the eyes of Pei-wang, construction worker, on the other side of the earth. I do not believe spiritual illumination is to be understood in quite this sensational way. We shall answer the question sufficiently if we can discover what is a nondualistic state of mind. Does it mean a mind in so intense a state of concentration that it contains only one thought? Strictly speaking, the mind never contains more than one thought at a time; such is the nature of thinking. But if spirituality means thinking only and always of one particular thing, then other things are excluded and this is still duality. Does it mean, then, a mind which is thinking of everything at once? Even if this were possible, it would exclude the convenient faculty of thinking of one thing at a time and would still be dualistic. Clearly these two interpretations are absurd, but there is another way of approach.

Spiritual illumination is often described as absolute freedom of the soul, and we have seen that the One Reality is all-inclusive. Is the mind of the mystic singularly free and all-inclusive? If so, it would seem that his spirituality does not depend on thinking any special kinds of thoughts, on having a particular feeling ever in the background of his soul. He is free to think of anything and nothing, to love and to fear, to be joyful or sad, to set his mind on philosophy or on the trivial concerns of the world; he is free to be both a sage and a fool, to feel both compassion and anger, to experience both bliss and agony.

And in all this he never breaks his identity with the One Reality-God, 'whose service is perfect freedom.' For he knows that in whatever direction he goes and in whichever of these many opposites he is engaged, he is still in perfect harmony with the One that includes all directions and all opposites. In this sense, serving God is just living; it is not a question of the way in which you live, because all ways are included in God. To understand this is to wake up to your freedom to be alive." ~Alan Watts, The Middle Way...

..."And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact. It is made, as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it. Don't forget Jesus is the son of a carpenter. And also the son of God. So the image of God and of the world is based on the idea of God as a technician, potter, carpenter, architect, who has in mind a plan, and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan.

So basic to this image of the world is the notion, you see, that the world consists of stuff, basically. Primordial matter, substance, stuff. As parts are made of clay. Now clay by itself has no intelligence. Clay does not of itself become a pot, although a good potter may think otherwise. Because if you were a really good potter, you don't impose your will on the clay, you ask any given lump of clay what it wants to become, and you help it to do that. And then you become a genius. But the ordinary idea I'm talking 108

about is that simply clay is unintelligent; it's just stuff, and the potter imposes his will on it, and makes it become whatever he wants.

And so in the book of Genesis, the lord God creates Adam out of the dust of the Earth. In other words, he makes a clay figurine, and then he breathes into it, and it becomes alive. And because the clay become informed. By itself it is formless, it has no intelligence, and therefore it requires an external intelligence and an external energy to bring it to life and to bring some sense to it. And so in this way, we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts, as being made, and it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother 'How was I made?' or 'Who made me?' And this is a very, very powerful idea, but for example,it is not shared by the Chinese, or by the Hindus. A Chinese child would not ask its mother 'How was I made?' A Chinese child might ask its mother 'How did I grow?' which is an entirely different procedure from making. You see, when you make something, you put it together, you arrange parts, or you work from the outside in, as a sculpture works on stone, or as a potter works on clay. But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction. It works from the inside to the outside. It expands. It burgeons. It blossoms. And it happens all of itself at once. In other words, the original simple form, say of a living cell in the womb, progressively complicates itself, and that's the growing process, and it's quite different from the making process." ~Alan Watts...

...“Doesn’t it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you’re doing all this and you never had any education in how to do it? Never learned, but you’re this miracle? The point of it is, from a strictly physical, scientific standpoint, this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that’s going on. And if I am my foot, I am the sun. Only we’ve got this little partial view. We’ve got the idea that ‘No, I’m something IN this body.’ The ego. That’s a joke. The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. It’s like the radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter. Is there anything in the way? And conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any troublemaking changes. But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. And the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, we realize first thing how harmonious it all is. Because your organism is a miracle of harmony. All these things functioning together. Even those creatures that are fighting each other in the blood stream and eating each other up. If they weren’t doing that, you wouldn’t be healthy.” ~Alan Watts...

..."What im saying is, watch out, for your social conditioning, and how your constant commerce in language with other people, shapes, the way in which you actually sense the world." ~Alan Watts... 109

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…Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe. ~ Alan Watts...

...For Whom Were You Weeping? "There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one of the aspects of the godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive aspect. When Narada came to Vishnu and said, 'What is the secret of your maya?' Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. The moment he fell under the water he was born as a princess in a very great family, and went through all the experiences of childhood as a little girl. She finally married a prince from another kingdom and went to live with him in his kingdom. They lived there in tremendous prosperity, with palaces and peacocks, but suddenly there was a war and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed. The prince himself was killed in battle, and he was cremated. As a dutiful wife, the princess was about to throw herself weeping on to the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of suttee or self-sacrifice. But suddenly Narada woke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by his hair by Vishnu, who said, 'For whom were you weeping?'... So, that is the idea of the whole world being a magical illusion, but done so skillfully - by whom? By You, basically. Not 'you' the empirical ego, not 'you' who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories that are strung together into what you call 'my everyday self.' Rather, it is the 'you' that is responsible for growing your hair, coloring your eyes, arranging the shape of your bones. The deeply responsible 'you' IS what is responsible for all this." ~Alan Watts...

...“To begin with, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines.

Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present—the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness of articulation.

Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them. The eye sees types and classes—flower, leaf, rock, bird, fire—mental pictures of things rather than things, rough outlines filled with flat color, always a little dusty and dim. But here the depth of light and structure in a bursting bud go on forever. 111

There is time to see them, time for the whole intricacy of veins and capillaries to develop in consciousness, time to see down and down into the shape of greenness, which is not green at all, but a whole spectrum generalizing itself as green—purple, gold, the sunlit turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the emerald. I cannot decide where shape ends and color begins.

The bud has opened and the fresh leaves fan out and curve back with a gesture which is unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, 'Thus!' And somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The meaning is transparent in the same way that the color and the texture are transparent, with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be right inside the structure and color.

Which is of course where it is, for light is an inseparable trinity of sun, object, and eye, and the chemistry of the leaf is its color, its light. But at the same time color and light are the gift of the eye to the leaf and the sun. Transparency is the property of the eyeball, projected outward as luminous space, interpreting quanta of energy in terms of the gelatinous fibers in the head. I begin to feel that the world is at once inside my head and outside it, and the two, inside and outside, begin to include or 'cap' one another like an infinite series of concentric spheres.

I am unusually aware that everything I am sensing is also my body—that light, color, shape, sound, and texture are terms and properties of the brain conferred upon the outside world. I am not looking at the world, not confronting it; I am knowing it by a continuous process of transforming it into myself, so that everything around me, the whole globe of space, no longer feels away from me but in the middle. This is at first confusing. I am not quite sure of the direction from which sounds come. The visual space seems to reverberate with them as if it were a drum. The surrounding hills rumble with the sound of a truck, and the rumble and the color-shape of the hills become one and the same gesture.

I use that word deliberately and shall use it again. The hills are moving into their stillness. They mean something because they are being transformed into my brain, and my brain is an organ of meaning. The forests of redwood trees upon them look like green fire, and the copper gold of the sun-dried grass heaves immensely into the sky. Time is so slow as to be a kind of eternity, and the flavor of eternity transfers itself to the hills— burnished mountains which I seem to remember from an immeasurably distant past, at once so unfamiliar as to be exotic and yet as familiar as my own hand.” ~Alan Watts...

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..."The world is love to him who treats it as such, even when it torments and destroys him, and in states of consciousness where there is no basic separation between the ego and the world suffering cannot be felt as malice inflicted upon oneself by another. By the same logic it might seem that with out the separation of self and other there can be no love. This might be true if individuality and universality were formal opposites, mutually exclusive of one another, if, that is, the inseparability of self and other meant that all individual differentiations were simply unreal. But in the unitary, or non dualistic, view of the world I have been describing this is not so. Individual differences express the unity, as branches, leaves, and flowers from the same plant, and the love between the members is the realization of their basic interdependence." ~Alan Watts, The New Alchemy...

...“What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?...If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing…which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life that is spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like doing what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually…become a master of IT…and then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is…somebody is interested in everything. Anything You can be interested in, you can find others who are...So it’s an important question: What do I desire?” ~Alan Watts...

..."The Tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we arrange everything geometrically in boxes, or in rows. That is a very crude kind of order, but when you look at a plant it is perfectly obvious that the plant has order. We recognize at once that is not a mess, but it is not symmetrical and it is not geometrical looking. The plant looks like a Chinese drawing, because they appreciated this kind of non-symmetrical order so much that it became an integral aspect of their painting. In the Chinese language this is called li, and the character for li means the markings in jade. It also means the grain in wood and the fiber in muscle. We could say, too, that clouds have li, marble has li, the human body has li. We all recognize it, and the artist copies it whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, an abstract painter, or a non-objective painter. They all are trying to express the essence of li. The interesting thing is, that although we all know what it is, there is no way of defining it. Because tao is the course, we can also call li the watercourse,and the patterns of li are also the patterns of flowing water. We see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, as sculpture in the grain in wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles. All these things are patterned according to the basic principles of flow. In the patterns of flowing water you will all kind of motifs from Chinese art, immediately recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle of yang-yin. 114

So li means then the order of flow, the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid, because Lao-tzu likens Tao to water: 'The great Tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right, It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.' For as he comments elsewhere, water always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor, because we are always trying to play games of one-upmanship, and be on top of each other. But Lao-tzu explains that the top position is the most insecure. Everybody wants to get to the top of the tree, but then if they do the tree will collapse. That is the fallacy of American society." ~Alan Watts...

..."To maintain the state of bliss, the infinite consciousness must have the most ingenious ways of both having monotony and overcoming it, of so combining order with randomness that the principle of order does not issue in dead uniformity, nor the principle of randomness in chaos. The play of rhythm must be controlled, and yet not so controlled as to be completely predictable. It must be marvelously complicated, but without the tedium of having to keep track of all the ins and outs. In short, omnipotence must at all costs avoid the stultifying situation of being in total control of itself, and the equally fruitless situation of losing control altogether." ~Alan Watts...

..."This is no more saying that we ought not to fear death than I was saying that we ought to be unselfish. Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that 'I' and all other 'things' now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them--to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over-fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise: you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are." ~Alan Watts, The Book...

..."I presume, then, that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as my sensation of 'I-ness,' of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the 'central' Self—the IT—appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms—always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst

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of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.

Actually, we know this already. After people die, babies are born—and, unless they are automata,every one of them is, just as we ourselves were, the 'I' experience coming again into being. The conditions of heredity and environment change, but each of those babies incarnates the same experience of being central to a world that is 'other.' Each infant dawns into life as I did, without any memory of a past. Thus when I am gone there can be no experience, no living through, of the state of being a perpetual 'hasbeen.' Nature 'abhors the vacuum' and the I-feeling appears again as it did before, and it matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years. In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant.

This is so obvious, but our block against seeing it is the ingrained and compelling myth that the 'I' comes into this world, or is thrown out from it, in such a way as to have no essential connection with it. Thus we do not trust the universe to repeat what it has already done—to 'I' itself again and again. We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger—a visitor who hardly belongs—for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself—through our eyes and IT's." ~Alan Watts...

...“Of course the way Yoga is sold in the United States, like everything else, is that it’s supposed to be good for you. It isn’t. Has nothing to do with anything that’s good for you. It’s the one activity which you do for its own safety, and not because it’s good for you, not because it will lead any where.. Because you can not go to the place where you are now obviously. The Yoga is to be completely here and now, it’s why the word Yoga means ‘Join’. Get with it, be completely here and now. This is the real meaning of concentration, be in your center.” ~Alan Watts...

..."It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is commentaries and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separation which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the 'I', but it is just the feeling of being an isolated 'I' which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want. 116

To put it 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 breathretention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being 'exclusive' and 'special,' seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the 'nice' people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and live in the best way; but this, too, is a contradiction.

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good 'I' who is going to improve the bad 'me.' 'I,' who has let has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward 'me,' and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently 'I' will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make 'me' behave so badly." ~Alan Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity...

..."What I am trying to get into basic logic is that there isn't a sort of fight between something and nothing. Everyone is familiar with the famous words of Hamlet, 'To be or not to be, that is the question.' It isn't; to be or not to be is not the question. Because you can't have a solid without space. You can't have an is without an isn't, a something without a nothing, a figure without a background. And we can turn that round, and say, 'You can't have space without solid.'

Imagine nothing but space, space, space, space with nothing in it, forever. But there you are imagining it and you're something in it. The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all, is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast.

We know what we mean by white in comparison with black. We know life in comparison with death. We know pleasure in comparison with pain, up in comparison with down. But all these things must come into being together. You don't have first something and then nothing or first nothing and then something. Something and nothing are two sides of the same coin. If you file away the tails side of a coin completely, the heads side of it will disappear as well. So in this sense, the positive and negative, the something and the nothing, are inseparable—they go together. The nothing is the force whereby the something can be manifested." ~Alan Watts... 117

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..."When you look out of your eyes, at nature happening out there, you're looking at you! That's the real you. The 'you' that goes on of itself." ~Alan Watts...

..."So, we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self. That much of my activity which I feel I do. And that then doesn't include breathing most of the time; it doesn't include the heartbeats; it doesn't include the activity of the glands; it doesn't include digestion; it doesn't include how you shape your bones; circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now if you get with yourself and you find out you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find out that your body knows that you are one with the universe. In other words, the so called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out it's YOU who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that's going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean. Your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos, and it's all you. Only you're playing the game that you're only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there are in physical reality no such thing as separate events.

So then. Remember also when I tried to work towards a definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it. You don't have to translate it into language. Supposing that when you got up in the morning, you had to switch your brain on. And you had to think and do as a deliberate process waking up all the circuits that you need for active life during hte day. Why, you'd never get done! Because you have to do all those things at once. That's why the Buddhists and Hindus represent their gods as many-armed. How could you use so many arms at once? How could a centipede control a hundred legs at once? Because it doesn't think about it. In the same way, you are unconsciously performing all the various activities of your organism. Only unconsciously isn't a good word, because it sounds sort of dead. Superconsciously would be better. Give it a plus rather than a minus." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."What do you think the future is going to bring you? Actually you don't know. I've always thought it an excellent idea to assign to freshmen in college, the task of writing an essay on what you would like heaven to be. In other words, what do you really want. And be specific because be careful of what you desire - you may get it. You see, the truth of the matter is, as I have already intimated, there is no such thing as time. Time is an abstraction. So is money. As so are inches.

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Do you remember the Great Depression? One day everything was going on all right. Everybody was pretty wealthy and had plenty to eat. The next day everybody was in poverty. What had happened? Had the fields disappeared, had the dairy vanished into thin air, had the fish of the sea ceased to exist, had human beings lost their energy, their skills and their brains? No. But on the morning after the Depression a man came to work building a house, and the foreman said to him 'Sorry chum you can't work today, there ain't no inches.' He said 'What do you mean there ain't no inches?' 'Yeah' he said, 'Yeah, we got lumber, we got metal, we even got tape measures.' The foreman said 'The trouble with you is you don't understand business. There are no inches. We have been using too many of them and not enough to go around.' Because what happened in the Great Depression was that money, there was a slump in money. And human beings are so unbelievably stupid, that they confused money with wealth. And they don't realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that meters are a measure of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that get into unbelievable trouble, in exactly the same way time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion. And we keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this. And as we sit and watch the clock, supposing you are working, are you watching the clock? If you are, what are you waiting for. Time off. Five o'clock. We can go home and have fun. Yeah, fun. What are you going to do when you get home? Have fun? Or are you going to watch TV, which is an electronic reproduction of life which doesn't even smell of anything. And eat a TV dinner which is a kind of a warmed over airline nastiness until you just get tired and have to go to sleep. You know, the great society. This is our problem, you see. We are not alive, we are not awake. We are not living in the present." ~Alan Watts...

..."The mystical experience, whether induced by chemicals or other means, enables the individual to be so peculiarly open and sensitive to organic reality that the ego begins to be seen for the transparent abstraction that it is. In its place there arises (especially in the latter phases of the drug experience) a strong sensation of oneness with others, presumably akin to the sensitivity which enables a flock of birds to twist and turn as one body. A sensation of this kind would seem to provide a far better basis for social love and order than the fiction of the separate will." ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology...

..."So the most serious need of civilization is to come to Now. Think of all the trouble we would save. Think of how peaceful things would become, we would not be interfering with everybody. We would not be dedicated to doing everybody else good, like the General who the other day destroyed a village in Vietnam for its own safety. That is what he said. 'Kindly let me help you or you will drown' said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree. Now you see is the meaning of eternal life. When Jesus said 'Before Abraham was,' he didn't say 'I was,' he said 'I am.' And to come to this, to know that you are and 120

there is no time except the present. And then suddenly you see you attain a sense of reality. And you want always to be looking ahead for the things that you wanted to happen.

You have to find it now. And so really, the aim of education is to teach people to live in the present, to be all here. As it is, our educational system is pretty abstract. It neglects the absolutely fundamentals of life, teaching us all to the bureaucrats, bankers clerks, accountants and insurance salesmen; all cerebral. It entirely neglects our relationships to the material world. There are five fundamental relationships to the material world: farming, cooking, clothing, housing and lovemaking. And these are grossly overlooked...

So I think it is a great time to get back to reality, that is to say, to get back from time to eternity, to the eternal now, which is what we have, always have had, and indeed always will have." ~Alan Watts, From Time To Eternity...

"The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that'sthe universe looking at you. We are the eyes of the cosmos."--Alan Watts

..."And at the end of the kali-yuga, the great destroyer of the worlds, God manifested as the destructive principle Shiva, does a dance called the tandava, and he appears, blue-bodied with ten arms, with lightning and fire appearing from every pore in his skin, and does a dance in which the universe is finally destroyed. The moment of cosmic death is the waking up of Brahma, the creator, for as Shiva turns round and walks off the stage, seen from behind, he is Brahma, the creator, the beginning of it all again. And Vishnu is the preserver, that is to say,the going on of it all, the whole state of the godhead being manifested as many, many faces. So, you see, this is a philosophy of the role of evil in life which is rational and merciful.

If we think God is playing with the world, has created it for his pleasure, and has created all these other beings and they go through the most horrible torments—terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through how is that possibly justifiable? We try by saying, 'Well, some God must have created it; if a God didn't create it, 121

there's nobody in charge and there's no rationality to the whole thing. It's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a ridiculous system and the only out is suicide.'

But suppose it's the kind of thing I've described to you, supposing it isn't that God is pleasing himself with all these victims, showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them, supposing it's quite different from that. Suppose that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm. There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt, are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills, to go into that very situation." ~Alan Watts, Cosmic Drama...

..."Now, let's go into a more mythological kind of imagery. Suppose you're God. Suppose you have all time, eternity, and all power at your disposal. What would you do? I believe you would say to yourself after awhile, 'Man, get lost.' It's like asking another question which amounts to supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time—you could dream seventy-five years of time in one night, a hundred years of time in one night, a thousand years of time in one night—and it could be anything you wanted—because you make up your mind before you go to sleep, 'Tonight I'm going to dream of so-and-so.' Naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys, you could listen to music such as no mortal has heard, and see landscapes beyond your wildest dreams.

And for several nights, oh, maybe for a whole month of nights, you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you would begin to think, 'Well, I've seen quite a bit, let's spice it up, let's have a little adventure.' And you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero. And then as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game you would say, 'Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don't know that I'm dreaming,' and by so doing you would take the experience of the drama for complete reality. What a shock when you woke up! You could really scare yourself!

And then on successive nights you might dare yourself to experience even more extraordinary things just for the contrast when you woke up. You could, for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, live the essence of suffering to its most intense point, and then, suddenly, wake up and find it was after all nothing but a dream and everything's perfectly O.K. Well, how do you know that's not what you're doing already. You, reading, sitting there with all your 122

problems, with all your whole complicated life situations, it may just be the very dream you decided to get into. If you don't like it, what fun it'll be when you wake up!" ~Alan Watts...

..."Contradictory as it may sound, it seems to me the deepest spiritual experience can arise only in moments of a selfishness so complete that it transcends itself, by 'the way down and out,' which is perhaps why Jesus found the companionship of publicans & sinners preferable to that of the righteous and respectable.

It is a sort of first step to accept one's own selfishness without the deception of trying to wish it were otherwise, for a man who is not all of one piece is perpetually paralyzed by trying to go in two directions at once. As a Turkish proverb puts it, 'He who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed.' And so, when the sinner realizes that even his repentance is sinful, he may perhaps for the first time 'come to himself' and be whole. Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realization that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realization that everything is as right as IT can BE. Or better, everything is AS IT as it can BE." ~Alan Watts...

..."Every explicit duality is an implicit unity." ~Alan Watts...

..."Your skin doesn't separate you from the world; it's a bridge through which the external world flows into you, and you flow into it. Just, for example, as a whirlpool in water, you could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape you have a definite form. All right? Here is a flow of water, and suddenly it does a whirlpool, and it goes on. The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it. The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and exactly the same way, the whole universe is doing each one of us, and I see each one of you today and I recognize you tomorrow, just as I would recognize a whirlpool in a stream. I'd say 'Oh yes, I've seen that whirlpool before, it's just near so-and-so's house on the edge of the river, and it's always there.' So in the same way when I meet you tomorrow, I recognize you, you're the same whirlpool you were yesterday. But you're moving. The whole world is moving through you, all the cosmic rays, all the food you're eating, the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything is just flowing right through you. When you're wiggling the same way the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you.

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But the problem is, you see, we haven't been taught to feel that way. The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it--aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us. Otherwise we're going to go out of our heads." ~Alan Watts...

..."But the Buddha's doctrine, based on his own experience of awakening,which occurred after seven years of attempts to study with the various yogis of the time, all of whom used the method of extreme asceticism, fasting, doing all sort of exercises, lying on beds of nails, sleeping on broken rocks, any kind of thing to break down egocentricity, to become unselfish, to become detached, to exterminate desire for life. But buddha found that all that was futile; that was not The Way. And one day he broke his ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup from a girl who was looking after cattle. And suddenly in this tremendous relaxation, he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted. He saw, completely, that what he had been doing was on the wrong track. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And no amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish. So long as you think, and feel, that you are a someone contained in your bag of skin, and that's all, there is no way whatsoever of your behaving unselfishly. Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you're still tied to the wheel of becoming by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehavior's.

So, you know how people are when they get spiritually proud. They belong to some kind of a church group, or an occult group, and say 'Of course we're the ones who have the right teaching. We're the ingroup, we're the elect, and everyone else outside.' It is really off the track. But then comes along someone who one-ups THEM, by saying 'Well, in our circles, we're very tolerant. We accept all religions and all ways as leading to The One.' But what they're doing is they're playing the game called 'We're More Tolerant Than You Are.' And in this way the egocentric being is always in his own trap.

So buddha saw that all his yoga exercises and ascetic disciplines had just been ways of trying to get himself out of the trap in order to save his own skin, in order to find peace for himself. And he realized that that is an impossible thing to do, because the motivation ruins the project. He found out, then, see, that there was no trap to get out of except himself. Trap and trapped are one, and when you understand that, there isn't any trap left." ~Alan Watts, The World As Emptiness...

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..."All classification seems to require a division of the world. As soon as there is a class,there is what is inside it and what is outside it. In and out, yes and no, are explicitly exclusive of one another. The separation between them seems to be as clear-cut as that between a solid and a space, a figure and its background. The separation, the difference,is therefore what we notice; it fits the notation of language, and because it is noted and explicit it is conscious and unrepressed. But there is also something unnoticed and ignored, which does not fit the notation of language, and which because it is unnoticed and implicit is unconscious and repressed. This is that the inside and the outside of the class go together and cannot do without each other. 'To be and not to be arise mutually'. Beneath the contest lies friendship; beneath the serious lies the playful; beneath the separation of the individual and the world lies the field pattern. In this pattern every push from within is at the same time a pull from without, every explosion an implosion, every outline an inline, arising mutually and simultaneously so that it is always impossible to say from which side of the boundary any movement begins. The individual no more acts upon the world than the world upon the individual. The cause and effect turn out to be integral parts of the same event...

The difficulty, however, is not so much in finding the language as in overcoming social resistance. Would it really do to find out that our game is not serious, that enemies are friends, and that the good thrives on the evil? Society as we know it seems to be a tacit conspiracy to keep this hushed up for fear that the contest will otherwise cease. If these opposites are not kept fiercely separate and antagonistic, what motivation will there be for the creative struggle between them? If man does not feel himself at war with nature, will there be any further impetus to technological progress? Imagine how the Christian conscience would react to the idea that, behind the scenes, God and the Devil were the closest friends but had taken opposite sides in order to stage a great cosmic game." ~Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West...

..."Two eminent historians of science, Joseph Needham and Lynn White, have pointed out the surprising fact that in both Europe and Asia, science arises from mysticism, because both the mystic and the scientist are types of people who want to know directly, for themselves, rather than be told what to believe. And in this sense they follow the advice of Jesus to become again 'as little children,' to look at the world with open, clear, and unprejudiced eyes, as if they had never seen it before. It is in this spirit that an astronomer must look at the sky and a yogi must attend to the immediately present moment, as when he concentrates on a prolonged sound. Years and years of book study may simply fossilize you into fixed habits of thought so that any perceptive person will know in advance how you will react to any situation or idea. Imagining yourself reliable, you become merely predictable and, alas, boring. Most sermons are tedious. One knows in advance what the preacher is going to say,however dressed up on a fancy language. Going strictly by the book, he will have no original ideas or experiences, for which

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reason both he and his followers become rigid and easily shocked personalities who cannot swing, wiggle, lilt or dance." ~Alan Watts, The World's Most Dangerous Book...

..."Remember that Aristotle's and Newton's preoccupation with casual determinism was that they were trying to explain how one thing or event was influenced by others, forgetting that the division of the world into separate things and events was a fiction. To say that certain events are casually connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat." ~Alan Watts, The Book...

..."The truth of the matter being that there is no such thing as time. Time is a hallucination. There is only today. There never will be anything except today. And if you do not know how to live today, you are demented. And this is the great problem of Western civilization, not only of Western civilization, but really all civilization, because what civilization is, is a very complex arrangement in which we have used symbols - that is to say words, numbers, figures, concepts to represent the real world of nature, like we use money to represent wealth, and like we measure energy with the clock. Or like we measure with yards or with inches. These are very useful measures. But you can always have too much of a good thing, and can so easily confuse the measure with what you are measuring; the money with the wealth; or even the menu with the dinner. And at a certain point, you can become so enchanted with the symbols that you entirely confuse them with the reality. And this is the disease from which almost all civilized people are suffering. We are therefore in the position of eating the menu instead of the dinner. Of living in a world of words, symbols and are therefore very badly related to our material surroundings." ~Alan Watts...

..."The point is that the eyes are so sensitive that they can realize the concreteness of light.The ears are so sensitive that they can realize the concreteness of air vibrations and turn them into sound. The fingers are less sensitive, and they realize concreteness--that is, reality--in terms of touch, in terms of hardness. But all these things are reflections. That is to say-- Well, let's ask the question, is a rainbow real? Well, it fulfills all the categories of being there, because it fills all the categories of public observation. It isn't the hallucination of just one observer, because you can stand beside me and see the rainbow too. But you just try to get a hold of that rainbow, approach it. I remember as a little boy, I'd ride my bicycle around chasing rainbow ends, and believing there might be a pot of gold at the end of it. But the irritating thing was, you could never catch up with the rainbow. Well, was it there, or wasn't it? Well, everybody saw it. But you see, it depends on a kind of triangulation between you and the sun and 127

the moisture in the air, and if that triangulation doesn't exist, and of those three functions don't exist, there isn't any rainbow. Just like if I hit a drum, and I pound the hell out of it with no skin on the drum, it won't make any noise. In other words, for the drum to beat, needs both skin and a fist. If there's no skin, the drum doesn't make any noise; if there's no fist, the drum doesn't make any noise.

So in the same way, exactly, the hard floor made of stone is like a rainbow. It is there only if certain conditions of relationship are fulfilled. Now, we like to think, you see, that houses and things go on existing in their natural state when we're not around looking at them or feeling them. But what about the rainbow? Supposing that there's nobody to see it; would it be there? Or let me put it in another way. We're supporting the myth that the external world exists without us, but let's ask the question in another way. Supposing I was there, capable of seeing a rainbow, but there wasn't any sun out. It wouldn't be there, would it? Let's put it another way. Suppose the sun was out, and I was there to see it, butt here wasn't any moisture in the atmosphere. It wouldn't be there, would it? So equally, it wouldn't be there if there was no one there to see it. It just as much depends on somebody to see it as it depends on the sun and it depends on the moisture.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us. That's the whole myth of the independent observer, of man coming into a world into which he doesn't really belong, and that it's all going in there and he has nothing to do with it, but he just arrives in here and sees it as it always was. But that's a joke and people could only feel that way if they felt compeletely alienated and did not feel that the external world was continuous with their own organism. You bet you the external world is so continuous with your own organism: the whole world is human because it's humaning." ~Alan Watts...

..."So, here in the center is this extraordinary little being whose importance is not in his size--that's no criterion of value--but in his complexity, in his sensitivity, in the fact that these little germs, these tiny, tiny creatures we call people are each one of them essential to the existence of the whole cosmos. That's the sort of relation we have here between the great and the small, the macrocosm and the microcosm. But you see, we don't think about it, because of a way-- We are all brought up within social forms which denied us. 'Little children should be seen and not heard.' When children come into this world, we put them down. You get used to that in infancy, and ally our life through, you feel vaguely put down by reality. Government gives itself airs and graces, even in a democracy. The police are superbly rude to everybody else, just because they happen to be the instruments of the law. Incidentally, there's a very amusing article in a periodical called the 'East Village Other,' on policeman-ship, and what to do if you're 128

detained by one of these officers of the law, how to behave. You must be respectful, that's the main point. You see, that attitude, that you are here on probation, on sufferance, that you don't matter, that you're not important to this whole thing at all, and that you could be wiped out any time and no one would miss you, is very, very deeply pushed into us by social institutions. Because we're afraid that if we taught people otherwise they would get too big for their boots. Well, of course they might, because they would be reacting against the old way of doing things. If you tell a person who's been put down all his life that he is in fact the lord god, he's liable to go off his rocker." ~Alan Watts, Self and Other...

..."What's the basis of all drama? The basis of all stories, of all plots, of all happenings--is the game of hide and seek. You get a baby, what's the fundamental first game you play with a baby? You put a book in front of your face,and you peek at the baby. The baby starts giggling. Because the baby is close to the origins of life; it comes from the womb really knowing what it's all about,but it can't put it into words. See, what every child psychologist really wants to know is to get a baby to talk psychological jargon, and explain how it feels. But the baby knows; you do this, this, this and this, and the baby starts laughing, because the baby is a recent incarnation of God. And the baby knows, therefore, that hide and seek is the basic game.

See, when we were children, we were taught '1, 2, 3,' and 'A, B, C,' but we weren't set down on our mothers' knees and taught the game of black and white. That's the thing that was left out of all our educations, the game that I was trying to explain with these wave diagrams. That life is not a conflict between opposites, but a polarity. The difference bewteen a conflict and a polarity is simply--when you think about opposite things, we sometimes use the expression, 'These two things are the poles apart.' You say, for example, about someone with whom you totally disagree, 'I am the poles apart from this person.' But your very saying that gives the show away. Poles. Poles are the opposite ends of one magnet. And if you take a magnet, say you have a magnetized bar, there's a north pole and a south pole. Okay, chop off the south pole, move it away. The piece you've got left creates a new south pole. You never get rid of the south pole. So the point about a magnet is, things may be the poles apart, but they go together. You can't have the one without the other. We are imagining a diagram of the universe in which the idea of polarity is the opposite ends of the diameter, north and south, you see? That's the basic idea of polarity, but what we're trying to imagine is the encounter of forces that come from absolutely opposed realms, that have nothing in common. When we say of two personality types that they're the poles apart. We are trying to think eccentrically, instead of concentrically. And so in this way, we haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

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..."When we say that all things in the universe are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection on a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God's activity to draw attention to it in a particular way. But the trouble is that people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street. Really we should need to say no more than this, but it is sometimes called the activity of God to point out a certain understanding to the sort of person who might retort, 'The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street---so what?'

So what? Well, what else are you looking for? Here is someone who eats out the grocer's store and still complains that he is starving. But the word and concept God, Brahmin, Tao or what you will, was really introduced for such unappreciative stomachs. It is a way of emphasizing actual life to draw attention to it in much the same way as we underline words or put them in italics. Thus we call the universe the activity of God to induce the so-whatever to pay some attention and reverence to it, because he always bolts his life instead of rolling it appreciatively round his tongue. He always thinks of the second and third piece of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion. This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes." ~Alan Watts, Tomorrow Never Comes...

..."Tao means basically 'way', and so 'course'; the course of nature. Lao-tzu said the way of the functioning of the Tao is 'so of itself'; that is to say it is spontaneous. Watch again what is going on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing a happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at things there is no difference between what you do, on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. It is all the same process. Just as your thought happens,the car happens outside, and so the clouds and the stars.

When a Westerner hears that he thinks this is some sort of fatalism or determinism, but that is because he still preserves in the back of his mind two illusions. One is that what is happening is happening to him, and therefore he is the victim of circumstances. But when you are in primal ignorance there is no you different from what is happening, and therefore it is not happening to you. It is just happening. So is 'you', or what you call you, or what you will later call you. It is part of the happening, and you are part of the universe, although strictly speaking the universe has no parts. We only call certain features of the universe parts. However you can't disconnect them from the rest without causing them to be not only non-existent, but to never to have existed at all. 131

When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory, which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now, and therefore it is spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but of course we don't really know what randomness is. What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth." ~Alan Watts, "Taoism"...

..."In order to go into Taoism at all, we must begin by being in the frame of mind in which it can be understood. You cannot force yourself into this frame of mind, anymore than you can smooth disturbed water with your hand. But let's say that our starting point is that we forget what we know, or think we know, and that we suspend judgment about practically everything, returning to what we were when we were babies when we had not yet learned the names or the language. And in this state, although we have extremely sensitive bodies and very alive senses, we have no means of making an intellectual or verbal commentary on what is going on.

You are just plain ignorant, but still very much alive, and in this state you just feel what is without calling it anything at all. You know nothing at all about anything called an external world in relation to an internal world. You don't know who you are,you haven't even the idea of the word you or I-- it is before all that. Nobody has taught you self control, so you don't know the difference between the noise of a car outside and a wandering thought that enters your mind- they are both something that happens. You don't identify the presence of a thought that may be just an image of a passing cloud in your mind's eye or the passing automobile; they happen. Your breath happens. Light, all around you, happens. Your response to it by blinking happens.

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So, on one hand you are simply unable to do anything, and on the other there is nothing you are supposed to do. Nobody has told you anything to do. You are completely unable to do anything but be aware of the buzz. The visual buzz, the audible buzz, the tangible buzz, the smellable buzz-- all around the buzz is going on.Watch it. Don't ask who is watching it; you have no information about that yet. You don't know that it requires a watcher for something to be watched. That is somebody's idea; but you don't know that.

Lao-tzu says, 'The scholar learns something every day, the man of Tao unlearns something every day, until he gets back to non-doing.' Just simply, without comment, without an idea in your head, be aware. What else can you do? You don't try to be aware; you are. You will find, of course, that you can not stop the commentary going on inside your head, but at least you can regard it as interior noise. Listen to your chattering thoughts as you would listen to the singing of a kettle." ~Alan Watts, "Taoism"...

...“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ~Alan Watts...

..."When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. The whole glory of it is that we do not know. Ideas of survival and annihilation are alike based on the past, on memories of waking and sleeping, and, in their different ways, the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness are without meaning.

It needs but slight imagination to realize that everlasting time is a monstrous nightmare, so that between heaven and hell as ordinarily understood there is little to choose. The desire to continue always can only seem attractive when one thinks of indefinite time rather than infinite time. It is one thing to have as much time as you want, but quite another to have time without end. For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, 'Time to stop now!' he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is the result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the 133

feeling of an 'I' having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between 'I' and 'now' has vanished—when there is just this 'now' and nothing else.

By contrast, hell or 'everlasting damnation' is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession. It is trying to see one’s own eyes, hear one’s own ears, and kiss one’s own lips.

To see, however, that life is complete in each moment—whole, undivided, and ever new—is to understand the sense of the doctrine that in eternal life God, the undefinable this, is all-in-all and is the Final Cause or End for which everything exists. Because the future is everlastingly unattainable, and, like the dangled carrot, always ahead of the donkey, the fulfillment of the divine purpose does not lie in the future. It is found in the present, not by an act of resignation to immovable fact, but in seeing that there is no one to resign.

For this is the meaning of that universal and ever-repeated religious principle that to know God, man must give up himself. It is as familiar as any platitude, and yet nothing has been harder to do, and nothing so totally misunderstood. How can a self, which is selfish, give itself up? Not, say the theologians, by its own power, but through the gift of divine grace, the power which enables man to achieve what is beyond his own strength. But is this grace given to all or to a chosen few, who, when they receive it, have no choice but to surrender themselves? Some say that it comes to all, but that there are those who accept its aid and those who refuse. Others say that it comes to a chosen elect, but still, for the most part, insist that the individual has the power to take it or leave it.

But this does not solve the problem at all. It replaces the problem of holding or surrendering the self by the problem of accepting or refusing divine grace, and the two problems are identical. The Christian religion contains its own hidden answer to the problem in the idea that man can only surrender himself 'in Christ.' For 'Christ' stands for the reality that there is no separate self to surrender. To give up 'I' is a false problem. 'Christ' is the realization that there is no separate 'I.' 'I do nothing of myself.… I and the Father are one.… Before Abraham was, I am.'

If there is any problem at all, it is to see that in this instant you have no 'I' to surrender. You are completely free to do this at any moment, and nothing whatever is stopping you. This is our freedom. We are not, however, free to improve ourselves, to surrender ourselves, to lay ourselves open to grace,

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for all such split-mindedness is the denial and postponement of our freedom. It is trying to eat your mouth instead of bread.

Is it necessary to underline the vast difference between the realization that 'I and the Father are one,' and the state of mind of the person who, as we say, 'thinks he is God'? If, still thinking that there is an isolated 'I,' you identify it with God, you become the insufferable ego-maniac who thinks himself successful in attaining the impossible, in dominating experience, and in pursuing all vicious circles to satisfactory conclusions.

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul!

When the snake swallows his tail he has a swelled head. It is quite another thing to see that you are your 'fate,' and that there is no one either to master it or to be mastered, to rule or to surrender." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."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. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone 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." ~Alan Watts...

..."Most forms of energy are vibration, pulsation. The energy of light or the energy of sound are always on and off. In the case of very fast light, very strong light, even with alternating current you don't notice the discontinuity because your retina retains the impression of the on pulse and you can't notice the off pulse except in very slow light like an arc lamp. It's exactly the same thing with sound. A high note seems more continuous because the vibrations are faster than a low note. In the low note you hear a kind of graininess because of the slower alternations of on and off.

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All wave motion is this process, and when we think of waves, we think about crests. The crests stand out from the underlying, uniform bed of water. These crests are perceived as the things, the forms, the waves. But you cannot have the emphasis called a crest, the concave,without the de-emphasis, or convex, called the trough. So to have anything standing out, there must be something standing down or standing back. We must realize that if you had this part alone, the up part, that would not excite your senses because there would be no contrast.

The same thing is true of all life together. We shouldn't really contrast existence with nonexistence, because actually, existence is the alternation of now-you-see-it/now-you-don't,now-you-see-it/nowyou-don't, now-you-see-it/now-you-don't. It is that contrast that presents the sensation of there being anything at all." ~Alan Watts, "Nothingness"...

..."It is generally felt that there is a radical incompatibility between intuition and intellect, poetry and logic, spirituality and rationality, To me, the most impressive thing about LSD experiences is that these formally opposed realms seem instead to complement and fructify one another, suggesting, therefore, a mode of life in which man is no longer an embodied paradox of angel and animal, of reason fighting instinct, but a marvelous coincidence in whom Eros and Logos are one." ~Alan Watts...

…“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” ~ Alan Watts…

..."So then, you see, the Bodhisattva, who is--I'm assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this assembly--but the Bodhisattva as distinct from the pratyeka-buddha, Bodhisattva doesn't go off into nirvana, he doesn't go off into permanent withdrawn ecstasy, he doesn't go off into a kind of catatonic Samadhi. That's all right. There are people who can do that; that's their vocation. That's their specialty, just as a long thing is the long body of buddha, and a short thing is the short body of buddha. But if you really understand that Zen, that Buddhist idea of enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the temporal, because they're all concepts. So, let me say again, I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being school teacherish, and saying 'if you were NICE people, that's 136

what you would do.' For heaven's sake, don't be nice people. But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. It's too strong a current for the wire. So then, it's terribly important to see beyond ecstasy. Ecstasy here is the soft and lovable flesh, huggable and kissable, and that's very good. But beyond ecstasy are bones, what we call hard facts. Hard facts of everyday life, and incidentally, we shouldn't forget to mention the soft facts; there are many of them. But then the hard fact, it is what we mean, the world as seen in an ordinary, everyday state of consciousness. To find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy, well, it's rather like this:

Let's suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light. There's a Zen poem which says:

A sudden crash of thunder. The mind doors burst open, and there sits the ordinary old man.

See? There's a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee! And the doors of the mind are blown apart, and there sits the ordinary old man. It's just little you, you know? Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you've missed seeing. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the world has 'seen the light.' That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you're seeing it. Like you see aureoles around Buddhas. Like you seethe beatific vision at the end of Dante's 'Paradiso.' Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond light, it's so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great mandala appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet, there's black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the Yang comes from the Yin, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering bass which is so vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been watching a kind of thing radiating out. 'But,' it says, 'you know, this isn't all I can do,' and the rays start dancing like this, and the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures start varying themselves, and they say, well, you've been looking at this as I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let's add a third dimension; it's going to come right at you now. And meanwhile, it says, we're not going to just do like this, we're going to do little curlicues. And it says, 'well, that's just the beginning!' Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little sub-figures are contained in what you originally thought were the main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing complexities if sound all over the place, and this thing's going, going, going, 137

and you think you're going to go out of your mind, when suddenly it turns into...Why, us, sitting around here." ~Alan Watts...

..."You pick up a pebble on the beach – look at it – beautiful. Don't try and get a sermon out of it – sermons and stones and god and everything be down – just enjoy it, don't feel that you got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that you become healthy, you become able to be a loving, helpful human being. But if you can't do that, if you can only do things because they are somehow, you are going to get something out of it, you are a vulture.

So, we have to learn – we don't have to, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to go on living – but it's a great idea, it's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call 'purposelessness'. They think nature is purposeless. When we say something is purposeless, that's put down, there's no future in it, it's a washout. But when they hear the word purposeless, they think that's just great. It's like the waves washing against the shore, going on and on and on forever, with no meaning.The great Zen master said, as his death poem, just before he died: 'from the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff with nonsense'. The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said many nonsenses.

Like the birds in the trees go 'tweet, tweet, tweet!' what's it all about? Everybody tries to say 'ah it's the mating call, that's the purpose, trying to get their mate, you know, attract him with a song. That's why they have colors, butterflies have eyes on them, self protection' the engineering view of the universe! Why do that? They say 'well it's because they need to survive'. Well, why survive, what's that for? 'Well to survive'.

See, human beings really are a lot of tubes. And all living creatures is just tubes. And a tube has to put things in one end and let it out at the other. Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube, the eating end called the head. And that's in it's got eyes, and it's got ears, and it's got little organs and tenons, things like these, and it helps to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out at the other. Well, while you're doing this you see the stuff going through, where's the tube out? And so that the show can go on, and the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes, who go on doing the same thing, and at one end or at the other. And they say well, that's terribly serious, that's awfully important, we've got keep on doing this (ah ah ah). Now when Chinese say 'nature is purposeless' - this is a compliment. It's like the idea of the Japanese have a word 'Yugen', 138

and they describe Yugen as: 'watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds, as watching a ship vanish behind the distant island, as wondering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return'. Haven't you done this, haven't you gone on a walk with no particular purpose in mind? Carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit a doodle and wander along and sometimes twirl your thumbs. It's at that moment that you are a perfectly rational human being, you learn purposelessness. All music is purposeless. Is music getting somewhere? If it were, I mean if the aim of music, of a symphony were to get to the final bar, the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest! See, dancing, when you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor? Is that the idea of dancing? The aim of dancing is to dance! Is the presence. Well it's exactly the same with our life! We think life has a purpose. No.

Here is the choice: are you going to trust it or not? If you do trust it, you may get let down. And this it is yourself, your own nature and all nature around you. There are going to be mistakes. But if you don't trust it at all you are going to strangle yourself. You are going to fence yourself round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions and policemen and guards. And who's going to guard the guards? And who's going to look after big brother to be sure that he doesn't do something stupid? No go. To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn't have a boss, because a boss is a system of mistrust. That is why Lao Tzu's Tao 'Loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them'." ~Alan Watts, Who Guards The Guards?...

..."Cosmic consciousness is a release from self-consciousness, that is to say from the fixed belief and feeling that one’s organism is an absolute and separate thing as distinct from a convenient unit of perception. For it becomes clear that our use of the lines and surfaces of nature to divide the world into units is only a matter of convenience, then all that I have called myself is actually inseparable from everything. However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable." ~Alan Watts, This Is It...

..."So, these are the two other theories of nature that we are going to consider in the study of Oriental philosophy: the dramatic theory and the organic theory. I feel that ways of life that use these models are so unlike Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, that we cannot really use the word 'religion' to describe these things. Now, what is there in Western culture that resembles the concerns of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism? The trouble is, on the surface, they look alike. In other words, if you go into a Hindu temple or a special Japanese Buddhist temple you will be pretty convinced you are in church (in sort of a Catholic 139

church, at that, because there is incense, chants, bowings, gongs, candles, rosaries, and all the things that one associates with a theistic, monarchical religion). Yet, that is not what is going on. Even though the image of Buddha may be sitting on a throne, covered with a canopy, and royal honors being done, there is no factor of obedience. Probably the nearest thing to these ways of life in the West is, perhaps, psychotherapy in some form, although not all forms of psychotherapy. The objective of psychotherapy is, as you might say, to change your state of consciousness. If you, in other words, are horribly depressed and you are terrified, or if you are having hallucinations, you see a 'head shrinker' and he tries to change your state of consciousness.

Fundamentally, these Oriental disciplines are concerned basically with changing your state of consciousness. However, here we part company because psychotherapy is largely focused on the problems of the individual as such, the problems particular to this individual or that individual. Instead, these Asian ways of life are focused on certain problems peculiar to man as such, and to every individual on the understanding that the average human being (and the more civilized he is the more this is true) is hallucinating. The average human being has a delusive sense of his own existence, and it is thus that the very word 'Buddha,' in Buddhism, is from a root in Sanskrit, buddh, which means to awaken." ~Alan Watts...

..."To awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change of consciousness with regard to one's own existence. It is to cease being under the impression that you are just 'poor little me,' and to realize who you really are, or what you really are behind the mask. But there is a difficulty in this. You can never get to see what the basic self is. It is always and forever elusive.

And so, if I ask you, 'Who are you really?' And you say, 'Well, I am John Doe.' 'Oh? Ha-ha! You think so? John Doe, tell me: How do you happen to have blue eyes?' 'Well,' you say, 'I do not know. I did not make my eyes.' 'Oh, you didn't? Who else?' 'Well, I have no idea how it is done.'

'You have to have an idea how it is done to be able to do it? After all, you can open and close your hand perfectly easily. And you say, 'I know how to open my hand. I know how to close my hand because I can do it.' But how do you do it?' 'I do not know. I am not a physiologist.'

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'A physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he cannot do it any better than you can. So, you are opening and closing your hand, are you not? Yet you do not know how you do it. Maybe you are "blueing" your eyes, too! You do not know how you do it, because when you say "I do not know how I do it," all you are saying is, 'I do know how to do it, but I cannot put it into words!'"

I cannot, in other words, translate the activity called 'opening and closing my hand' into an exact system of symbols, that is, into thinking. If you actually could translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols, it would take forever because trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a one-pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a time, and in thinking about things you can only think one thought at a time. Like writing, thinking is a linear process, one thought after another in a series. You can only think of one thing at a time, but that is too slow for understanding anything at all and much too slow to understand everything. Our sensory input is much more than any kind of one thing at a time, and we respond with a certain aspect of our minds to the total sensory input that is coming in, only we are not consciously aware of it. Nevertheless, you are doing it, but what kind of 'you' is this? It certainly is not John Doe. It is not that little ego freak.

There is a lot more to you than you think there is, and that is why the Hindu would say that the real you is the Self, (but with a capital S), the Self of the universe. At that level of one's existence one is not really separate from everything else that is going on. We have something here which I will not call philosophy except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity. I prefer to call these disciplines ways of liberation. These are ways of liberation from maya, and the following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying anything, or on doing any specific rituals (although rituals are included for certain purposes because it is a purely experimental approach to life). This is something like a person who has defective eyesight and is seeing spots and all sorts of illusions, and goes to an ophthalmologist to correct his vision. Buddhism is, therefore, a corrective of psychic vision. It is to be disenthralled by the game of maya. It is not, incidentally, to regard the maya as something evil, but to regard it as a good thing of which one can have too much, and therefore one gets psychic and spiritual indigestion – from which we all suffer." ~Alan Watts...

..."Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious 'will,' except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one's ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and

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strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is." ~Alan Watts...

..."So there is always this blank side of experience. What I'm suggesting is that the blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side as the off principle of vibration has to the on principle. There's a fundamental division. The Chinese call them the yang, the positive side, and the yin, the negative side. This corresponds to the idea of one and zero. All numbers can be made of one and zero as in the binary system of numbers which is used for computers.

And so it's all made up of off and on, and conscious and unconscious. But the unconscious is the part of experience which is doing consciousness, just as the trough manifests the wave, the space manifests the solid, the background manifests the figure. And so all that side of life which you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable, is unconscious, unknown, impenetrable because it's really you. In other words, the deepest you is the nothing side, is the side which you don't know.

So, don't be afraid of nothing. I could say, 'There's nothing in nothing to be afraid of.' But people in our culture are terrified of nothing. They're terrified of death; they are uneasy about sleep, because they think it's a waste of time. They have a lurking fear in the back of their minds that the universe is eventually going to run down and end in nothing, and it will all be forgotten, buried and dead. But this is a completely unreasonable fear, because it is just precisely this nothing which is always the source of something.

Think once again of the image of clarity, crystal clear. Nothing is what brings something into focus. This nothing, symbolized by the crystal, is your own eyeball, your own consciousness." ~Alan Watts...

..."I want you to think of the curious sensation of nothing that lies behind ourselves. Think of the blank space behind the eyes, about the silence out of which all sound comes, and about empty space, out of which all the stars appear. I liken this curious emptiness behind everything to God, an image- less, nonidolatrous God of which we can have no conception at all. Basically, when you really get down to it, that emptiness is yourself. 142

Now it sounds very odd in our civilization to say, 'Therefore, I am God,' or for that matter, 'You ARE God.' But this is exactly what Jesus Christ felt. And he was crucified for it, because in his culture God was conceived as the royal monarch of the universe, and anybody who got up and said, 'Well, I am God,' was blasphemous. He was subversive. He was claiming to be, if not the boss himself, at least the boss' son, and that was a put-down for everybody else. But Jesus had to say it that way because, in his culture, they did not have, as the Hindus have, the idea that everybody, not only human beings, but animals and plants, all sentient beings whatsoever, are God in disguise.

Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly. I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with, continuous with, one with, the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe. If the universe is made up of stars a star is a center from which energy flows. In other words there's the middle and all the rays come out from it. And so I feel that as the image of the whole thing all energy is a center from which rays come out and, therefore, each one of us is an expression of what is basically the whole thing." ~Alan Watts...

..."Besides the philosopher's stone that would turn base metal into gold, one of the great quests of alchemy in both Europe and Asia was the elixir of immortality. In gullible enthusiasm for this quest, more than one Chinese emperor died of the fabulous concoctions of powdered jade, tea, ginseng, and precious metals prepared by Taoist priests. But just as the work of transforming lead into gold was in many cases a chemical symbolism for a spiritual transformation of man himself, so the immortality to be conferred by the elixir was not always the literally everlasting life but rather the transportation of consciousness into a state beyond time. Modern physicists have solved the problem of changing lead into gold, though the process is somewhat more expensive than digging gold from the earth. But in the last few years modem chemists have prepared one or two substances for which it may be claimed that in some cases they induce states of mind remarkably similar to cosmic consciousness.

To many people such claims are deeply disturbing. For one thing, mystical experience seems altogether too easy when it simply comes out of a bottle, and is thus available to people who have done nothing to deserve it, who have neither fasted nor prayed nor practiced yoga. For another, the claim seems to imply that - spiritual insight is after all only a matter of body chemistry involving a total reduction of the spiritual to. These are serious considerations, even though one may be convinced that in the long run the difficulty is found to rest upon semantic confusion as to the definitions of 'spiritual' and 'material'." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. Once upon a time the mouth, the hands, and the feet said to each other, 'We do all this work gathering food and chewing it up, but that lazy fellow,the stomach, does nothing. It's high time he did some work too, so let's go on strike!' Whereupon they went many days without working, but soon found themselves feeling weaker and weaker until at last each of them realized that the stomach was their stomach, and that they would have to go back to work to remain alive. But even in physiological textbooks, we speak of the brain, or the nervous system, as 'governing' the heart or the digestive tract, smuggling bad politics into science, as if the heart belonged to the brain rather than the brain to the heart or the stomach. Yet it is as true, or false, to say that the brain 'feeds itself' through the stomach as that the stomach 'evolves' a brain at its upper entrance to get more food.

As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot 'perform' actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better,'goes with') absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?" ~Alan Watts, The Book...

..."I want you to think of the curious sensation of nothing that lies behind ourselves. Think of the blank space behind the eyes, about the silence out of which all sound comes, and about empty space, out of which all the stars appear. I liken this curious emptiness behind everything to God, an image- less, nonidolatrous God of which we can have no conception at all. Basically, when you really get down to it, that emptiness is yourself.

Now it sounds very odd in our civilization to say, 'Therefore, I am God,' or for that matter, 'You ARE God.' But this is exactly what Jesus Christ felt. And he was crucified for it, because in his culture God was conceived as the royal monarch of the universe, and anybody who got up and said, 'Well, I am God,' was blasphemous. He was subversive. He was claiming to be, if not the boss himself, at least the boss' son, and that was a put-down for everybody else. But Jesus had to say it that way because, in his culture, they did not have, as the Hindus have, the idea that everybody, not only human beings, but animals and plants, all sentient beings whatsoever, are God in disguise.

Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly. I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with, continuous with, one with, the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe. If the universe is 145

made up of stars a star is a center from which energy flows. In other words there's the middle and all the rays come out from it. And so I feel that as the image of the whole thing all energy is a center from which rays come out and, therefore, each one of us is an expression of what is basically the whole thing." ~Alan Watts...

..."If we think God is playing with the world, has created it for his pleasure, and has created all these other beings and they go through the most horrible torments—terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through how is that possibly justifiable? We try by saying, 'Well, some God must have created it; if a God didn't create it, there's nobody in charge and there's no rationality to the whole thing. It's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a ridiculous system and the only out is suicide.'

But suppose it's the kind of thing I've described to you, supposing it isn't that God is pleasing himself with all these victims, showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them, supposing it's quite different from that. Suppose that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm. There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt, are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation.

Curiously enough, there is something parallel to this in Christianity. There's a passage in St.Paul's Epistle to the Philippians in which he says a very curious thing: 'Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not think identity with God a thing to be clung to, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross.' Here you have exactly the same idea, the idea of God becoming human, suffering all that human beings can suffer, even death. And St. Paul is saying, 'Let this mind be in you,' that is to say, let the same kind of consciousness be in you that was in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ knew he was God." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Our society—that is, we ourselves, all of us—is defining the individual with a double-bind, commanding him to be free and separate from the world, which he is not, for otherwise the command would not work. Under the circumstances, it works only in the sense of implanting an illusion of separateness, just as the commands of a hypnotist can create illusions.

Thus bamboozled, the individual—instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world—is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish, self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature.This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present—that is, of really living.

For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, 'Now, I've arrived!' Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now." ~Alan Watts, The Book...

..."What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it, because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, 'Whew, what a relief.' That is called satori. When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn't find it. So, it isn't there, and when you see clearly that it isn't there, you have a new sense of identity. You realize that what you are is the whole world of nature, doing this. Now, that is difficult for many Western people, because it suggests a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces. However, when your own inner sense of identity changes from being the separate individual to being what the entire cosmos is doing at this place, you become not a puppet but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever. This is 148

the same paradox that the Christian knows in the form, 'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it'." ~Alan Watts...

..."With their differing methods, Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism all involve the realization that life ceases to be problematic when it is understood that the ego is a social fiction. Sickness and death may be painful, indeed, but what makes them problematic is that they are shameful to the ego. This is the same shame that we feel when caught out of role, as when the bishop is discovered picking his nose or a policeman weeping. For the ego is the role, the 'act', that one's inmost self is permanent, that it is in control of the organism, and that while it 'has' experiences it is not involved in them. Pain and death expose this pretense, and this is why suffering is almost always attended by a feeling of guilt, a feeling that is all the more difficult to explain when the pretense is unconscious. Hence the obscure but powerful feeling that one ought not to suffer and die." ~Alan Watts...

...“The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.” ~Alan Watts...

..."A lot of yoga teachers may try to get you to control your own mind, mainly to prove to you that you cannot do it. 'A fool who persists in his folly will become wise,' and so they speed up the folly. Initially you may have a certain amount of superficial success by a process commonly called self hypnosis, and you may think you are making progress. A good teacher will let you go along that way for a while, until he really throws you by asking, 'Why are you concentrating?'

Buddhism works very much in this way. Buddha said, 'If you suffer, you suffer because you desire,and your desires are either unattainable or always disappointed. So cut out desire.' So those disciples went away and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire.When they came back, Buddha said, 'But you are still desiring not to desire.' They wondered how 149

to get rid of that desire. When you see that all of this is nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. Seeing that you cannot control your in you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings is just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just a part of the experience.There is not any thinker of thoughts or feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because our language has a grammatical rule that states that verbs must have subjects. The funny thing about this is that verbs are processes, and so are subjects and nouns, which are supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously it cannot, but we always insist that there is this subject called the knower, and without a knower there cannot be knowing. However, that is just a grammatical rule, not a rule of nature. In nature there is just knowing." ~Alan Watts...

..."What you DO is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now, you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around, the real deep down you IS the whole universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."You cannot control your thoughts, and you cannot control your feelings, because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings, and they are running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go. You are still breathing, aren't you? Still growing your hair; still seeing and hearing. Are you doing that? Is breathing something that you DO? Do you see? Do you organize the operations of your eyes, and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you DO that? It happens, and it is a happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening. Your hearing, your seeing, the clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue; the sun is happening shining. There it is: all this happening.

May I introduce you? This is yourself. This is a vision of who you really are, and the way you really function. You function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence. This is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach about it to you, because the minute you start thinking 'I should understand that,' the stupid notion that 'I' should bring it about arises again, when there is no 'you' to bring it about. That is why I am not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is talk about WHAT IS. It amuses me to talk about what is because it is wonderful. I love it, and therefore I like to talk about IT. If I get paid for it, it is because sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing. My whole approach is not to convert you, not to make you over, not to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew the way you were, things would be sane. However, you 150

cannot do that. You cannot make that discovery because you are in your own way so long as you think 'I' am 'I,' so long as that hallucination blocks it. The hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility, when at last you see that you cannot make yourself over." ~Alan Watts...

..."If people are intelligent, and I suppose we have to grant that, then the energy that people express must also be intelligent, because one does not gather figs from thistles, or grapes from thorns. But it does not occur to ordinary, civilized people to regard themselves as expressions of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and mild temperature, and that all these things go with us and are as important to us albeit outside our skins as our internal organs, our stomachs, and our brains." ~Alan Watts...

..."People do not really understand what meditation is. Meditation is the one human activity that has no purpose. Buddhists who are supposed to have attained everything are invariably shown in some sort of meditation posture. Why should they meditate anymore? Because that just happens to be the way a Buddhist sits. When he sits, he sits. When he walks, he walks. He is not going anywhere. He is just going for a walk because he digs it. The very word dig means not merely to appreciate, but to penetrate, to go to the heart of the matter, to penetrate the moment. To get to the root of the moment is to get to the center of you. Where you are is where you start, where you begin all this questioning. Where does the question and the desire spring from? That is you, and that you is the point from which the whole universe is created, flowing back into the past like the wake of a ship. The wake does not drive the ship, it is the ship that makes the wake. Meditation is just sitting and watching it happen. It is not done because it is good for you. It is done for fun. Meditation is an enjoyable thing. If it is not, you are not really meditating.

There is an awful game that meditators play, which is competitive suffering. They go to some place where they sit for hours on end, until their legs ache and practically fall off. Then they come back and brag about sitting through all those hours of leg ache. It is very difficult to put down people who are suffering. One has a natural sympathy for pain, but I sometimes want to say, 'For goodness sake, do not throw your suffering at me in that way and in that spirit. Do not brag about it. Do not one up me by saying you have suffered more than I have.' People say many things like, 'I am more aware of my shortcomings than you are.' 'I am more tolerant than you are.' 'I recognize more than you what a rascal I am.' There are many kinds of ways of one-upping somebody else in order to play the game in which you always win. Once we get

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into that kind of thing with meditation, we get into hierarchies,ranks, and degrees, and end up by asking, 'Who has attained level seven, who has attained level nine?'

The expert guru will always set you a stage higher than you have ever thought of, in order to see how far your ambition will run. This goes on endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, until you suddenly wake up and begin real meditation, by realizing that you are there, that you really do meditate all the time just by virtue of existing all the time." ~Alan Watts...

..."There seems to me a strong possibility that the psychedelics (as a medicine rather than a diet) may help us to 'trigger' a new sense of identity, providing the initial boost to get us out of the habit of restricting 'I' to a vague center within the skin. That they make us aware that our whole knowledge of the external world is a state of our own bodies is not a merely technical and trivial discovery. It is the obverse of the fact that our own bodies are functions, or behaviors, of the whole external world. This— at first—weird and mystical sensation of 'unity with the cosmos' has been objectively verified. The mystic's subjective experience of his identity with 'the All' is the scientist's objective description of ecological relationship, of the organism/environment as a unified field." ~Alan Watts...

..."I wonder what is meant when we use the word I. I have been very interested in this problem, and have come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination, a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of nature. As a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment, and when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we see a profound discord begin to separate man and nature as is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it. We believe that our environment is something other than ourselves, and in assuming that, we make a great mistake and are now paying the price." ~Alan Watts...

..."Let it be clear, furthermore, that the ego-fiction is in no way essential to the individual, to the total human organism, in fulfilling and expressing his individuality. For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely if ever experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated 'egos' in bags of skin." ~Alan Watts...

..."So your body knows that its energy system is one with and continuous with the whole energy system, and that if it's in any sense true to say that I am my body, and that I beat my heart, and that I think by growing a brain, where do you draw the line between what you think and the power to think? Do you think with your brain in the same way that you carve wood with a knife? Y'know, it's an instrument that you pick up and use. I don't think our bodies are just instrumental in that way. They're something we are doing, only we don't think about it, in the sense that we don't have to consider when we get up in the morning as an act of voluntary behavior how to connect all of the switches in our brain to get us ready for the day; they come on automatically. But this automatic or, I would rather call IT, spontaneous functioning of the brain is what is called in Japanese 'shizen'(?), that is to say, the spontaneity of nature. It does all this, and what we perform consciously is simply a small fragment of our total activity, of which we happen to be aware in a special way. We are far more than that. And it isn't only, say, that the sun is light because we have eyes and optical nerves which translate the energy of the sun into an experience called 'light.' It is also that that very central fire of the sun is something that you are doing just as much as you are generating temperature in your body." ~Alan Watts...

..."It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in words of Chuang-tzu: 'The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.' Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal NOW. For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this NOW; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever." ~Alan Watts...

..."It is generally believed in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The word karma literally means 'action' or 'doing' in Sanskrit, so 154

that when we say something that happens to you is your karma, it is like saying in English, 'it is your own doing.' In popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things and all the good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit. So long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma. Nishkama means 'without passion' or 'without attachment,' and karma means 'action.' So, whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does not generate future karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming, samsara, the 'round,' and keeps you being reincarnated.

Now, when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for payment. In other words, a person who begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die, or that he will lose his money, or that all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. There is no hurry to be 'cleared up' if you're just living along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life, a certain hurry occurs. Therefore, since this is known, it is rather discouraging to start these things. The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life (shall we say to turn over a new leaf?) you mustn't let the devil know, because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking too much, and you make a New Year's resolution that during this coming year you will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The devil will immediately know about it, and he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drink-less days. That will be awful, just overwhelming, and you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon. So, in that case, you compromise with the devil and say, 'Just today I'm not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe we'll go back.' Then, when tomorrow comes, you say, 'Oh, just another day, let's try, that's all.' And the next day, you say, 'Oh, one more day won't make much difference.' So, you only do it for the moment, and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day. Of course, there's something still better than that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of course, not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying 'Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth' is just this. That is why, in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying 'Now.' There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously – this means you escape karma and the devil.

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So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the reputation of being the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his students.

If some teacher or some guru says, 'Really, this isn't difficult at all – it's perfectly easy,' some people will say, 'Oh, he's not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult.' When we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that's very weird and rigid, people think, 'Now there is the thing. That man means business.' So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students, whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort, because that's what it is. Taoism is, in that sense, what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle.

So, the question naturally arises, 'Isn't it cheating?' When, in any game, somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating; and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. The inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of cheating; that is its way of saving face. 'You beat me by means that weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, and you're not playing fair.' So, in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are routes for the stupid people and routes for the intelligent people, and the latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in his Platform Sutra, where he said, 'The difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is that although they both arrive at the same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witted people.' In other words, can you find a way that sees into your own nature – that sees into the Tao immediately." ~Alan Watts...

..."Now then, the most far-out form of Mahayana Buddhism is called the Pure Land school, jodo-shinshu. Jodo means 'pure land' and shin-shu means 'true sect.' This is based on the idea that there was in immeasurably past ages a great bodhisattva called Amitabha, and he made a vow that he would never 156

become a buddha unless any being who repeated his name would automatically at death be born into the Pure Land over which he presides that is, a kind of paradise. He did become a buddha, and so the vow works. All you have to do is repeat the name of Amitabha, and this will assure that without any further effort on your part you will be reborn into his western paradise when you die, and in that paradise, becoming a buddha is a cinch. There are no problems there. The western paradise is a level of consciousness, but it is represented in fact as a glorious place. You can see the pictures of it in Koya-san, wonderful pictures where the Buddha Amitabha is actually a Persian figure related to Ahura Mazda, which means 'boundless light.' The Daibutsu of Kamakura, that enormous bronze buddha in the open air, is Amitabha.

So, there he sits surrounded with his court, and this court is full of upasaras, beautiful girls playing lutes. And as you were born into the paradise, what happens when you die is you discover yourself inside a lotus, and the lotus goes pop, and there you find yourself sitting, coming out of the water, and here on the clouds in front of you are the upasaras sitting, strumming their lutes, with the most sensuous, beautiful faces.

Now, to get this, all you have to do is say the name of Amitabha. The formula is Namu Amida butsu, and you can say this very fast, 'Namu Amida butsu, Namu Amida butsu, Numanda, Numanda, Numanda.' When said many, many times, you are quite sure it is going to happen.

Actually, you only have to say it once, and you mustn't make any effort to gain this reward, because that would be spiritual pride. Your karma, your bad deeds, your awful past, is so bad that anything good you try to do is done with a selfish motive, and therefore doesn't effect your deliverance. Therefore, the only way to get deliverance is to put faith in the power of this Amitabha Buddha and to accept it as a free gift, and to take it by doing the most absurd things – by saying 'Namu Amida butsu.' Don't even worry whether you have to have faith in this, because trying to have faith is also spiritual pride. It doesn't matter whether you have faith or whether you don't, the thing works anyway, so just say 'Namu Amida butsu.' Now, that is the most popular form of Buddhism in Asia.

The two most vast temples in Kyoto, the initiant Higashi Honganji temples, represent this sect, and everybody loves Amitabha. Amida, as they call him in Japan – boundless light, infinite Buddha of Compassion, is sitting there with this angelic expression on his face: 'It's all right, boys, just say my name, it's all you have to do.' So when we add together prayer wheels, Namu Amida butsu (the Japanese call it Nembutsu) as the means of remembering Buddha, and all these things where you just have to say an abbreviated prayer and the work is done for you, wouldn't we Westerners, especially if we are Protestants, say, 'Oh, what a scoundrelly thing that is, what an awful degradation of religion, what an 157

avoidance of the moral challenge and the effort and everything that is required. Is this what the bodhisattva doctrine of infinite compassion deteriorates into?'

Now, there is a profound aspect to all that, just as there is desperation and despair, nirvana desperation and despair of the horrors, so there are two ways of looking at this 'nothing to do, no effort to make' idea, depending completely on the savior. For, who is Amitabha? Popularly, Amitabha is somebody else. He is some great compassionate being who looks after you. Esoterically, Amitabha is your own nature; Amitabha is your real self, the inmost boundless light that is the root and ground of your own consciousness. You don't need to do anything to be that. You are that, and saying Nembutsu is simply a symbolical way of pointing out that you don't have to become this, because you are it." ~Alan Watts, The Philosophies of Asia...

..."Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly. I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with, continuous with, one with, the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe. If the universe is made up of stars, a star is a center from which energy flows. In other words there's the middle and all the rays come out from it. And so I feel that as the image of the whole thing, all energy is a center from which rays come out and, therefore, each one of us is an expression of what is basically the whole thing." ~Alan Watts...

..."But to understand this we must again relate back to our basic contrast between on and off, something and nothing, which is that the aspect of the universe which is aware of itself, which does the awaring, does not see itself. In other words, you can't look at your eyes with your eyes. You can't observe yourself in the act of observing. You can't touch the tip of a finger with the tip of the same finger no matter how hard you try. Therefore, there is on the reverse side of all observation a blank spot; for example, behind your eyes from the point of view of your eyes. However you look around there is blankness behind them. That's unknown. That's the part of the universe which does not see itself because it is seeing.

We always get this division of experience into one-half known, one-half unknown. We would like to know, if we could, this always unknown. If we examine the brain and the structure of the nerves behind the eyes, we're always looking at somebody else's brain. We're never able to look at our own brain at the same time we're investigating somebody else's brain.

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So there is always this blank side of experience. What I'm suggesting is that the blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side as the off principle of vibration has to the on principle. There's a fundamental division. The Chinese call them the yang, the positive side, and the yin, the negative side. This corresponds to the idea of one and zero. All numbers can be made of one and zero as in the binary system of numbers which is used for computers.

And so it's all made up of off and on, and conscious and unconscious. But the unconscious is the part of experience which is doing consciousness, just as the trough manifests the wave, the space manifests the solid, the background manifests the figure. And so all that side of life which you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable, is unconscious, unknown, impenetrable because it's really you. In other words, the deepest you is the nothing side, is the side which you don't know." ~Alan Watts...

..."For a while I felt lost in a void, frightened, baseless, insecure through and through Yet soon I became accustomed to the feeling,strange as it was. There was simply a pattern of action, of process, and this was at one and the same time the universe and myself with nothing outside it either to trust or mistrust. And there seemed to be no meaning in the idea of its trusting or mistrusting itself, just as there is no possibility of a finger's touching its own tip.Upon reflection, there seems to be nothing unreasonable in seeing the world in this way. The agent behind every action is itself action. If a mat can be called matting, a cat can be called catting. We do not actually need to ask who or what 'cats,' just as we do not need to ask what is the basic stuff or substance out of which the world is formed---for there is no way of describing this substance except in terms of form, of structure, order, and operation. The world is not formed as if it were inert clay responding to the touch of a potter's hand; the world is form, or better, formation, for upon examination every substance turns out to be closely knit pattern. The fixed notion that every pattern or form must be made of some basic material which is in itself formless is based on a superficial analogy between natural formation and manufacture, as if the stars and rocks had been made out of something as a carpenter makes tables out of wood. Thus what we call the agent behind the action is simply the prior or relatively more constant state of the same action: when a man runs we have a 'manning-running' over and above a simple 'manning.' Furthermore, it is only a somewhat clumsy convenience to say that present events are moved or caused by past events, for we are actually talking about earlier and later stages of the same event. We an establish regularities of rhythm and pattern in the course of an event, and so predict its future configurations, but its past states do not 'push' its present and future states as if they were a row of dominoes stood on end so that knocking over the first collapses all the others in series. The fallen dominoes lie where they fall, but past events vanish into the present, which is just another way of saying that the world is a self-moving pattern which, when its successive states are remembered, can be shown to have a certain order. Its motion, its energy, issues from itself now, not from the past,which simply falls behind it in memory like the wake from a ship." ~Alan Watts... 159

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..."The individual and the Universe are inseparable, but the curious thing is very few people are aware of it. Everything in nature depends on everything else. So it's interconnected. We confuse ourselves as living organisms - which are one with the whole Universe - with our personality. Now what is our personality? Our fundamental self is not something just within the skin - its everything around us with which we connect." ~Alan Watts...

..."The mystical experience is something rather badly handled in Western culture, because we're not used to it, it's not something which our standard brands of religion have done anything much about. They preach morals. They don't help people to find cosmic consciousness. A person who has total amnesia and lived in a split second only wouldn’t know he was there."~Alan Watts...

..."A thing looks exotic when you look at it from somebody else's point of view, but eventually you get use to it. If you move into a state of consciousness such as I've been trying to describe, that is not your usual state of consciousness, you will say, 'It's kind of weird.' If you are not prepared for that you might become frightened and say, 'Am I going mad? Am I going out of my mind?' Well, yes, you are. You are going out of ordinary mind-set into another aspect of mind, and that always feels strange at first. That's why people have difficulty in meditation. When they start progressing they often say, 'I'm going to go out of my mind.' There are famous stories about people who thought about the nature of thought and were never heard from again. There is a certain fear of loss of one's own ego, and of one's regular world, where familiar gestures make you feel at home. We all have in us levels of vibration that we are not familiar with, which we are therefore afraid of, and it is these levels we reach when we get out of our ordinary state of mind." ~Alan Watts...

..."The new schools of Buddhism said that you must be liberated by tariki, or grace, the power of something in you that is not your ego. It is the same power that makes your heart beat. Your heart does not beat at the will of your ego. To us Jungian language to talk about grace, we say that when the unconscious is worked on, watered and nourished, eventually it--not the ego--will integrate the two aspects or power of the self, and you will acknowledge that both the conscious and the unconscious-the power of the ego joined with the power of the natural organism or the psyche--are part of You." ~Alan Watts...

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..."We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the 'harmony of contained conflicts' in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being." ~Alan Watts...

..."When you ask a person, 'What did you do yesterday?' they will give you a historical account of a certain number of events in which they participated, and a certain number of things that they saw, used, or were clobbered by. You will realize at once that this history leaves out most of what happens. If I try to describe what happens to me this evening, I will never be able to describe it, because there are so many people here that if I were to talk about everyone whom I have seen, what they were wearing, what color their hair was, and what sort of expressions they had on their faces, I would have to talk until doomsday. So instead of this rich physical experience, which is very rich indeed, I have to attenuate it in memory and description and say, 'I met a lot of people in Philadelphia. There were men and there were women; lots of them were young and some of them were old.' Now this is an utterly impoverished account of what went on. Therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way in terms of this stringy, mangy account, of what I did yesterday, and the day before all I have is a caricature of myself. Of course a caricature does not really draw us in, but just puts on certain salient features whereby people can recognize you. It's a sort of skeleton, and in this way we are conceiving of ourselves as a bunch of skeletons. They have no flesh on them, and just a bunch of bones.

It is no wonder we all feel inadequate. We are all looking for something in the future to bring us a golden goodie at the end of the line somewhere. We hope that there is a good time coming be it ever so far away some far off, divine event to which all creation moves. Therefore, when we say of something that it is no good, we mean 'It has no future.' I would say, 'It has no present.' When everybody says 'It has no future,' that is plainly ridiculous." ~Alan Watts...

...“I have no idea what can be done to correct this in a culture where personal identity seems to depend on being physically aloof, and where many people shrink even from holding the hand of someone with whom they have no formally sexual or familial tie. To force or make propaganda for more affectionate contacts with others would bring little more than embarrassment. One can but hope that in the years to come our defenses will crack spontaneously, like eggshells when the birds are ready to hatch. This hope may gain some encouragement from all those trends in philosophy and psychology, religion and science,

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from which we are beginning to evolve a new image of man, not as a spirit imprisoned in incompatible flesh, but as an organism inseparable from his social and natural environment.

This is certainly the view of man disclosed by these remarkable medicines {psychedelics} which temporarily dissolve our defenses and permit us to see what separative consciousness normally ignores—the world as an interrelated whole. This vision is assuredly far beyond any drug-induced hallucination or superstitious fantasy. It wears a striking resemblance to the unfamiliar universe that physicists and biologists are trying to describe here and now. For the clear direction of their thought is toward the revelation of a unified cosmology, no longer sundered by the ancient irreconcilables of mind and matter, substance and attribute, thing and event, agent and act, stuff and energy. And if this should come to be a universe in which man is neither thought nor felt to be a lonely subject confronted by alien and threatening objects, we shall have a cosmology not only unified but also joyous.” ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology...

...“If you try very hard to love God you may ask yourself, 'Why am I doing this?' You will find out you are doing it because you want to be right. After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, and if you don’t love him, you’re going to be in a pretty sad state. So, you realize you are loving him just because you are afraid of what will happen to you if you don’t. And then you think, 'That is pretty lousy love, isn’t it? That’s a bad motivation. I wish I could change that. I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart.' But, why do you want to change? You realize that the reason you want to have a different kind of motive is that you have the same motive. So, you say 'Oh for heaven’s sake, God, I’m a mess. Will you please help me out?' Then he reminds you, 'Why are you doing that? Now, you are just giving up, aren’t you? You are asking someone else to take over your problem.' Suddenly you find you are stuck.

What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way at all of showing it, because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, 'Whew, what a relief.' That is called satori.” ~Alan Watts, The Philosophies of Asia...

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..."When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is – that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense – even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren't there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you're in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you're supposed to do something, you have to think.

It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you're advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts – it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words." ~Alan Watts...

..."A lot of yoga teachers may try to get you to control your own mind, mainly to prove to you that you cannot do it. "A fool who persists in his folly will become wise," and so they speed up the folly. Initially you may have a certain amount of superficial success by a process commonly called self hypnosis, and you may think you are making progress. A good teacher will let you go along that way for a while, until he really throws you by asking, 'Why are you concentrating?'

Buddhism works very much in this way. Buddha said, 'If you suffer, you suffer because you desire, and your desires are either unattainable or always disappointed. So cut out desire.' So those disciples went away and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire. When they came back, Buddha said, 'But you are still desiring not to desire.' They wondered how to get rid of that desire. When you see that all of this is nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. Seeing that you cannot control your mind you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings is just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just a part of the experience.

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There is not any thinker of thoughts or feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because our language has a grammatical rule that states that verbs must have subjects. The funny thing about this is that verbs are processes, and so are subjects and nouns, which are supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously it cannot, but we always insist that there is this subject called the knower, and without a knower there cannot be knowing. However, that is just a grammatical rule, not a rule of nature. In nature there is just knowing." ~Alan Watts...

..."What is so bad about dying, for example? It's really no problem. When you die, you just drop dead, and that's all there is to it. But what makes it a problem is that you are dragging a past. And all those things you have done, all those achievements you've made and all these relationships and people that you've accumulated as your friends have to go. It isn't here now. A few friends might be around you, but all the past that identifies you as who you are (which is simply memory) has to go, and we feel just terrible about that. If we didn't, if we were just dying and that's all, death would not be a problem. Likewise, the chores of everyday life become intolerable when everything-all the past and future ties together and you feel it dragging at you every way. Supposing you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning. Let's take today, right here and now-here we are in this paradise of a place and some of us have to go to work on Monday. Is that a problem? For many people it is because it spoils the taste of what is going on now. When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas, actually, we're just lying in bed." ~Alan Watts...

..."To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses." ~Alan Watts...

..."It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chuang-tzu: 'The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.'

Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, 167

to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal Now. For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this Now; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.

This movement and change has been called Tao by the Chinese, yet in fact there is no movement, for the moment is the only reality and there is nothing beside it in relation to which it can be said to move. Thus it can be called at once the eternally moving and eternally resting.

How can we bring ourselves into accord with this Tao? A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. But he was not altogether right. For the curious thing is that you cannot get out of accord with it even if you want to; though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment. However far back or forward they try to escape they can never be separated from the moment, for those thoughts are themselves of the moment; just as much as anything else they partake of, and, indeed, are the movement of life which is Tao.

You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now—otherwise you would not be here. Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it. So become what you are." ~Alan Watts...

...“So, don’t be afraid of nothing. I could say, 'There’s nothing in nothing to be afraid of.' But people in our culture are terrified of nothing. They’re terrified of death; they are uneasy about sleep, because they think it’s a waste of time. They have a lurking fear in the back of their minds that the universe is eventually going to run down and end in nothing, and it will all be forgotten, buried and dead. But this is a completely unreasonable fear, because it is just precisely this nothing which is always the source of something.” ~Alan Watts...

..."The fourth noble truth describes the way or the method of realizing nirvana, called the noble eightfold path. The eightfold path is a series of eight human activities, such as understanding or view, effort, vocation or occupation, speaking, conduct, and so forth, and they are all prefaced by the Sanskrit 168

word samyak, which is very difficult to translate. Most people translate it as 'right' in the sense of correct, but this is an in complete translation. The root sam in Sanskrit is the same as our word sum through the Latin summa. The sum of things means completion, but it also conveys the sense of balanced or 'middle-wayed.' Buddhism is called the Middle Way..." ~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. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way. We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.” ~Alan Watts…

..."But the Buddha's doctrine, based on his own experience of awakening,which occurred after seven years of attempts to study with the various yogis of the time, all of whom used the method of extreme asceticism, fasting, doing all sort of exercises, lying on beds of nails, sleeping on broken rocks, any kind of thing to break down egocentricity, to become unselfish, to become detached, to exterminate desire for life. But buddha found that all that was futile; that was not The Way. And one day he broke his ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup from a girl who was looking after cattle. And suddenly in this tremendous relaxation, he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted. He saw, completely, that what he had been doing was on the wrong track. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And no amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish. So long as you think, and feel, that you are a someone contained in your bag of skin, and that's all, there is no way whatsoever of your behaving unselfishly. Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you're still tied to the wheel of becoming by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehavior's.

So, you know how people are when they get spiritually proud. They belong to some kind of a church group, or an occult group, and say 'Of course we're the ones who have the right teaching. We're the ingroup, we're the elect, and everyone else outside.' It is really off the track. But then comes along someone who one-ups THEM, by saying 'Well, in our circles, we're very tolerant. We accept all religions 169

and all ways as leading to The One.' But what they're doing is they're playing the game called 'We're More Tolerant Than You Are.' And in this way the egocentric being is always in his own trap.

So buddha saw that all his yoga exercises and ascetic disciplines had just been ways of trying to get himself out of the trap in order to save his own skin, in order to find peace for himself. And he realized that that is an impossible thing to do, because the motivation ruins the project. He found out, then, see, that there was no trap to get out of except himself. Trap and trapped are one, and when you understand that, there isn't any trap left." ~Alan Watts, The World As Emptiness...

..."If a Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has discovered that he is God, we put him in the loony bin because it is unfashionable to burn people for heresy anymore. However, in India if you announce that you are the Lord God, they say, 'Well, of course! How nice that you found out,' because everybody is. Why then does a great problem arise? Why does it appear that we are not? Why do we think? Why do we have the sensory impression that this whole universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things, and we do not see it all as one? Consider though, what do you think it would be like to see it all as one? I know a lot of people who study Oriental philosophy and look into attaining these great states of consciousness, which the Hindus call nirvana, moksba, and what a Zen Buddhist would call liberation or satori (their word for enlightenment or awakening). Now what would it be like to have that? How would you feel if you saw everything as really one basic reality? Well, a lot of people think that it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of vision suddenly became vague and melted away and we saw only a kind of luminous sea of light.

However, rather advisedly, the Vedanta philosophy does not seriously use the word 'one' of the supreme self because the word and idea 'one' has its opposite 'many' on one side, and another opposite, 'none,' on the other. It is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither one nor many, but as they say, non-dual, and they express that in this word advita. A is a negative word like non. Dvita is from dva, same as the Latin duo, two. So advita is non-dual." ~Alan Watts...

..."Who is it that wants to escape from suffering? Here we get into a methodological difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question of 'Who are you?' The Hindu says, 'Your self is called the atman, the self. Now, strive to know the self. Realize I am not my body, because I can be aware of my body. I am not my thoughts, because I can be aware of 170

my thoughts. I am not my feelings for the same reason. I am not my mind, because I can be aware of it. Therefore, I really am other than and above, transcending all these finite aspects of me.'

Now, the Buddhist has a critique of that. He says, 'Why do you try to escape from yourself as a body?' The reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape from it. 'Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?' The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to escape from them. You don't want to have to be afraid. You don't want to have to be in grief or anger, and even love is too much – it involves you in suffering, because if you love someone you are a hostage to fortune. So, the Buddha says the reason why you believe you are the atman, the eternal self, which in turn is the brahman, the self of the whole universe, is that you don't want to lose your damn ego. If you can fix your ego and put it in the safe-deposit box of the Lord, you think you've still got yourself, but you haven't really let go. So, the Buddha said there isn't any atman: he taught the doctrine of anatman, or non-self. Your ego is unreal, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing you can cling to – no refuge, really. just let go. There is no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere, and you see how clever that was. What he was really saying is that any atman you could cling to or think about or believe in wouldn't be the real one.

This is the accurate sense of the original documents of the Buddha's teaching. If you carefully go through it, that is what he is saying. He is not saying that there isn't the atman or the brahman, he's saying anyone you could conceive wouldn't be it. Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one, because believing is still clinging. There is no salvation through believing, there is only salvation through knowledge, and even then the highest knowledge is non-knowledge.

Here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the Kena Upanishad, 'If you think that you know Brahman, you do not know him. But if you know that you do not know the Brahman, you truly know.' Why? It is very simple. If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it, and you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need to look at themselves. That is the difference of method in Buddhism. Now, understand 'method' here. The method is a dialogue, and the so-called teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the dialogue. When they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason is that the books only give you the opening gambits. Then, having read the book, you have to go on with the method. Now, you can go on with the method without a formal teacher. That is to say, you can conduct the dialogue with yourself or with life. You have to explore and experiment on such things as 'Could one possibly not desire?' 'Could one possibly concentrate the mind perfectly?' 'Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?' And you have to work with it so that you understand the later things that come after trying these experiments. These later things are the heart of Buddhism." ~Alan Watts...

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..."When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything else. That is why to know is at the same time to ignore, and because of that, there arises trishna, or craving. Why? Because if you ignore what you really know, you come to imagine that you are separate from the rest of the universe, and that you are alone, and therefore you begin to crave or to thirst. You develop an anxiety to survive, because you think if you are separate, if you are not the whole works, you're going to die. Actually, you're not going to die at all. You are simply going to stop doing one thing and start doing something else.

When you die in the ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing, in this case called Alan Watts, but you do something else later. And there is nothing to worry about at all. Only when you are entirely locked up in the illusion that you are only this do you begin to be frightened and anxious, and that creates thirst. So, if you can get rid of ignorance (ignorance) and widen your mind out so as to see the other side of the picture, then you can stop craving. That does not mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner anymore, and that it won't be nice to make love, or anything like that. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that enjoying your dinner and making love, and generally enjoying the senses and all of experience, only become an obstacle to you if you cling to them in order to save yourself. However, if you do not need to save yourself, you can enjoy life just as much as ever: you don't have to be a puritan.

So, then, that is the state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything. Supposing you are in business and you have to make money to keep a family supported – that is the thing to do, but don't let it get you down. Do it, in what the Hindus call nishkama karma. Nishkama means 'passionless' and karma means 'activity.' That means doing all the things that one would do in life, one's business, one's occupation, but doing it without taking it seriously. Do it as a game, and then everybody who depends on you will like it much better. If you take it seriously, they will be feeling guilty, because they will say, 'Oh dear, Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us,' and they become miserable. They go on, and they live their lives out of a sense of duty, which is a dreadful thing to do. So, that is nirvana, to live in a let-go way." ~Alan Watts...

..."Duality is always secretly unity. The self pretending it’s not the self." ~Alan Watts...

...“If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I still have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it 173

difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness make me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world. After all, the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me 'absent,' looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face. It would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy. To drink more fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which make man more susceptible to pain. It has given us the power to control the future but a little—the price of which is the frustration of knowing that we must at last go down in defeat. If we find this absurd, this is only to say that nature has conceived intelligence in us to berate itself for absurdity. Consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.” ~Alan Watts...

...“Knowledge is not some type of encounter, that you have to face the truth type of thing like Westerners think. It is more like the blossoming of a flower, knowledge being a nutrient that makes you grow and expand the mind.” ~Alan Watts...

..."A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion." ~Alan Watts...

..."The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe thus clashes with his society's concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. For the ecologist, the biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom feel) that every organism constitutes a single field of behavior, or process, with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. Thus the words 'I' and 'self' should properly mean what the whole universe is doing at this particular 'here-andnow' called John Doe.

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The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God, or self and universe, inconceivable in Western religious terms. The difference between Eastern and Western concepts of man and his universe, however, extends beyond strictly religious concepts. The Western scientist may rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego- as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, 'I came into this world.' But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees. Our galaxy, our cosmos, 'peoples' in the same way that an apple tree 'apples'." ~Alan Watts...

..."At the base of the spine is the sleeping serpent kundalini coiled around a phallus, this represents 'involution', to be absolutely involved. The sex symbol is used because sex stands for, symbolically, complete involvement. When you have gotten in, the trick is to get out. The process of yoga is represented by waking up the serpent, who is under the sleep of maya, captivated by illusion, thinking the world really exists, you have lost sight of the eternal now." ~Alan Watts...

..."Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of dreams, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights, of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say 'Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's gonna be.' And you would dig that and come out of that and say 'Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?'. And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today." ~Alan Watts...

..."People study Zen, and they say that getting rid of your ego is a superhuman task. I assure you it is very, very difficult to get rid of your ego. You have to sit for a long time, and you are going to get the sorest legs. It is hard work, and all you wretched kids who think you are getting rid of your ego with easy yoga do not know what you are in for. The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist. There is nothing to get rid of. It is an illusion, as I have tried to explain, but still you ask how to stop the illusion. But who is asking? In the ordinary sense in which we 175

use the word I, how can I stop identifying myself with the wrong me? The answer is simply that you cannot." ~Alan Watts...

..."Although there have been Christian mystics, the church has been very quiet about them. In the average church, all you get is talk, there is no meditation and no spiritual discipline. They interminably tell God what to do, as if He did not know. Then they tell the people what to do, as if they could do what they're told, or even wanted to. Then they sing religious nursery rhymes. And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church which at least had an unintelligible service that was real mysterious and suggested vast goings on, went on to put the service into bad English. They took away incense, and became essentially a bunch of Protestants, and so now even the Catholics are at loose ends. As Clare Boothe Luce said, 'It is no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass.' You are being advised, exhorted, and edified all the time, and that becomes a bore. Think of God, listening to all those prayers. Talk about grieving the Holy Spirit. It is just awful; people have no consideration for God at all.

In pursuing spiritual disciplines, however, such as yoga, Zen, and also psychotherapy, there arises a difficulty. This difficulty lies in wanting to find a method whereby I can change my consciousness and improve myself. But the self that needs to be improved is the one that is doing the improving, and so I am rather stuck. I find out that the reason I think I believe in God is that I hope that somehow God will rescue me. In other words, I want to hang on to my own existence and feel rather shaky about doing that for myself, so I hope there is a God who will take care of it. Or I may think that if only I could be loving, I would have a better opinion of myself. I could face myself if I were more loving. So by some gimmickry the unloving me has to turn itself into a loving me. This is just like trying to lift yourself off the ground with your own bootstraps; it cannot be done. That is why religion, in practice, mainly produces hypocrisy and guilt, due to the constant failure of these enterprises." ~Alan Watts...

..."Everybody these days is interested in spiritual development, and wisely so, because we want to change our consciousness. Many people are well aware that this egocentric consciousness is a hallucination, and they presume it is the function of religion to change it. After all, that is what the Zen Buddhists, and all these yogis in the Orient are doing. They are changing their state of consciousness to get something called satori, or mystical experience, or nirvana, or moksha." ~Alan Watts...

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..."What has happened is that our eye has been trained to see an illusion. It is merely an image, and it is no more our self than an idol is the Godhead. Yet we say, 'That cannot be so, because I feel I really exist. It is not just an idea in my head. It is a feeling; I feel me.' However, what is it that you feel when you feel 'I'? I will tell you. What is the difference between looking at something and taking a hard look at it, or hearing something and listening intently? What is the difference between waiting while something goes on, and enduring it? The difference is that when you pay attention, instead of just looking, you screw up your face. You frown and stare in a futile muscular activity. When you listen intently, you start by doing some face squeezing, then you grit your teeth, or clench your fists. When you endure, you pull yourself together physically, and therefore you sit upright. You hold your breath. You do all kinds of muscular things to control the functioning of your nervous system, and none of them have the slightest effect on its proper operation. If you stare at things. you may fuzz the image rather than seeing it clearly. I you listen intently by concentrating on muscles around the ears, you will be attending to your muscles so much that you may not hear things properly. If you tighten up your body to pull yourself together, all you accomplish is to constrict yourself.

I remember sitting next to a boy in school who had great difficulty in learning to read. Teachers always say to children, 'Try. If you cannot do it, you must try.' So the boy tried, and when he was trying to get out words he grunted and groaned as if he were lifting weights. The teacher was impressed because the boy was really trying. The boy got a B for effort, but all he was doing was straining uselessly. We all make this muscular strain in the belief that it is achieving the sort of psychological results we intended to achieve. But this is like taking off in a jet plane, and when you get a mile down the runway and the plane is not up in the air yet, you begin to get nervous. So you start pulling at your seat belt. That is symptomatic of the chronic feeling we have in us all the time that corresponds to the word I.

When you see yourself as 'I,' you feel that chronic tension. In much the same way when an organ is working properly, you do not feel it. If you see your eye, you may have cataracts. If you hear your ears, you have ringing in your ears getting in the way of hearing. When you are fully functioning you are unaware of the body. When you are thinking clearly, your brain is not getting in your way. Of course, you are seeing your eyes in the sense that everything you see out in front of you is a condition in the optic nerves at the back of the skull. That is where you are aware of all this, but you are not aware of the eye as the eye, the optical eye. When we are aware of the ego as 'I,' we are aware of a chronic tension inside ourselves, and that is not us. It is just a futile tension. And then we wonder why 'I' cannot do anything, why 'I' feel impotent in the face of all the problems of the world, and why 'I' somehow cannot manage to transform '1.' Here we come to the real problem, because we are always telling each other that we should be different. However, I am not going to tell you that because I know that you cannot be different, nor can I. That may sound depressing, but I will show you that it is not. It is actually very heartening. Everybody who is at all sensitive and awake to their own problems, and humanity's problems, is trying to change themselves. We know we cannot change the world unless we change ourselves. If we are all individually selfish, we are going to be collectively selfish. As it is said in the Bible, 178

'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and love your neighbor as yourself.' We all agree that we must love, but we do not, and this becomes particularly appalling when we enter into the higher realm of spiritual development." ~Alan Watts...

..."Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the Unknown Self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, 'Why, that's me!' And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever." ~Alan Watts...

..."What we feel, instead, is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves I would rather say, with our image of ourselves. That is the person, or the ego. You play a role; you identify with that role. I play a role called Alan Watts. And I know very well that it is a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary, but I find this one is best for making a living. But I assure you that is a mask and I do not take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of guru, or savior of the world just breaks me up, because I know me. Besides, it is very difficult to be holy, in the ordinary sense.

So, I know I am not that, but most of us are taught to think that we are whom we are called. When you are a little child and you begin to learn a role, your parents and your peers approve of your being that. In that way they know who you are. You are predictable, so you can be controlled. However, when you act out of role and you imitate some other child's behavior, everybody points the finger and says, 'You are not being true to yourself. Johnny, that's not you, that's Peter.' So you learn to stay Johnny, not Peter. But, of course, you are not either, because these are just images of you. They are as much of you as you can get into your conscious attention, which is precious little.

Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your nervous system. It contains no information about your blood chemistry. It contains almost no information about the subtle influences of society on your behavior. It also does not include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all taken for granted and unconscious. You cannot make them conscious unless you study other cultures to see how their basic assumptions differ. Your self-image includes all kinds of illusions of 179

which you are completely unaware, for example, that time is real and that there is such a thing as a past, which is pure conjecture. Nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us, and they are not included in our image of ourselves, nor is there any information included in our image of ourselves about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe. In all this is a very impoverished image." ~Alan Watts...

..."Many people say in the course of their Zen training, 'I realize there was nothing to realize. It was all there from the beginning.' Standing opposite this realization that you cannot do anything about your desires, and equally that you cannot do nothing about them is the awakening that this realization is true because there is no you separate from you. In other words, when you try to control your thoughts, or feelings, there is no difference between the thoughts and the controller. What you call the thinker is simply your thought of yourself. The thinker is a thought among thoughts, and the feeler is a feeling among feelings, but trying to control thoughts with thoughts is like trying to bite your own teeth.

The other side of the picture is that when you do discover that the project of controlling yourself was unnecessary, it will be because you were yourself a Buddha from the very beginning. That is what the Upanishads mean when they say quite simply Tat tvam asi "You are it" you, as you are. How can you conceive that? Suppose you let your imagination go, and really think through what you would like to have happen. Imagine the most gorgeous state of bliss that you can conceive, where there are no worries, no anxieties, and no haunting future with unpleasant consequences. You are in control of the whole works, and you are sitting on your lotus, perfectly content. I ask you seriously, are you quite sure that is really what you want? Imagine the situation. You have everything you want. You are in the highest possible spiritual state that you can conceive, and yet you have not really surrendered yourself, because you know everything.

The feeling of self depends on there being, at the same time, a contrasting feeling of other. The self has a sensation of being in control of life to some extent through voluntary action. The will seems to have a certain freedom, and yet on the other hand, there are limits. It seems that in the end, life sweeps us away. We are overwhelmed by the involuntary, yet the voluntary keeps popping up. New voluntaries come into the world with every baby. So you could not have the experience you call 'being a voluntarily acting self' without the contrast of the involuntary happening. Would you want to be without the involuntary happening? If you could get rid of that, you wouldn't have the experience of the voluntary self. To turn it the other way around, would you like to have the experience of no voluntary self, where everything just happens? You may say, 'I'm not sure about that, because then I would feel that I was just walking on air, floating along, with no further responsibilities.' Of course, we do get that feeling sometimes. If you take the ideas of determinism and fatalism to their final conclusion, you do have that 180

sense of freedom from all responsibilities, from worry and care. However, it wears off, and it seems to be impossible to follow out that philosophy consistently, especially if you have children. Somehow society begins to push you to be responsible, just as it pushes children to be responsible, and this nagging duality keeps returning. I cannot realize the irresponsible condition of involuntary life unless I have the contrast of the possibility of the voluntary, and vice versa.

These two aspects of our experience which we can call the voluntary and the involuntary, the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the self and the other although appearing to be two, are indeed one. You cannot have one without the other. Whenever it seems that you do, you should know at once that there is a conspiracy, that when two things seem as different as different can be, they are actually, for that very reason, the same. You can detect this even within those actions that you call voluntary. In the voluntary movement of the muscles or of the mind there are processes that are not voluntary. You do not will your blood to circulate, you do not control by intention the synapses in your nervous system, and yet you would be incapable of any voluntary action unless those involuntary processes were going on. So, therefore, these differences go together." ~Alan Watts...

..."Imagine for a moment that it is your privilege to have a brief interview with God, in the course of which you are allowed to ask one question. What would you ask? You would have to think this over very carefully, because this golden opportunity would come to you only once, and you would have to be most careful not to ask a silly question. You might try God out with a Zen Buddhist koan such as 'Beyond the positive and the negative, what is reality?' The Lord would turn to you and say, 'My dear child, your question has no meaning.' And you would not have the opportunity to think up a meaningful response.

Perhaps you should have asked, 'What question should I ask?' And the Lord would say to you, 'Why do you want to have a question?' You want one because you would feel that something was wrong if you didn't have one. But you have got a question: the insoluble problem of trying to win without losing, and as long as you have that problem you will be kept busy, until you see that it is meaningless because it cannot be solved. However, there are all sorts of ways of thinking about that problem in ways so as to prevent yourself from seeing that it is meaningless.

The better gurus are very clever at bringing these ways out. If you are invited to practice intense concentration, after a while you may find yourself thinking about concentrating, and therefore see that your concentration is somewhat divided. The guru may ask, 'Why are you concentrating? What is your motivation for this activity?' And you may find out that the answer is your irreducible rascality. However, the teacher, once he has seen that you have mastered that lesson, has something still more 181

ingenuous to teach. He says, 'You have made progress. Finding out that you cannot concentrate has begun to prick the illusion of your ego, but you have only got your foot in the door. Beyond this are many higher learnings, and you must redouble your efforts.' And so you apply yourself all the more, again and again, to all sorts of tricks that these old gentlemen can come up with. You keep at it as long as he can make you fall for it, but in the end, you see that it was all tricks." ~Alan Watts...

..."Buddhism represents existence in terms of a wheel, called the pavarachakra, the wheel of becoming, of birth and death. On the top of that wheel are devas who we could call angels. At the bottom of the wheel there are naraka, or tormented people in purgatory. You go round and round, now this way, now that. It is really like a squirrel cage, where you are running and running to get to the top, and you have to run faster and faster just to stay where you are. That is why there is always the sense that the more you succeed in any scale of either worldly or spiritual progress, the more you are still in the same place. Perhaps there is something ambitious, proud, and wrong in aspiring to be enlightened or compassionate. Perhaps there is a great dose of spiritual pride in thinking that 1, by my efforts, could make myself into a buddha or a saint. Therefore, perhaps the thing to do is to try to eliminate all desire, not only the desire for worldly success, but also for spiritual success. The Buddha proposed that desire was the root of suffering, and therefore suggested to his disciples that if they eliminated desire or clinging, they might cease from suffering. But you must realize that the teachings of the Buddha are not doctrines in the sense that the Jews and the Christians and the Moslems have doctrines. They are proposals. They are the opening steps in a dialogue. If you go away and try to cease desiring, you will very quickly discover that you are desiring not to desire. So you very rapidly come to a situation where you discover that with regard to your own transformation, everything you try fails to work. Some sort of temporary success may make you feel better, but again and again you will still come back to the same old gnawing problem. That is why people interested in spiritual things tend to move from one sect to another, from one teacher to another, always hoping that they will meet the one who has the answer for them." ~Alan Watts...

..."Can you see, then, what we are trying to do when we seek the positive and avoid the negative? We are trying to have yang without yin. We are trying to arrange a life game in which there is winning without losing. How can you arrange such a state of affairs? If we are all equally happy, it is impossible to know that we are happy, because a certain flatness will come over everything. If we lifted up all valleys, and lowered all mountains, we should have the sort of destruction of the ecology that they are achieving with bulldozers in the Hollywood Hills, in ghastly fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that every valley should be exalted and every mountain laid low, and the rough places made even. But Isaiah also said something that Christians, at least, do not often quote, which is, 'I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create the darkness. I make peace and I create evil. I, the Lord, do all these 182

things.' In spite of this, everybody is busy trying to be good, not realizing that we would not recognize saints unless there were sinners, or sages unless there were fools. There is no way out of that dilemma." ~Alan Watts...

..."Perhaps you realize that this matter of controlling of the mind is no superficial undertaking, because although you may be able to smooth the ruffles of your consciousness, beneath that is a vast area of unconsciousness, which erupts as unpredictably as events in the external world. You may consider seriously the possibilities of psychoanalysis, of going down into those depths to see if oil can be put on those troubled waters. Perhaps then you will look into going to some guru against whose mirror you can reflect those aspects of yourself of which you are not directly aware.

As the process goes on, you may find there is something awkward about all this. This awkwardness can be expressed in many different ways. One is this: How on earth are you to get at yourself, to do something about yourself? This is a project not unlike trying to pierce the point of the pin with the point of the same pin.

In other words, if you feel that you need to make some sort of psychological or spiritual improvement, obviously you are the character who is going to have to bring this about. But if you are the one who needs to be improved, how are you going to accomplish the improvement? You are in the predicament of trying to lift yourself up off the floor by pulling at your own bootstraps, and you are likely to land with a bang on your fanny and end up lower down than you were in the first place." ~Alan Watts, Myth and Religion...

..."Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” ~Alan Watts...

..."I take the liberty of beginning by saying something about myself and my role in talking about philosophical matters, because I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not a guru. In other words, I talk about what we call "these things" that comprise a multitude of interests concerning Oriental 183

philosophy, psychotherapy, religion, and mysticism because I am interested in them and because I enjoy talking about them, and that explains me. In saying that I am not a guru, that means I am not trying to help you or improve you. I accept you as you are. I am not out to save the world. Of course, when a stream, a bubbling spring, flows out from the mountains, it is doing its thing. And if a thirsty traveler helps himself, that is fine. When a bird sings, it does not sing for the advancement of music. But if somebody stops to listen, and is delighted, that is fine. And I talk in the same spirit." ~Alan Watts...

..."Now what I'm trying to talk about is a deeper understanding of the pattern in which we live, and if you understand that, it suddenly hits you so that you feel, right in your guts, this new kind of existence that is NOT yourself alone facing an alien world, but yourself as an expression of the world in the same way as the wave is the expression of the ocean.

Now then, the most important shift one has to make in intelligence and understanding this is to be able to think in a polar way. We sometimes say of things that we want to describe as being opposed to each other as being in conflict, that they are 'the poles apart.' People who belong to different schools of thought; people who belong to nations in opposition with each other; people who are in flat, outright conflict, we say they are the poles apart. But that's a very funny phrase. Because things that are the poles apart happen to be very deeply connected. The North and the South Pole are the poles of one Earth. So try to imagine a situation in which there is an encounter between opposites, which have no connection with each other at all. Where will they come from? How will they meet each other? You think from the opposite ends of space? But what is space? For space to have opposite ends, there has to be a continuum between the ends. And so to think in a polar way is to realize the intimate connection between processes or events or things, which language describes as if they were unconnected and opposed." ~Alan Watts...

..."So then, you don't see that other things are important, besides those things which are 'practical.' Nobody takes time off to look at these things, and Nan-sen, the Zen master, said 'most people look at these flowers as if they were in a dream.' That is to say, they were not awake, not looking at it at all. And people think, 'Well, they're pretty; they decorate the room; they have green leaves, and that's nice.' And once you get them to draw what they think it looks like, it doesn't look anything like it. You know, you draw a leaf, you make an outline like this, and you fill it up with green paint. But these aren't green. They're every color of the rainbow. If you look at any single leaf of this plant, and you look deeply enough, you will see the reflection of every color in the room in it. And you will begin to realize that if

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you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."So if you understand--let's carry this further now--that you are really the cosmos, and that you can't die, in that sense of you, you can disappear as an individual organism, yes, but that's only your surface. The real you can't die, so stop fooling around as if you could. You'll be relaxed and you'll be happy, and you won't start this tremendous project to assert your individuality over everybody else, just to tell you that you're really there; that's all they do. I mean, a person who goes out for power, who wants to feel that he's in control of all the things that are happening around him is simply somebody who is in a state of terror." ~Alan Watts...

..."Our mistake has been to suppose that the individual is honored and his uniqueness enhanced by emphasizing his separation from the surrounding world, or his eternal difference in essence from his Creator. As well honor the hand by lopping it from the arm! But when Spinoza said that 'the more we know of particular things, the more we know of God', he was anticipating our discovery that the richer and more articulate our picture of man and the world becomes, the more we are aware of its relativity and the interconnection of all its patterns in an undivided whole. The psychotherapist is perfectly in accord with the ways of liberation in describing the goal of therapy as individuation (Jung), selfactualization (Maslow), functional autonomy (Allport), or creative selfhood (Adler), but every plant that is to come to its full fruition must be embedded in the soil, so that as its stem ascends the whole Earth reaches up to the sun." ~Alan Watts...

..."So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their disciples and say, 'I am God. I have realized.' But the important thing is that you are realized. Whether I am or not is of no consequence to you whatsoever. I could get up and say 'I am realized,' and put on a turban and yellow robe and say 'Come and have darshan, I'm guru, and you need the grace of guru in order to realize,' and it would be a wonderful hoax. It would be like picking your pockets and selling you your own watch. But the point is, you are realized. Now, what are we saying when we say that? We are obviously saying something very important, but alas and alack, there is no way of defining it, nor going any further into words about it. When a philosopher hears such a statement as tat tvam asi, 'You are it,' or There is only the eternal now,' the philosopher says, 'Yes, but I don't see why you are so excited about it. What do you mean by that?' 185

Yet he asks that question because he wants to continue in a word game; he doesn't want to go on into an experiential dimension. He wants to go on arguing, because that is his trip, and all these great mystical statements mean nothing whatsoever. They are ultimate statements, just as the trees, clouds, mountains, and stars have no meaning, because they are not words. Words have meaning because they're symbols, because they point to something other than themselves." ~Alan Watts...

..."When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is – that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense – even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren't there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you're in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you're supposed to do something you have to think.

It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you're advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts – it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words." ~Alan Watts...

..."In popular Hinduism, it is believed that each of us contains not only the supreme self – the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks out from all eyes and hears through all ears – but also an individualized self. This self reincarnates from life to life in a sort of progressive or a regressive way, according to your karma, the Sanskrit word that means 'your doing,' from the root kre, 'to do.' There is a time, then, in which we become involved and get more and more tied up in the toils of the world, and are more subject to desire and to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb. Then, there follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually evolve until he 186

becomes a completely enlightened man, a mukti. A mukti is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or liberation, where he has found himself. He knows who he is. He knows that he, deep down in himself (and that you, deep down in yourself) are all the one central self, and that this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion." ~Alan Watts...

..."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. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone 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. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satcitananda. Which means sat, that which is, chit, that which is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy." ~Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness...

..."By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another. Nor is the interval between these two nights an unclouded day, for the more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain- and, whether in background or foreground, the pain is always with us.We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the out appearance- that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create and love. Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees- unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and death." ~Alan Watts...

..."But we're afraid, you see, to know that we don't go wrong, because we think that if we do that, we will lose our morals. But the only reason why people lose their morals is that they're scared. They can't trust life, or they can't trust others. They think that if you die or something like that, it will be terrible, it will be awful, it will be the end. So the fights. So the desperate efforts to make it all in one life, and that's greed. That's excessive protections of one's security. But if you are really open, and you start looking 187

around, you suddenly see that you're in a world where everything is absolutely incredible. Not simply lovely things like these blossoms here, but also the dust on the floor, little wiggles, cracks, and the quality of light in things. That's what's so fascinating, the reflection of light on everything, because everything that exists is really a reflection of everything else. Reflection is ultimate. The reflection is a mirror, here, and when the curtain is drawn, it suddenly looks as if the Chrysler building is across the other side of the East River. You say, 'Well, it isn't really there, that's just a reflection.' But the Chrysler building on THAT side of the river is a reflection. Some reflection, but that's what it is. The whole world is just energy bouncing. What exists if it's not reflecting? That's the clue: reflection. The reflective life, the contemplatory life, is therefore wisdom." ~Alan Watts...

..."To discover the ultimate Reality of life- the Absolute, the eternal, God - you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. These idols are not just crude images...They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind, and heart to reality. The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it." ~Alan Watts...

..."So then, when you're in the way of waking up, and finding out who you are, you meet a character called a guru, as the Hindus say 'the teacher,' 'the awakener.' And what is the function of a guru? He's the man that looks you in the eye and says 'Oh come off it. I know who you are.' You come to the guru and say 'Sir, I have a problem. I'm unhappy, and I want to get one up on the universe. I want to become enlightened. I want spiritual wisdom.' The guru looks at you adn says 'Who are you?' You know SriRamana-Maharshi, that great Hindu sage of modern times? People used to come to him and say 'Master, who was I in my last incarnation?' As if that mattered. And he would say 'Who is asking the question?' And he'd look at you and say, go right down to it, 'You're looking at me, you're looking out, and you're unaware of what's behind your eyes. Go back in and find out who you are, where the question comes from, why you ask.' And if you've looked at a photograph of that man--I have a gorgeous photograph of him; I look by it every time I go out the front door. And I look at those eyes, and the humor in them; the lilting laugh that says 'Oh come off it. Shiva, I recognize you. When you come to my door and say `I'm so-and-so,' I say `Ha-ha, what a funny way God has come on today.'' ~Alan Watts...

..."There are all sorts of schools of thought, and they disagree with each other, they debate with each other, but so far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't know what I thought unless there were people who had different opinions than mine. Therefore, instead of saying to those people, 'You ought to agree with me,' I'd say to them, 'Thank you so much for disagreeing, because now I know where I am.' I wouldn't 188

know otherwise. In other words, the in goes with the out; the solid with the space. It's a very funny thing.

Take any highly organized system of life. Take the way a garden exists. It's full of, in a sense, competitive species. Snails and thrushes and various insects that are supposed to be at war with each other. And because their fights keep going on, the life of the garden as a whole is maintained. And so I can't say 'All snails in this garden should be abolished, so that the lettuces should thrive,' because if there aren't some snails around there, the birds won't come around, because they like the snails. And the birds do all sorts of things for my garden, not to mention supplying it with manure and all kinds of things. So I need them around. So the price of having birds is snails that eat your lettuces. And so on. I mean, this is merely an instance, an example of this.

The funny thing is, though, that when you realize this, and you suddenly see for the first time that you and your point of view, and everything that you stand for and believe in--and you think 'Boy, I'm going to stand for that and I'm going to fight for that!'--that it depends on its opposite. When you get that, it starts giving you the giggles, and you begin to laugh at yourself, and this is one of the most amazing forces in life, the creative force is human. Because when you are in a state of anxiety, and you are afraid that black may win over white, that darkness may conquer light, that non-being may conquer being, you haven't seen this point. When it strikes you that the two go together, the trembling emotional feeling which we call anxiety is given another value, and it's called laughter." ~Alan Watts...

..."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. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning— you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you I see not just what you define yourself as...I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too, but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it." ~Alan Watts...

...“Buddhism is a method – it is not a doctrine. Buddhism is a dialogue, and what it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it would state at the end. The method of Buddhism is, first of all, a

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relationship between a teacher and a student. The student creates the teacher by raising a problem and going to someone about it.

Now, if he chooses wisely, he will find out if there is a buddha around to use as the teacher, and then he says to the buddha, “My problem is that I suffer, and I want to escape from suffering.” So, the buddha replies, “Suffering is caused by desire, by trishna, by craving. If you can stop desiring then you will solve your problem. Go away and try to stop desiring.” He then gives him some methods of how to practice meditation and to make his mind calm in order to see if he can stop desiring. The student goes away and practices this. Then he comes back to the teacher and says, “But I can’t stop desiring not to desire. What am I to do about that?” So the teacher says, “Try, then, to stop desiring not to desire.”

Now, you can see where this is going to end up. He might put it in this way: “All right, if you can’t completely stop desiring, do a middle way. That is to say, stop desiring as much as you can stop desiring, and don’t desire to stop any more desire than you can stop.” Do you see where that’s going to go? He keeps coming back because what the teacher has done in saying “Stop desiring” is he has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan. This is a Japanese word that means “a meditation problem,” or more strictly, the same thing that case means in law, because koans are usually based on anecdotes and incidents of the old masters – cases and precedents. But the function of a koan is a challenge for meditation. Who is it that desires not to desire? Who is it that wants to escape from suffering?” ~Alan Watts...

..."The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. Religious ideas are like words- of little use, and often misleading , unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word 'water' is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and idea called 'God'." ~Alan Watts...

..."I had a discussion with a great master in Japan... and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, '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...

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..."It is convention alone which persuades me that I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time. Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventional isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything... In practice we are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world as if it were the world of words. As a consequence we are dismayed and dumbfounded when they do not fit. The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.” ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity...

..."To awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change of consciousness with regard to one's own existence. It is to cease being under the impression that you are just 'poor little me,' and to realize who you really are, or what you really are behind the mask. But there is a difficulty in this. You can never get to see what the basic self is. It is always and forever elusive.

And so, if I ask you, 'Who are you really?' And you say, 'Well, I am John Doe.' 'Oh? Ha-ha! You think so? John Doe, tell me: How do you happen to have blue eyes?' 'Well,' you say, 'I do not know. I did not make my eyes.' 'Oh, you didn't? Who else?' 'Well, I have no idea how it is done.'

'You have to have an idea how it is done to be able to do it? After all, you can open and close your hand perfectly easily. And you say, 'I know how to open my hand. I know how to close my hand because I can do it. 'But how do you do it?'

'I do not know. I am not a physiologist.' 'A physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he cannot do it any better than you can. So, you are opening and closing your hand, are you not? Yet you do not know how you do it. Maybe you are 'blue-ing' your eyes, too! You do not know how you do it, because when you say 'I do not know how I do it,' all you are saying is, 'I do know how to do it, but I cannot put it into words!'

'I cannot, in other words, translate the activity called 'opening and closing my hand' into an exact system of symbols, that is, into thinking. If you actually could translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols, it would take forever because trying to understand the world purely by 192

thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a one-pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a time, and in thinking about things you can only think one thought at a time. Like writing, thinking is a linear process, one thought after another in a series. You can only think of one thing at a time, but that is too slow for understanding anything at all and much too slow to understand everything. Our sensory input is much more than any kind of one thing at a time, and we respond with a certain aspect of our minds to the total sensory input that is coming in, only we are not consciously aware of it.Nevertheless, you are doing it, but what kind of 'you' is this? It certainly is not John Doe. It is not that little ego freak.

There is a lot more to you than you think there is,and that is why the Hindu would say that the real you is the Self, (but with a capital S), the Self of the universe. At that level of one's existence one is not really separate from everything else that is going on. We have something here which I will not call philosophy except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity. I prefer to call these disciplines ways of liberation." ~Alan Watts...

..."Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mysticsensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete." ~Alan Watts...

..."The nub of all these oriental philosophies is not an idea, not a theory, not even a way of behaving, but a way of experiencing a transformation of everyday consciousness so that it becomes quite apparent to us that this is the way things are." ~Alan Watts...

..."So you have to see that the whole notion of there being particular, separate events, and particular, separate things, is nothing more than a calculus. A calculus. Calculus means 'pebbles.' Pebbles used for counting. So when we measure curves, we pretend as if they were a series of points, and the position of these points can be expressed in an arithmetical way, say by tracing a curve across a piece of finely calibrated graph paper. That's the basis of the calculus. So that a curve swings so many points across, so many down, etc., and so you feel you have control of the curve that way, you measure it, you know 193

where it really goes. But where it really goes, you have set up this 'really' in terms of your other crisscross system, and you said 'That's for real.' All it means is you've meshed two different systems, one on top of the other, and you're saying 'What I mean by reality is the systems of measurements that I've invented. The system of weights and measures. This thing is REALLY,' and you feel a great sense of confidence, 'exactly two pounds.' Now simply because you've made the two pounds of apples correspond with the weighing machine, which is a constant. Two pounds of apples, two pounds of grapes, different number of apples, different number of grapes, but you say 'That's really two pounds.'

But so, in just the same way, we say 'There are really different people. There are really different events.' But actually there aren't. I'm not saying that if we were to see the world in its truth, all of you different people would disappear, that your outlines would suddenly become vague, and you would turn into a solid lump of gelatinous goo. A lot of people think that's the way mystics see things. That's not at all what would happen. The thing I'm saying is this: we are all different, but we are as interrelated and indispensable to each other as the different organs in our body - stomach, heart, glands, bones, etc. Now you can argue that the stomach is fundamental--eating is the big thing, and therefore we grew brains as extensions of the stomach to get it more food. So that you say 'The brain is the servant of the stomach.' But you can argue equally that the brain is primary, and it has all these thinking games to play, and it needs a stomach as an appendage to supply it with energy. Or you can argue that the sex organs are primary and they need the brain and the stomach to keep that ecstasy going. But the brain and the stomach can equally argue that they wouldn't find it worthwhile going on unless they had the sex organ appendange to give them solace. The truth of the matter is that nobody comes first. No one pushes the other around. You don't find brains without stomachs and sex organs. They all go together - and this is the fallacy of Freud, in saying that the sexual apparatus are primary. It just goes along with the others.

So you don't have a universe in which a series or a collection of separate events or things are banging each other around like an enormous mass of billiard balls. You have a situation which is quite different from that, where what have hitherto been called 'causally related events,' to say that certain events are causally related is a very clumsy way of saying that these certain specific events which you have isolated as being causally related, were in fact really all parts of the same event." ~Alan Watts...

...“All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures. They contain no information for most of us on how we grow our brains, how we work our nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape our bones. That isn’t contained in the sensation, or the image, we call the ego. So, obviously then, the ego is not myself.” ~Alan Watts...

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..."Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one's own. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To 'have' running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God." ~Alan Watts...

..."Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death. But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly." ~Alan Watts...

..."Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination." ~Alan Watts...

..."Lao-tzu says, 'The scholar learns something every day, the man of tao unlearns something every day, until he gets back to non-doing.' Just simply, without comment, without an idea in your head, be aware. What else can you do? You don't try to be aware; you are. You will find, of course, that you can not stop the commentary going on inside your head, but at least you can regard it as interior noise. Listen to your chattering thoughts as you would listen to the singing of a kettle.

We don't know what it is we are aware of, especially when we take it altogether, and there's this sense of something going on. I can't even really say 'this,' although I said 'something going on.' But that is an idea, a form of words. Obviously I couldn't say something is going on unless I could say something else isn't. I know motion by contrast with rest, and while I am aware of motion I am also aware of at rest. So maybe what's at rest isn't going and what's in motion is going, but I won't use that concept then because in order for it to make sense I have to include both. If I say here it is, that excludes what isn't, like space. If I say this, it excludes that, and I am reduced to silence. But you can feel what I am talking about. That's what is called Tao, in Chinese. That's where we begin.

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Tao means basically 'way', and so 'course'; the course of nature. Lao-tzu said the way of the functioning of the Tao is 'so of itself'; that is to say it is spontaneous. Watch again what is going on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing a happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at things there is no difference between what you do, on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. It is all the same process. Just as your thought happens, the car happens outside, and so the clouds and the stars.

When a Westerner hears that he thinks this is some sort of fatalism or determinism, but that is because he still preserves in the back of his mind two illusions. One is that what is happening is happening to him, and therefore he is the victim of circumstances. But when you are in primal ignorance there is no you different from what is happening, and therefore it is not happening to you. It is just happening. So is 'you', or what you call you, or what you will later call you. It is part of the happening, and you are part of the universe, although strictly speaking the universe has no parts. We only call certain features of the universe parts. However you can't disconnect them from the rest without causing them to be not only non-existent, but to never to have existed at all.

When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory, which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now, and therefore it is spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but of course we don't really know what randomness is. What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth." ~Alan Watts...

..."In order to go into Taoism at all, we must begin by being in the frame of mind in which it can be understood. You cannot force yourself into this frame of mind, anymore than you can smooth disturbed water with your hand. But let's say that our starting point is that we forget what we know, or think we know, and that we suspend judgment about practically everything, returning to what we were when we 197

were babies when we had not yet learned the names or the language. And in this state, although we have extremely sensitive bodies and very alive senses, we have no means of making an intellectual or verbal commentary on what is going on. You are just plain ignorant, but still very much alive, and in this state you just feel what is without calling it anything at all. You know nothing at all about anything called an external world in relation to an internal world. You don't know who you are, you haven't even the idea of the word you or I-- it is before all that. Nobody has taught you self control, so you don't know the difference between the noise of a car outside and a wandering thought that enters your mind- they are both something that happens. You don't identify the presence of a thought that may be just an image of a passing cloud in your mind's eye or the passing automobile; they happen. Your breath happens. Light, all around you, happens. Your response to it by blinking happens. So, on one hand you are simply unable to do anything, and on the other there is nothing you are supposed to do. Nobody has told you anything to do. You are completely unable to do anything but be aware of the buzz. The visual buzz, the audible buzz, the tangible buzz, the smellable buzz-- all around the buzz is going on. Watch it. Don't ask who is watching it; you have no information about that yet. You don't know that it requires a watcher for something to be watched. That is somebody's idea; but you don't know that." ~Alan Watts...

..."In other words, the question 'Who are you before your father and mother conceived you?' is a request for an act of perfect sincerity and spontaneity. It is as if I were to ask, 'Look now, will you be absolutely genuine with me? No deception please. I want you to do something that expresses you without the slightest deception. No more role-acting, no more playing games with me; I want to see you!' Now, imagine, could you really be that honest with somebody else, especially a spiritual teacher, because you know he looks right through you and sees all your secret thoughts. He knows the very second you have been a little bit phony, and that bugs you. The same is true of a psychiatrist. You might be sitting in there discussing your problems with him and absentmindedly you start to pick your nose. The psychiatrist suddenly says to you, 'Is your finger comfortable there? Do you like that?' And you know your Freudian slip is showing. What do fingers symbolize, and what do nostrils symbolize? Uh-oh. You quickly put your hand down and say, 'Oh no, it is nothing,I was just picking my nose.' But the analyst says, 'Oh really? Then why are you justifying it? Why are you trying to explain it away?' He has you every way you turn.Well, that is the art of psychoanalysis, and in Zen it is the same thing." ~Alan Watts...

..."You see, to go out of your mind, at least once a day, is tremendously important because by going out of your mind you will come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are over198

rational, you are like a very rigid bridge and because it has no give, no craziness in it, will be blown down with the first hurricane." ~Alan Watts...

..."Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem to his teacher, which says: The voices of torrents are from one great tongue, the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha. 'Isn't that right?' he said to the teacher. 'It is,' said the teacher, 'but it's a pity to say so.'

It would be, of course, much better, if this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all, and if I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave. But I somehow have the feeling that since you have contributed to the support of the Zen Center, in expectation of learning something, a few words should be said, even though I warn you, that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax.

Because if I allow you to leave here this evening, under the impression that you understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever, so that any concepts, any ideas, any words that I shall put across to you this evening will have as their object, showing you the limitations of words and of thinking.

Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by way of introduction, I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine. There's nothing you're supposed to believe in. It's not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more like water--it always slips through the net. And in water you know when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to. All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And when you're thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land, you're not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. The only way to survive in the water, and this refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical propositions are meaningless, and there's really nothing to hang on to, because we're all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those circumstances is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the right way. And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you become the

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water. And so in the same way, one might say if one attempted to--again I say misleadingly--to put Zen into any sort of concept, it simply comes down to this:

That in this universe, there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. People have tried various names for it, like God, like *Brahmin, like Tao, but in the West, the word God has got so many funny associations attached to it that most of us are bored with it. When people say 'God, the father almighty,' most people feel funny inside. So we like to hear new words, we like to hear about Tao, about Brahmin, about Shinto, and __-__-__, and such strange names from the far East because they don't carry the same associations of mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past. And actually, some of these words that the Buddhists use for the basic energy of the world really don't mean anything at all. The word tathata, which is translated from the Sanskrit as 'suchness' or 'thusness' or something like that, really means something more like 'dadada,' based on the word _tat_, which in Sanskrit means 'that,' and so in Sanskrit it is said tat lum asi, 'that thou art,' or in modern America, 'you're it.' But 'da, da'--that's the first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world, because the baby looks around and says 'da, da, da, da' and fathers flatter themselves and think it's saying 'DaDa,' which means 'Daddy,' but according to Buddhist philosophy, all this universe is one 'dadada.' That means 'ten thousand functions, ten thousand things, one suchness,' and we're all one suchness. And that means that suchess comes and goes like anything else because this whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it's the yang and the yin, and therefore it consists of 'now you see it, now you don't, here you are, here you aren't, here you are,' because that the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs, only we, being under a kind of sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is going to overcome the wave or the crest, the yin, or the dark principle, is going to overcome the yang, or the light principle, and that 'off' is going to finally triumph over 'on.' And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion. 'Hey, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn't that be terrible!' And so we're constantly trembling and thinking that it may, because after all, isn't it odd that anything exists? It's most peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy, and it would have been so much easier for there to have been nothing at all. Therefore, we think 'well, since being, since the 'is' side of things is so much effort' you always give up after a while and you sink back into death. But death is just the other face of energy, and it's the rest, the not being anything around, that produces something around, just in the same way that you can't have 'solid' without 'space,' or 'space' without 'solid.' When you wake up to this, and realize that the more it changes the more it's the same thing, as the French say, that you are really a train of this one energy, and there is nothing else but that that is you, but that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while and then come back as someone else altogether, and so when you find that out, you become full energy and delight. As Blake said, 'Energy is eternal delight.' And you suddenly see through the whole sham thing. You realize you're That--we won't put a name on it-- you're That, and you can't be anything else. So you are relieved of fundamental terror. That doesn't mean that you're always going to be a great hero, that you won't jump when you hear a bang, that you won't worry occasionally, that you won't lose your temper. It means, though, that fundamentally deep, deep, deep down within you, you will be able to be human, not a stone Buddha--you know in Zen there is a difference made between a 200

living Buddha and a stone Buddha. If you go up to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head, nothing happens. You break your fist or your stick. But if you hit a living Buddha, he may say 'ouch,' and he may feel pain, because if he didn't feel something, he wouldn't be a human being. Buddhas are human, they are not devas, they are not gods. They are enlightened men and women. But the point is that they are not afraid to be human, they are not afraid to let themselves participate in the pains, difficulties and struggles that naturally go with human existence. The only difference is--and it's almost an undetectable difference--it takes one to know one. As a Zen poem says, 'when two Zen masters meet each other on the street, they need no introduction. When fiends meet, they recognize one another instantly.' So a person who is a real cool Zen understands that, does not go around 'Oh, I understand Zen, I have satori, I have this attainment, I have that attainment, I have the other attainment,' because if he said that, he wouldn't understand the first thing about it." ~Alan Watts, Lecture on Zen...

..."So because you define your position in opposition to another position, then you know who you are courtesy of the outsider, and so you can say to the outsider--if this suddenly strikes you, you start laughing, because you realize that you're indebted to the outsider, whom you defined as awful, because you know where he is, you know where you are. Well now it's the same thing in philosophy and religion. There are all sorts of schools of thought, and they disagree with each other, they debate with each other, but so far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't know what I thought unless there were people who had different opinions than mine. Therefore, instead of saying to those people, 'You ought to agree with me,' I'd say to them, 'Thank you so much for disagreeing, because now I know where I am.' I wouldn't know otherwise. In other words, the in goes with the out; the solid with the space. It's a very funny thing.

Take any highly organized system of life. Take the way a garden exists. It's full of, in a sense, competitive species. Snails and thrushes and various insects that are supposed to be at war with each other. And because their fights keep going on, the life of the garden as a whole is maintained. And so I can't say 'All snails in this garden should be abolished, so that the lettuces should thrive,' because if there aren't some snails around there, the birds won't come around, because they like the snails. And the birds do all sorts of things for my garden, not to mention supplying it with manure and all kinds of things. So I need them around. So the price of having birds is snails that eat your lettuces. And so on. I mean, this is merely an instance, an example of this.

The funny thing is, though, that when you realize this, and you suddenly see for the first time that you and your point of view, and everything that you stand for and believe in--and you think 'Boy, I'm going to stand for that and I'm going to fight for that!'--that it depends on its opposite. When you get that, it starts giving you the giggles, and you begin to laugh at yourself, and this is one of the most amazing 201

forces in life, the creative force is human. Because when you are in a state of anxiety, and you are afraid that black may win over white, that darkness may conquer light, that non-being may conquer being, you haven't seen this point. When it strikes you that the two go together, the trembling emotional feeling which we call anxiety is given another value, and it's called laughter." ~Alan Watts...

..."To go anywhere in philosophy, other than back and forth, round and round, one must have a keen sense of 'correlative vision'. This is a technical term for a thorough understanding of the Game of Blackand-White, whereby one sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies-correlative in the sense that they 'go with' each other and cannot exist apart. This, rather than any miasmic absorption of differences into a continuum of ultimate goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world. For this unity is not mere one-ness as opposed to multiplicity, since these two terms are themselves polar. The unity, or inseparability, of one and many is therefore referred to in Vedanta philosophy as 'non-duality' (advaita) to distinguish it from simple uniformity. True, the term has its own opposite, 'duality,' for insofar as every term designates a class, an intellectual pigeonhole, every class has an outside polarizing its inside. For this reason, language can no more transcend duality than paintings or photographs upon a flat surface can go beyond two dimensions. Yet by the convention of perspective, certain two-dimensional lines that slant towards a 'vanishing-point' are taken to represent the third dimension of depth. In a similar way, the dualistic term 'non-duality' is taken to represent the 'dimension' in which explicit differences have implicit unity." ~Alan Watts...

..."Now what I'm trying to talk about is a deeper understanding of the pattern in which we live, and if you understand that, it suddenly hits you so that you feel, right in your guts, this new kind of existence that is NOT yourself alone facing an alien world, but yourself as an expression of the world in the same way as the wave is the expression of the ocean." ~Alan Watts...

..."Differences, borders, lines, surfaces, and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all; they join them together. All boundaries are held in common. When you understand this, you see that the sense of being 'me' is exactly the same sensation as being one with the whole cosmos. You do not need to go through some other weird, different, or odd kind of experience to feel in total connection with everything. Once you get the clue, you see that the sense of unity is inseparable from the sense of difference. The secret is that what is 'other' eventually turns out to be you. That is the element of surprise in life - to find the thing that is most alien is you. If you go out at night and look at the stars you will realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away - vast configurations out in 202

space! You can lie back and look at that and say, 'Whew! Surely I hardly matter. I am just a tiny peek-aboo on this weird spot of dust called Earth, and all that out there was going on billions of years before I was born, and will still go on billions of years after I die.' Nothing may seem stranger to you than that more different from you. But there comes a point when you will say, 'Why, that's me!' And when you know that, you know you never die." ~Alan Watts...

..."But I think we'll get over it, and discover the thing that we simply don't let our children in on, that we don't let ourselves in on. Let me emphasize this point again. It is not at the moment common sense, not plausible, because of our condition, but we can very simply come to see that YOU are not some kind of accident that pops up for a while and then vanishes - but that deep inwards, you are what there is and all that there is, which is eternal, and that which there is no whicher. That's you. Now, you don't have to remember that all the time, as you don't have to remember how to beat your heart. You could die and forget everything you ever knew in this lifetime, because it's not necessary to remember it. You're going to pop up as somebody else later on, just as you did before, without knowing who you were. It's as simple as that. You were born once, you can get born again. If there was a cosmic explosion once that blew everything into existence and is going to fizzle out, if it happened once, it can happen again, and it goes on." ~Alan Watts...

..."But you don't have to think that way in order to have the faith that the universe is something other than mere stupid, blind energy. What we are coming to see is that the total universe, consisting of all its galaxies, and not only this galaxy, is a living organism. How will we define that? What do we mean by a living organism? I mean a system of intercommunication of extreme complexity. Just like you are. You try to define what you are, and you go into it, you suddenly discover that as you take off the skin and look underneath, that we are an enormously complex system of tubes and fibers, beautifully patterned. When we look at it with a microscope, we say 'Oh my, look at that. Isn't that gorgeous?' Have you seen those models of cells that the Upjohn Company has made? They're exquisite. And incidentally, you should all, if you've never done so, go to the Charles Darwin Hall in the New York Museum of Natural History and see the glass models of the tiniest microorganisms, called radiolaria. They are also such things as are running around in you, and they are incomparable jewelry. Now I suppose if we looked at ourselves from that microscopic point of view, all these funny creatures that are running around us that don't look like people, would if you got used to them seem like people. And they would be having their problems. They've got all sorts of fights going on, and collaborations and conspiracies and so on. But if they weren't doing that, we wouldn't be healthy. If the various corpuscles and cells in our blood stream weren't fighting each other, we would drop dead. And that's a sobering thought, that war at one level of being can bring peace and health at another." ~Alan Watts... 203

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..."Philosophists sometimes speak of us having two selves – the higher self, which is spiritual, and the lower self which is merely psychic – the ego. Therefore the problem of life is to make the one self – the higher one - take charge of the lower as a rider takes charge of a horse. But the problem that constantly arises is – how do you know that what you think is your higher self, isn’t really your lower self in disguise. When a thief is robbing a house and the police enter on the ground floor, the thief goes up to the second floor, and when the police follow up the stairs the thief goes higher and higher until at last he gets out at the rooftop. And in the same way, when one really feels oneself to be the lower self that is to be a separate ego, and then the moralists come along – they are of course the police – and say ‘you are not to be selfish’ – then the ego dissembles and he tries to pretend that he is a good person after all. Therefore one of the ways of doing this is for the ego to say – ‘I believe I have a higher self.’ And I would say why do you believe that? Do you know the higher self? ‘No if I knew it I would behave differently. But I am trying to get there.’ Well why are you trying to get there? ‘Well then the police wouldn’t come around. Then the moralists wouldn’t preach at me. And I could feel I was doing my duty, behaving as a proper member of society.’ But all this is a great phony front. If you don’t know that there is a higher self and you believe that there is one, on who’s authority do you believe this? You say well such and such a teacher – Buddha, Jesus, or whomever said that we have a higher self. And I believe it. Catholics sometimes say they believe their religion because they are told to, and they have to be obedient. The Baltimore catechism starts out – we are bound to believe that there is but one god, father almighty – creator of the heaven and earth etc. And they make jokes about the Protestants and say they don’t have real authority in the protestant church because everybody interprets the bible according to his own opinion. But we have an authoritative interpretation of the bible.

However this always screens out the fact that, it is fundamentally a matter of your own opinion that you accept the authority of the church to interpret the bible. You cannot escape, in all matter of belief, from opinion. In other words, it must become clear to you that you yourself create all the authorities you accept. And if you create them, in order to dissimulate, in order to pretend that your motivations and your character are different, that you would like them to be different, this is the same old principle of the separate self trying to improve itself so that it will live longer or survive in the spiritual world, or attain the riches and progress of enlightenment, and the whole thing is phony. So in Zen, a duality between a higher self and a lower self is not made. Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self. If you believe that there is no really lower self, there is only the higher self but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through, the very fact that you think it has to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self. If you think you have a lower self, or an ego to get rid of, then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that." ~Alan Watts...

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..."What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way of showing it because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, 'Whew, what a relief.' That is called Satori." ~Alan Watts...

..."The unenlightened man keeps a tight hold on himself because he is afraid of losing himself; he can trust neither circumstances nor his own human nature; he is terrified of being genuine, of accepting himself as he is and tries to deceive himself into the belief that he is as he wishes to be. But these are the desires that bind man and it was such desires as these that the Buddha described as the cause of human misery." ~Alan Watts...

...“And we don’t even think that we had anything personally to do with the fact that our fathers once had an evil gleam in their eyes, but that evil gleam was you … coming on.” ~Alan Watts...

...“LSD is simply an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope, except this one’s inside you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge, you can use a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So in the same way, according to your capacity and your knowledge you can use an interior instrument to your advantage … or just for kicks!” ~Alan Watts...

..."So be careful of that. Jung calls it inflation; people who get the holy man syndrome. That I’ve suddenly discovered that I’m the lord and that I am above good and evil and so on. And that therefore I start giving myself heirs and graces. But the point is that everybody else is too. If you discover that you’re there you ought to know that everyone else is. Well for example, let’s see how in other ways you might realize this. Most people think when they open their eyes and look around, that what they are seeing is outside, it seems doesn’t it that you are behind your eyes. And that behind the eyes there is a 207

blank that you can’t see at all; you turn around and you see something in front of you. But behind the eyes, there seems to be something that has no color, it isn’t dark, and it isn’t light. It’s there from a tactile standpoint; you can feel it with your fingers, although you don’t get inside it. Well than what is it that’s behind your eyes? Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around, that’s how it feels inside your head. The color of this room – is back here in the nervous system, where the optical nerves are at the back of the head. It’s what you’re experiencing. What you see out here is a neurological experience. Now if that hits you, and you feel sensuously that that’s so, you may think that then therefore the external world is all inside my skull. But you’ve got to correct that, with the thought that your skull is also in the external world. So you suddenly begin to feel well what of a kind of situation is this? It’s inside me, and I’m inside it. But that’s the way it is. This is what you could call the transaction rather than interaction, between the individual and the world. Just like for example in buying and selling. There cannot be an act of buying unless there is simultaneously and act of selling, and vice versa. So the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional. The environment grows the organism and organism in turn creates the environment. The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. Now the answer to it all is they are all one process. And it isn’t that organisms by chance came into this world, but rather that this world is sort of the environment which grows organisms. It was that way from the beginning." ~Alan Watts...

..."Every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick. As Jung once suggested, 'Life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis, it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death!' And I submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous. For I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300." ~Alan Watts...

..."Try to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Which will pose the next question, what would it be like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born. you see, you cant have an experience of nothing. So After your dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same type of experience as when you were born. In other words we all know very well that after people die, other people are born, and they're all you, but you can only experience it one at a time. Everybody is I, you all know you're you. And where ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, you are all of them. And when they come into being that's you coming into being. You know that very well, only you dont have to remember the past in the same way that you dont have to think about how you circulate your blood, or beat your heart or work your glands. Doesn't it really astonish you, that you are this fantastically complex thing, and you're doing all of this and you've never had any education on how to do it? You never learned, but you're this miracle. Well the point is, 208

from a strictly physical scientific stand point, this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that is going on. And if i am my foot than i am the sun, only we've got this little partial view that, the idea that 'no im only something in this body' the ego. Thats a joke, the ego is nothing more than the focus of conscious attention. All matter is the same energy condensed to a slow vibration. Everything that exists is simply energy molecules." ~Alan Watts...

..."So you see, when you ask ‘How do I obtain the knowledge of God, how do I obtain the knowledge of liberation?’ All I can say is it’s the wrong question. Why do you want to obtain it? Because the very fact that you’re wanting to obtain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there. You already have IT. But of course, it’s up to you. It’s your privilege to pretend that you don’t. That’s your game; that’s your life game; that’s what makes you think your an ego. And when you want to wake up, you will, just like that. If you’re not awake, it shows you don’t want to. You’re still playing the hide part of the game. You’re still, as it were, the self pretending it’s not the self. And that’s what you want to do. So you see, in that way, too, you’re already there." ~Alan Watts...

...“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...

…"Listen, there's something I must tell. I've never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn't matter a bit if you don't understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don't know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play—exuberance which is its own end." ~ Alan Watts…

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..."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. Not conceive, but FEEL yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone 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. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, 'Satchitananda.' Which means 'sat,' that which is, 'chit,' that which is consciousness; that which is 'ananda' is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy. Wowee! And all those stars, if you look out in the sky, is a firework display like you see on the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for celebration; the universe is a celebration, it is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is Wowee." ~Alan Watts...

..."And this is the human problem: we know that we know. And so, there came a point in our evolution where we didn't guide life by distrusting our instincts. Suppose that you could live absolutely spontaneously. You don't make any plans, you just live like you feel like it. And you say 'What a gas that is, I don't have to make any plans, anything. I don't worry; I just do what comes naturally.'

The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we're worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence. When we lost this thing that the cats and the flowers have, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation and so on, and then we worry. Once you start thinking about things, you worry as to if you thought enough. Did you really take all the details into consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And by jove, the more you think about it, the more you realize you really couldn't take everything into consideration, because all the variables in every decision are incalculable, so you get anxiety. And this, though, also, is the price you pay for knowing that you know. For being able to think about thinking, being able to feel about feeling. And so you're in this funny position.

Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage? What has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness, a certain kind of reflexive consciousness--being aware of being aware. Being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols, such as words, such as numbers. You put, as it were, two lives together at 211

once, one representing the other. The symbols representing the reality, the money representing the wealth, and if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary, it doesn't have the same value. People go to the supermarket, and they get a whole cartload of goodies and they drive it through, then the clerk fixes up the counter and this long tape comes out, and he'll say '$30, please,' and everybody feels depressed, because they give away $30 worth of paper, but they've got a cartload of goodies. They don't think about that, they think they've just lost $30. But you've got the real wealth in the cart, all you've parted with is the paper. Because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth. It represents power, potentiality, whereas the wealth, you think oh well, that's just necessary; you've got to eat. That's to be really mixed up." ~Alan Watts...

..."My own work, though it may seem at times to be a system of ideas, is basically an attempt to describe mystical experience, not of formal visions and super-natural beings, but of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and mindings." ~Alan Watts...

..."Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don't grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be." ~Alan Watts...

..."The more clear your image of god, the less powerful it is, because you're clinging to it, the more it's an idol. But voiding it completely isn't going to turn it into what you think of as void. What would you think of as void? Being lost in a fog, so that it's white all around, and you can't see in any direction. Being in the darkness. Or the color of your head as perceived by your eyes. That's probably the best illustration that we would think of as a void, because it isn't black, it isn't white, it isn't anything. But that's still not the void. Take the lesson from the head. How does your head look to your eyes? Well, I tell you, it looks like what you see out in front of you, because all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. So it's the same with this." ~Alan Watts...

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..."I was talking a great deal yesterday afternoon about the Buddhist attitude to change, to death, to the transience of the world, and was showing that preachers of all kinds stir people up in the beginning by alarming them about change. That's like somebody actually raising an alarm, just the same way as if I want to pay you a visit I ring the doorbell, and then we can come in and I don't need to raise an alarm anymore. So in the same way, it sounds terrible, you see, that everything is going to die and pass away, and here you are, thinking that happiness, sanity, and security consist in clinging on to things which can't be clung to, and in any case there isn't anybody to cling to them. The whole thing is a weaving of smoke. So, that's the initial standpoint, but, as soon as you really discover this, and you stop clinging to change, then everything is quite different. It becomes amazing. Not only do all your senses become more wide awake, not only do you feel almost as if you're walking on air, but you see, finally, that there is no duality, no difference between the ordinary world and the nirvana world. They're the same world, but what makes the difference is the point of view. And of course, if you keep identifying yourself with some sort of stable entity that sits and watches the world go by, you don't acknowledge your union, your inseparatability from everything that there is. You go by with all the rest of the things, but if you insist on trying to take a permanent stand, on trying to be a permanent witness of the flux, then it grates against you, and you feel very uncomfortable. But it is a fundamental feeling in most of us that we are such witnesses. We feel that behind the stream of our thoughts, of our feelings, of our experiences, there is something which is the thinker, the feeler, and the experiencer. Not recognizing that that is itself a thought, feeling, or experience, and it belongs within and not outside the changing panorama of experience. It's what you call a cue signal. In other words, when you telephone, and your telephone conversation is being tape recorded, it's the law that there shall be a beep every so many seconds, and that beep cues you in to the fact that this conversation is recorded. So in a very similar way, in our everyday experience there's a beep which tells us this is a continuous experience which is mine. Beep!" ~Alan Watts...

..."But you see, the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear, because it tells you you can't hang on. So what we need, if we're going to have a good religion around, that's one of the places where it can start: having, I suppose they'd call it The Institution For Creative Dying, something like that. You can have one department where you can have champagne and cocktail parties to die with, another department where you can have glorious religious rituals with priests and things like that, another department where you can have psychedelic drugs, another department where you can have special kinds of music, anything, you know. All these arrangements will be provided for in a hospital for delightful dying. But that's the thing, to go out with a bang instead of a whimper." ~Alan Watts...

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..."So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing. You can't hang on to yourself. You don't have to try to not hang on to yourself. It can't be done, and that is salvation. That's why you may think it a grisly habit, but certain monks keep skulls on their desks, 'momentomori,' 'be mindful of death.' Gurgdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and every person you see will soon be dead. It sounds so gloomy to us, because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death. There is a wonderful saying that Anandakuri- Swami[?] used to quote: 'I pray that death will not come and find me still unannihilated.' In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die. In other words, if the ego's disappeared before death caught up to him." ~Alan Watts...

..."In all mysteries, when you’re going to be initiated, there’s somebody saying, ‘ah, ah, ah, ah- don’t you come in. you’ve got to fulfill this requirement and this requirement and this requirement and this requirement, then we’ll let you in.’ and so you go through the middle. why? because you’re saying to yourself, ‘i won’t wake up until i feel i deserve it; i won’t wake up until i’ve made it difficult for me to wake up.’ so i invent for myself an elaborate system of delaying my waking up. i put myself through this test and that test and i feel it’s been sufficiently arduous… then i may at last admit to myself who i really am… and draw aside the veil, and realize, that after all, when all is said and done… i am that i am, which is the name of god.” ~Alan Watts...

..."Now Zen is a little bit unlike the rest of Hinduism and Buddhism in that it's summed up in these four principles: It's a special transmission of the Buddhist enlightenment outside the scriptures. It does not depend on words or letters. It points directly to your own mind-heart and attains therefore Buddhahood directly. Buddhahood means the state of being awakened to the real nature of things. But you see, what IS the real nature of things? It obviously cannot be described. Just as if I were to ask what is the true position of the stars in the big dipper. Well, it depends from where you're looking. From one point in space, they would be completely different in position from another. So there is no true position of those stars. So in the same way, you cannot therefore describe their true position or their true nature. And yet on the other hand, when you look at them, and really don't try to figure it out, you see them as they are, and they are as they are from every point of view, wherever you look at them. So there is no way of describing or putting you finger on what the Buddhists call reality or in Sanskrit, tathata, which means 'suchness' or 'thatness,' or sunyata, which means 'voidness,' in the sense that all conceptions of the world when absolutised are void. It doesn't mean that the world is, in our Western sense, nothing. It means that it's no thing. And a thing--as I think I explained last night--is a unit of

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thought. A think. So reality isn't a think. We cannot say what it is, but we can experience it. And that is of course the project of Zen." ~Alan Watts...

..."And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to your life. What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do. They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs, and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You've gotta get out and mow the damn thing all the time, and you buy expensive this-that and soon you're all involved in mortgages, and instead of being able to walk out into the garden and enjoy, you sit at your desk and look at your books, filling out this and that and the other and paying bills and answering letters. What a lot of rot! But you see, that is holding onto life. So, translated into colloquial American, nirvana is 'whew!' 'Cause if you let your breath go, it'll come back. So nirvana is not annihilation, it's not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void. Nirvana is the state of being let go. It is a state of consciousness, and a state of--you might call it-- being, here and now in this life." ~Alan Watts...

..."Psychedelic drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But beyond these occasional lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a system of total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of logic and language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that 'energy which is eternal delight' can consist with the misery and suffering of everyday life." ~Alan Watts...

..."If you were awake, you would understand that you were the whole universe, pretending, projecting itself at a point called here and now, in the form of the human organism. And you would understand that very clearly, not just as an idea, but as an actual vivid sensation, just the same way you know you're sitting in this room." ~Alan Watts...

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..."A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life." ~Alan Watts...

...“We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” ~Alan Watts...

..."Almost invariably, my experiments with psychedelics have had four dominant characteristics. I shall try to explain them -in the expectation that the reader will say, at least of the second and third, 'Why, that's obvious! No one needs a drug to see that.' Quite so, but every insight has degrees of intensity. There can be obvious-1 and obvious-2---and the latter comes on with shattering clarity, manifesting its implications in every sphere and dimension of our existence. The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration in the present. One's normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. Other people, going about their business on the streets, seem to be slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole point of life is to be fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost luxuriously, into studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to the now highly articulate vibration of every note played on an oboe or sung by a voice... Only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results. 'Tomorrow never comes.' I have never yet heard a preacher urging his congregation to practice that section of the Sermon on the Mount which begins, 'Be not anxious for the morrow....' The truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, 'not quite all there'--- or here: by over-eagerness they are

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perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its own advantages. The second characteristic I will call awareness of polarity. This is the vivid realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly different are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male and female-and then, a little more surprisingly, solid and space, figure and background, pulse and interval, saints and sinners, police and criminals, in-groups and out-groups. Each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. As this awareness becomes increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply each other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pull---as when you move the steering wheel of a car. Are you pushing it or pulling it?" ~Alan Watts...

..."Well, when you get to the void, there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief. That's nirvana. 'Whew!', as I gave a proper English translation of nirvana. So they are liberated, and yet, they can't quite say why or what it is they found out, so they call it the void. But Nagarjuna went on to say 'You mustn't cling to the void.' You have to void the void. And so the void of nonvoid is the great state, as it were, of Nagarjuna's Buddhism. But you must remember that all that has been voided, all that has been denied, are those concepts in which one has hither to attempted to pin down what is real." ~Alan Watts...

..."The realization of the self fundamentally depends on 'coming off it'. You know the sort of, when we say to people who put on some kind of an act and we say, 'Oh, come off it'. And some people can 'come off it'. They laugh and say they suddenly realize that they’re making fools of themselves and they laugh at themselves and they, 'come off it'. So, in exactly the same way the Guru, (the teacher) is trying to make you 'come off it'. Now if he finds that he can’t make you 'come off it' he’s gonna put you through all these exercises. So that you for the last time, when you’ve got enough discipline, enough suffering and enough frustration, you’ll give it all up. And realize you were there from the beginning and there was nothing to realize." ~Alan Watts...

..."But there are two main reasons for the persistent attachment to spiritual methods. The first is that, being ignorant of what we have and are now, we look for it in the future, and therefore can be beguiled by all those gurus who pick our pockets and sell us our own wallets. They promise marvelous states of 220

consciousness, ecstasies, psychic powers, and transportation to other levels of being. So what? If you were managing the entire universe which in one sense you are, it would be absolutely necessary for it to appear that a lot of things were out of control. Does the ventriloquist want to dine every night with only his dummy? The second is the beguilement of spiritual pride, which is also the same thing as a sense of guilt. 'I am not worthy to attain this exalted state unless I have suffered, unless the teacher has beaten me, unless I have sat in a cold, dark cave for three years, or practiced Zazen with my legs aching for hours.' Anyone silly enough to think this way deserves all the pains he must endure. Nothing is more ostentatious than deliberate humility, nor more egocentric than projects to get rid of egotism. These are strong words, but not uttered in a spirit of condemnation, for those who undertake such projects may, by so doing, realize very clearly that they are futile. But then they may return as gurus thinking that this is the only way to realize the futility of spiritual ambition, and then 'lay their trip' upon others without asking themselves, 'Is this trip really necessary?'" ~Alan Watts...

..."There are, for example, those who try to live completely in the present, the Eternal Now, by attempting to be fully concentrated on what is at this moment as in the Theravada Buddhist satipatthana discipline or Gurdjieff's 'self remembering.' I am not quarreling with this...But all along it should have been obvious that all consciousness, all experience, is of nothing else than the eternal present. Memories of the past and anticipation's of the future exist only now, and thus to try to live completely in the present is to strive for what is already the case. This should be clear to anyone. The same principle applies to striving for nirvana or union with God by means of so-called spiritual exercises. There is no actual necessity for a road or obstacle course to that which IS." ~Alan Watts...

..."The point, with which Krishnamurti and the ancient Chinese Zen masters also agree, is that there is no progressive method by which the liberated and awakened state (moksha) can be attained. This state of being and consciousness has innumerable names, mystical experience, enlightenment, selfrealization, cosmic consciousness, union with God, not to mention Sanskrit, Chinese, and Arabic equivalents but none of them are satisfactory because it is altogether beyond words. Striving after this state blocks the understanding that it is already present..." ~Alan Watts...

..."Nothing has changed except one’s perception. And in the same way, you may have the same view of the world — just what you’re looking at now, seeing everything that you see now — but it can have a 221

completely different feeling, and a completely different meaning to it. Because in one’s ordinary sensation of the world the differentiations — the solids — are stressed, and the space is ignored. But when you practice Zen meditation, you have a kind of a 'conceptual alteration,' and then suddenly you notice the physical world — everything you’re seeing now — in a completely different way. You see that it all goes together; it’s all-of-a-piece. You see that every inside implies its outside, and every outside implies its inside." ~Alan Watts...

..."We say, 'Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness,' but we don’t follow our own advice. We’re talking to ourselves most of the time — and if you talk all the time you’ve got nothing else to talk about but your own talking! You never listen to what anybody else has to say, without a running commentary of your own talking. And if all you ever listen to is talking — be it your own or other people’s — you have nothing to talk about but talk. You have to stop talking in order to have something to talk about! In the same way, you have to stop thinking in order to have something to think about, because otherwise all you’re thinking about is thoughts — and that’s scholarship, as we practice it in the universities today, where we study and write and talk about books about books about books!" ~Alan Watts, What is Zen?...

..."You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and fabulous game, and that there is no separate 'you' to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real 'you' is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For 'you' is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained--though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Anyone who brags about knowing this doesn't understand it, for he is only using the theory as a trick to maintain his illusion of separateness, a gimmick in a game of spiritual one-upmanship. Moreover, such bragging is deeply offensive to those who do not understand, and who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because after all, in them 222

the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game--the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster. This is why Hindus do not shake hands on meeting, but put their palms together and bow in a gesture of reverence, honoring the Godhead in the stranger." ~Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are...

..."As the Chinese say, it's the 'yang' and the 'yin', and therefore it consists of 'now you see it, now you don't, here you are, here you aren't, here you are,' because thats the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs, only we, being under a kind of sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is going to overcome the wave or the crest, the 'yin', or the dark principle, is going to overcome the 'yang', or the light principle, and that 'off' is going to finally triumph over 'on.' And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion. 'Hey, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn't that be terrible!' And so we're constantly trembling and thinking that it may, because after all, isn't it odd that anything exists? It's most peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy, and it would have been so much easier for there to have been nothing at all. Therefore, we think 'well, since being, since the 'is' side of things is so much 'effort' you always give up after a while and you sink back into death. But death is just the other face of energy, and it's the rest, the not being anything around, that produces something around, just in the same way that you can't have 'solid' without 'space,' or 'space' without 'solid.' When you wake up to this, and realize that the more it changes the more it's the same thing, as the French say, that you are really a train of this one energy, and there is nothing else but that that is you, but that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while and then come back as someone else altogether, and so when you find that out, you become full energy and delight. As Blake said, 'Energy is eternal delight.' And you suddenly see through the whole sham thing. You realize you're That--we won't put a name on it-- you're That, and you can't be anything else." ~Alan Watts...

..."Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by way of introduction, I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine. There's nothing you're supposed to believe in. It's not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more like water--it always slips through the net. And in water you know when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to. All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And when you're thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land, you're not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. The only way to survive in the water, and this refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical propositions are meaningless, and there's really nothing to hang on to, because we're all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those circumstances is to learn how to swim. And to 223

swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the right way. And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you become the water." ~Alan Watts...

...“'To be or not to be' is not the question — because you can’t have one without the other! Not-being implies being; just as being implies not-being. The existentialist in the West — who still trembles at the choice between being and not-being and therefore says that anxiety is ontological — hasn’t grasped this point yet. When the existentialist who trembles with anxiety before this choice realizes suddenly one day that not-being implies being, the trembling of anxiety turns into the shaking of laughter." ~Alan Watts...

..."The concept of what we might call the 'Christian ego' simply does not fit in with the facts of life; it has become a social institution that is obsolete. When we say 'social institution,' people usually think of things like hospitals, parliaments, police forces, fire departments, and so forth. But marriage is a social institution, the family is a social institution, the clock and the calendar are social institutions, latitude and longitude are social institutions. And the ego is a social institution; it is, in other words, a 'convention' (from the Latin convenire, 'to come together'); it is a consensus, an agreement. With it we are agreeing to a set of rules for the purpose of playing a game." ~Alan Watts...

...“There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it...Neither the church nor the opponents of the church have clearly understood that the secret, or unconscious, motivation of sexual repression is to make it all the more interesting. And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that sexual biology and all that goes with it is a figuring force, on the level of biology, of what the whole universe is about, ecstatic play.” ~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... 224

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..."What I think an awakening really involves is a re-examination of our common sense. We've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious. And our speech reflects them; its commonest phrases. 'Face the facts.' As if they were outside you. As if life were something they simply encountered as a foreigner. 'Face the facts.' Our common sense has been rigged, you see? So that we feel strangers and aliens in this world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because this is what we are used to. That's the only reason. But when you really start questioning this, say 'Is that the way I have to assume life is? I know everybody does, but does that make it true?' It doesn't necessarily. It ain't necessarily so. So then as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture, you find you get a new kind of common sense. It becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."Civilized man tends to be in a state of chronic worry and fear and anxiety, because he is always confronted not with the simple actuality of what is happening before him but with the innumerable possibilities of what 'might' happen. And since, because of this, his emotional existence tends to be in a state of anxiety and tension, he increasingly loses the ability to relate to the concrete world as it manifests itself to him in the actual present in which he lives...Therefore, the need arises for various ways of liberating ourselves from society, for entering what the Indians call 'Vanaprastha,' the life of a forest dweller." ~Alan Watts, Zen and The Beat Way....

..."There are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs. First, use of these drugs may be dangerous. However, every worth-while exploration is dangerous-climbing mountains, testing aircraft, rocketing into outer space, skin diving, or collecting botanical specimens in jungles. But if you value knowledge and the actual delight of exploration more than mere duration of uneventful life, you are willing to take the risks. It is not really healthy for monks to practice fasting, and it was hardly hygienic for Jesus to get himself crucified, but these are risks taken in the course of spiritual adventures. Today the adventurous young are taking risks in exploring the psyche, testing their mettle at the task just as, in times past, they have tested it---more violently---in hunting, dueling, hot-rod racing, and playing football. What they need is not prohibitions and policemen, but the most intelligent encouragement and advice that can be found. Second, drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in which I was at once completely 226

lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But beyond these occasional lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a system of total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of logic and language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that 'energy which is eternal delight' can consist with the misery and suffering of everyday life." ~Alan Watts...

..."There is nothing more difficult than to describe the ideal. Aldous Huxley has tried, but hasn't been able to succeed in perfectly visualizing the ideal—trying to make the highest visions he has convincing to those that never had them." ~Alan Watts...

..."As you know, Eastern teachers don't advertise for students, because their basic attitude is, really, they haven't anything to teach. That may seem surprising, but it is based on the insight that, at the deepest level—because it is prior to conflict—life isn't a problem." ~Alan Watts...

..."It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chuang-tzu: 'The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.' Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal Now. For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this Now; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever." ~Alan Watts...

..."The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences may not be behavior along the lines of 'conventional' morality. It may well be as the squares said of Jesus, 'Look at him! A glutton and a drinker, a friend of tax-gathers and sinners!' Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as 227

better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad game of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg's way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self. There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you 'ought' to break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, the Self) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, and so bring the drama of life on earth to its close in a vast explosion. If then, I am not saying that you 'ought' to awaken from the ego-illusion and help save the world from disaster, why "The Book?" Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply that it is part of 'things taking their course' that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. I realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard." ~Alan Watts...

..."My wish would be to tell, not how things ought to be, but how they ARE, and how and why we ignore them as they are. You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed." ~Alan Watts...

..."You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now." ~Alan Watts...

..."You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things which 'happen' to us, rather than things that we do. In other words, we don't assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape. You can say to a beautiful girl, 'Gee, you're gorgeous,' and she'd say 'How like a man, all you think about is bodies. My body was given to me by my parents, and I'm not responsible for it, and I'd like to be admired for my self and not for my chassis.' And so I'd tell her 'You poor little chauffeur. You've disowned your own being and identified yourself not being associated with your own body.' I agree that if she had a terrible body with a lousy figure, she might want to feel that way, but if she is a fine-looking human being, she should get with it and not disown herself. But this happens again and again." ~Alan Watts...

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...“Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called ‘birth’, and will continue long after the event called ‘death’. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which IS Everything.” ~Alan Watts...

..."The division of life into the higher and lower categories of spirit and nature usually goes hand in hand with a symbolism in which spirit is male and nature female. The resemblance was perhaps suggested by the rains falling from heaven to fertilize the earth, the planting of seed in the ground, the ripening of the fruit by the warmth of the sun. To a considerable extent ancient man reasoned in terms of such correspondences, and made sense of his world by seeing analogies between one natural process and another, analogies which were understood to be actual relationships." ~Alan Watts...

..."Religious ideas are like words—of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word ‘water’ is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called ‘God'." ~Alan Watts, The Wisdom Of Insecurity...

..."Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mysticsensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete." ~Alan Watts...

..."If You try to pursue, to gain the positive, and to deny, get rid of the negative, its as if Your trying to arrange everything in this room so that IT was ALL UP, and nothing was down. You cant do it, you set yourself a absolutely insoluble problem. Because the basis of Life IS Spectrum." ~Alan Watts...

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..."No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living Now." ~Alan Watts...

..."The mystical experience, whether induced by chemicals or other means, enables the individual to be so peculiarly open and sensitive to organic reality that the ego begins to be seen for the transparent abstraction that it is. In its place there arises (especially in the latter phases of the drug experience) a strong sensation of oneness with others, presumably akin to the sensitivity which enables a flock of birds to twist and turn as one body. A sensation of this kind would seem to provide a far better basis for social love and order than the fiction of the separate will." ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology Adventures In The Chemistry Of Consciousness...

..."It is convention alone which persuades me that I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time. Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventional isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything." ~Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity)...

..."In his ordinary consciousness man lives like someone trying to speak in an excessively sensitive echochamber; he can proceed only by doggedly ignoring the interminably gibbering reflections of his voice. For in the brain there are echoes and reflected images in every dimension of sense, thought, and feeling, chattering on and on in the tunnels of memory. The difficulty is that we confuse this storing of information with an intelligent commentary on what we are doing at the moment, mistaking for intelligence the raw materials of the data with which it works. Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we mistake 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...

..."That is the world, that is the Tao, but perhaps that makes us feel afraid. We may ask, 'If all that is happening spontaneously, who's in charge? I am not in charge, that is pretty obvious, but I hope there is 232

God or somebody looking after all this.' But why should there be someone looking after it, because then there is a new worry that you may not of thought of, which is, 'Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care?' Who guards the guards? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God? You may say 'God doesn't need looking after' Oh? Well, nor does this." ~Alan Watts...

..."When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence." ~Alan Watts...

..."For in this world nothing is wrong, nothing is even stupid. The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs—a play which seems quite improper at level 28 may be exactly right at level 96. I am speaking of levels or stages in the labyrinth of twists and turns, gambits and counter-gambits, in which life is involving and evolving itself—the cosmological one-upmanship which the yang and the yin, the light and the dark principles, are forever playing, the game which at some early level in its development seems to be the serious battle between good and evil. If the square may be defined 'as one who takes the game seriously,' one must admire him for the very depth of his involvement, for the courage to be so far-out that he doesn't know where he started." ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology...

..."Listen, there's something I must tell. I've never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn't matter a bit if you don't understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don't know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play—exuberance which is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason 233

whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety." ~Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology...

..."I try to go deeper, sinking thought and feeling down and down to their ultimate beginnings. What do I mean by loving myself? In what form do I know myself? Always, it seems, in the form of something other, something strange; The landscape I am watching is also a state of myself, of the neurons in my head. I feel the rock in my hand in terms of my own fingers. And nothing is stranger than my own body—the sensation of the pulse, the eye seen through a magnifying glass in the mirror, the shock of realizing that oneself is something in the external world. At root, there is simply no way of separating self from other, self-love from other-love. All knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and all knowledge of other knowledge of self. I begin to see that self and other, the familiar and the strange, the internal and the external, the predictable and the unpredictable imply each other. One is seek and the other is hide, and the more I become aware of their implying each other, the more I feel them to be one with each other. I become curiously affectionate and intimate with all that seemed alien. In the features of everything foreign, threatening, terrifying, incomprehensible, and remote I begin to recognize myself. Yet this is a 'myself' which I seem to be remembering from long, long ago—not at all my empirical ego of yesterday, not my specious personality." ~Alan Watts...

..."There seems to be something phony about every attempt to define myself, to be totally honest. The trouble is that I can't see the back, much less the inside, of my head. I can't be honest because I don't fully know what I am. Consciousness peers out from a center which it cannot see—and that is the root of the matter. Life seems to resolve itself down to a tiny germ or nipple of sensitivity. I call it the EenieWeenie—a squiggling little nucleus that is trying to make love to itself and can never quite get there. The whole fabulous complexity of vegetable and animal life, as of human civilization, is just a colossal elaboration of the Eenie-Weenie trying to make the Eenie-Weenie. I am in love with myself, but cannot seek myself without hiding myself. As I pursue my own tail, it runs away from me, Does the amoeba split itself in two in an attempt to solve this problem?" ~Alan Watts...

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...“It’s very bad form if an actor always acts the same way. That’s what’s called a Star, as distinct from an actor. A real actor can become anything.” ~Alan Watts...

..."You dont have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are gonna do, You delegated all that authority. Lao Tzu puts it in this way, 'The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them, and when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them.' The more, therefore, you relinquish power, trust others, the more powerful You become. But in such a way that instead of having lay awake nights, controlling everything, you doing it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, they carry it on. So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning, you can even tell it 'I want to wake up at six o'clock' and it will wake you up just like a alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity, of coming to a sense of Oneness with the whole of the rest of universe, is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe, that will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less One with you then ever. The way to become One with the Universe is to Trust IT." ~Alan Watts...

..."Both poetry and music lead us to the understanding of what this world is all about, which is the dance, a rhythm." ~Alan Watts...

..."I am a philosopher who has been for many years been interested in the mutual fractification of Eastern cultures and Western cultures; studying Oriental ideas not in the spirit of saying to the West 'you ought to be converted to Eastern culture.' But in the spirit of saying 'you don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.' Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions, but very few people know what they are." ~Alan Watts...

..."For what consciousness overlooks is the fact that all boundaries and divisions are held in common by their opposite sides and areas, so that when a boundary changes its shape both sides move together. It is like the yang-yin symbol of the Chinese—the black and white fishes divided by an S-curve inscribed within a circle. The bulging head of one is the narrowing tail of the other. But how much more difficult it is to see that my skin and its movements belong both to me and to the external world, or that the spheres of influence of different human beings have common walls like so many rooms in a house, so 236

that the movement of my wall is also the movement of yours. You can do what you like in your room just so long as I can do what I like in mine. But each man's room is himself in his fullest extension, so that my expansion is your contraction and vice versa." ~Alan Watts...

..."Thus it is by no means the main work of a philosopher to be classed with the moralists & reformers. There is such a thing as philosophy, the love of wisdom, in the spirit of the artist. Such philosophy will not preach or advocate practices leading to improvement. As I understand it, the work of the philosopher as artist is to reveal & celebrate the eternal & purposeless background of human life." ~Alan Watts...

..."Try to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up? Think about that, children think about it, its one of the great wonders of life. What would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You'll find out, among other things, that it will pose the next question to you. What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see, You cant have a experience of nothing, nature abhors a vacuum. So after your dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience, as when you were born.' ~Alan Watts...

..."We in the West think of the world as an artifact, something made by a grand technician, the Creator. But the Hindus do not think that the world is created at all. They look upon the world as a drama, not as created, but as acted. And they see God as the supreme actor, or what is called the cosmic self, playing all the parts. In other words, you and the birds and bees and the flowers, the rocks and the stars are all a big act being put on by God, who is pretending in order to amuse himself, through the many eternities, who is pretending that he is all of you. And this is not, after all, an unreasonable idea." ~Alan Watts...

..."When Einstein propounded the theories of relativity, people said they couldn't understand it. It used to be something at a cocktail party to be introduced to somebody who understands Einstein. Now every young person understands Einstein and knows what it's about. You've got even one year of college, you know what relativity is. And you know it not only in an intellectual way, you know this as a feeling, just as you have a feeling of the roundness of the world, especially if you travel a lot on jet planes. So I feel 237

that in just that way, within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."Slowly it becomes clear that one of the greatest of all superstitions is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean that we are being forced to admit that we are only bodies; it means that we are forming an altogether new idea of the body. For the body considered as separate from the mind is one thing—an animated corpse. But the body considered as inseparable from the mind is another, and as yet we have no proper word for a reality which is simultaneously mental and physical. To call it mental-physical will not do at all, for this is the very unsatisfactory joining of two concepts which have both been impoverished by long separation and opposition. But we are at least within sight of being able to discard altogether ideas of a stuff which is mental and a stuff which is material. 'Stuff' is a word which describes the formless mush that we perceive when sense is not keen enough to make out its pattern. The notion of material or mental stuff is based on the false analogy that trees are made of wood, mountains of stone, and minds of spirit in the same way that pots are made of clay. 'Inert' matter seems to require an external and intelligent energy to give it form. But now we know that matter is not inert. Whether it is organic or inorganic, we are learning to see matter as patterns of energy—not of energy as if energy were a stuff, but as energetic pattern, moving order, active intelligence." ~Alan Watts...

..."In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley has given us a superbly written account of the effects of mescalin upon a highly sensitive person. It was a record of his first experience of this remarkable transformation of consciousness, and by now, through subsequent experiments, he knows that it can lead to far deeper insights than his book described. While I cannot hope to surpass Aldous Huxley as a master of English prose, I feel that the time is ripe for an account of some of the deeper, or higher, levels of insight that can be reached through these consciousness-changing 'drugs' when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding. I should perhaps add that, for me, philosophical reflection is barren when divorced from poetic imagination, for we proceed to understanding of the world upon Two legs, not One." ~Alan Watts...

..."Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world." ~Alan Watts... 238

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...“What you call the external world is as much you as your own body. Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world; it’s a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it.” ~Alan Watts...

..."But when Chinese Taoists say nature is purposeless, this is a compliment. Its like the idea of the Japanese word 'yugen.' They describe 'yugen' as watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds; as watching a ship vanish behind a distant island; as wandering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return. Haven’t you done this? Haven’t you gone on a walk with no particular purpose in mind? You carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit at old stumps, and wander along and sometimes twiddle your thumbs. Its at that moment that you are a perfectly rational human being. You’ve learned purposelessness." ~Alan Watts...

..."I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, 'You shall be my disciple.' I looked at him and said, 'Who was Buddha's teacher?' He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover." ~Alan Watts...

..."Intense beauty and intense pleasure are always gratuitous, and are revealed only to senses that are not seeking and straining. For our nerves are not muscles: to push them is to reduce their efficiency." ~Alan Watts...

..."It is like the mask of Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, a multiple mask which illustrates the fact that the one who looks out of my eyes and out of everyone's eyes is the same center. So, when I look at another human being, and I look straight into their eyes, I don't like doing that, there's something embarrassing about looking into someone's eyes too closely. Don't look at me that closely because I might give myself away! You might find out who I really am! And what do you suppose that would be? Do you suppose that another person who looks deeply into your eyes will read all the things you're ashamed of, all your faults, all the things you are guilty of? Or is there some deeper secret than that? The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you. We are 240

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, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many- faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts." ~Alan Watts...

..."Wake up and find out eventually who you really ARE. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy or you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in the nut house, which is the same thing. But if You wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out'." ~Alan Watts...

..."The liberative artist plays the part of Orpheus by living in the mode of music instead of the mode of language. His entire activity is dancing, rhythm for its own sake, and in this way he becomes a vortex which draws others into its pattern. He charms their attention from then to now, absorbing them into a rhythm in which survival ceases to be the criterion of value. It is by this attraction, and not by direction or commandment, that he is sought out as a teacher in the way of liberation. It is easy enough to become a martyr by throwing open challenges and judgments at the ways of the world. It is all too simple to indulge the sense of being in the right by flaunting one's lack of inhibition and scandalizing a repressed society. But the high art, the upaya [skillful means], of a true Bodhisattva is possible only for him who has gone beyond all need for self-justification, for so long as there is something to prove, some ax to grind, there is no dance." ~Alan Watts...

..."After people die, babies are born—and, unless they are automata, every one of them is, just as we ourselves were, the 'I' experience coming again into being. The conditions of heredity and environment change, but each of those babies incarnates the same experience of being central to a world that is 'other.' Each infant dawns into life as I did, without any memory of a past. Thus when I am gone there can be no experience, no living through, of the state of being a perpetual 'has-been.' Nature 'abhors the vacuum' and the I-feeling appears again as it did before, and it matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years. In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious 'will,' except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one's ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is." ~Alan Watts...

..."The point becomes clear only as one realizes, with compassion and sorrow, that many of our most powerful and wealthy men are miserable dupes and captives in a treadmill, who—with the rarest exceptions—have not the ghost of a notion how to spend and enjoy money." ~Alan Watts...

..."Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights, of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say 'Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's gonna be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say 'Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?'. And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are Now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices You would have, and maybe that's what Your DOing..." ~Alan Watts...

..."There was a 'kamikaze' pilot who escaped because his plane that he was flying at an American aircraft carrier went wrong, and he landed in the water instead of hitting the plane, so he survived. But he said afterwards that he had the most extraordinary state of exaltation. It wasn't a kind of patriotic ecstasy, but the very though that in a moment he would cease to exist--he would just be gone--for some mysterious reason that he couldn't understand, made him feel absolutely like a god. And when I talk to a certain German sage whose name is Count Van Derkheim[?], he said that during the war this happened to people again and again and again. He said they heard the bombs screaming down over their heads, and knew this was the last moment, or that they were in a concentration camp with absolutely no hope 243

of getting out, or that they were displaced in such a way that their whole career was shattered. He said in each of these cases, when anybody accepted the situation as totally inevitable, they suddenly got this amazing kind of enlightenment experience of freedom from ego. Well, they tried to explain it to their friends when it was over and everything had settled down again, and their friends said 'Well, you were under such pressure that you must have gone a little crazy.' But Van Derkheim said 'A great deal of my work is to reassure these people that in that moment there was a moment of truth, and they really saw how things are'." ~Alan Watts...

..."Of course, the separate observer, the thinker of the thoughts, is an abstraction which we create out of memory. We think of the self, the ego, rather, as a repository of memories, a kind of safety deposit box, or record, or filing cabinet place where all our experiences are stored. Now, that's not a very good idea. It's more that memory is a dynamic system, not a storage system. It's a repetition of rhythms, and these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience. In other words, first of all, how do you distinguish between something known now, and a memory? Actually, you don't know anything at all until you remember it. Because if something happens that is purely instantaneous--if a light flashes, or, to be more accurate, if there is a flash, lasting only one millionth of a second, you probably wouldn't experience it, because it wouldn't give you enough time to remember it...But the problem that we don't see, don't ordinarily recognize, is that although memory is a series of signals with a special kind of cue attached to them so we don't confuse them with present experience, they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience, they are all part of this constantly flowing life process, and there is no separate witness standing aside from the process, watching it go by. You're all involved in IT." ~Alan Watts...

..."Most Westerners start to fidget; they find it very boring to sit for a long time, but the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them. Because say when a person says 'I see a leaf,' immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves--leaves are not green. That's why Lao-Tzu said 'the five colors make a man blind, the five tones make a man deaf,' because if you can only see five colors, you're blind, and if you can only hear five tones in music, you're deaf. You see, if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you're blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it." ~Alan Watts... 244

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..."Now, I am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual, because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and am a sort of half-baked scholar. But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word 'think,' talking to yourself, sub-vocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about." ~Alan Watts...

..."All those people who try to realize Zen by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately to find it, and they're on the wrong track. There is another Zen poem which says, 'You cannot attain it by thinking, you cannot grasp it by not thinking.' Or you could say, you cannot catch hold of the meaning of Zen by doing something about it, but equally, you cannot see into its meaning by doing nothing about it, because both are, in their different ways, attempts to move from where you are now, here, to somewhere else, and the point is that we come to an understanding of this, what I call suchness, only through being completely here. And no means are necessary to be completely here. Neither active means on the one hand, nor passive means on the other. Because in both ways, you are trying to move away from the immediate now. But you see, it's difficult to understand language like that. And to understand what all that is about, there is really one absolutely necessary prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking." ~Alan Watts...

..."Richard Alpert, who in all this had played a much quieter role, also went into exile, but in another way. While visiting India he realized that he had come to the end of the identity as a psychologist which he had thus far played, so much so that he could not envisage any normal role or career for himself in the United States. Furthermore, he felt as I did that he had learned all that he could get from psychedelics, and that what remained was actually to live out the life of freedom from worldly games and anxieties. He therefore took the name of Baba Ram Dass, and came back as a white-robed and bearded sannyasin, full of laughter and energy, dedicated simply to living in the eternal now. And, as might be expected, people raised their eyebrows and shook their heads, saying that the old showman was playing another game, or, alas, what drugs had done to such a promising young scientist, or that it was just great to be a sannyasin with an independent income. But I felt that he had done just the right thing for himself. I spent many hours with him and sensed that he was genuinely happy, that his intelligence was as sharp as ever, and that he was confident enough in what he was doing not to try to persuade me to follow his example. Certainly he was having great pleasure in the multitudes of young people who came to listen to him, but in this respect he and I are alike, for we enjoy thinking out loud with an appreciative and intelligent audience just as we enjoy landscape or music. But would he be 246

going about in a white robe if he were really sincere? Indeed yes. For in a country where a philosopher's sincerity is measured by the ordinariness of his dress, I too will sometimes wear a kimono or sarong in public, lest, like Billy Graham, I should attract an enormous following of dangerously serious and humorless people." ~Alan Watts...

..."For they were realizing the odd fact that their brains were more intelligent than their minds or, to say the least, that the human nervous system was of such a high order of complexity that we were only just beginning to organize it in terms of conscious thought. I sat in on an intimate seminar with Pribram in which he explained in most careful detail how the brain is no mere reflector of the external world, but how its structure almost creates the forms and patterns that we see, selecting them from an immeasurable spectrum of vibrations as the hands of a harpist pluck chords and melodies from a spectrum of strings." ~Alan Watts...

..."'The Ultimate Ground of Being' is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for 'God' and would also do for 'the Self of the world' as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or 'pretending' to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: You're IT!" ~Alan Watts, THE BOOK, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are...

..."Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg's way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self." ~Alan Watts...

..."We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we 247

are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment." ~Alan Watts...

...“If you say that getting money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things that you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is, to go on doing things that you don’t like doing, which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life that is spent in a miserable way.” ~Alan Watts...

..."A separate self is merely conventional reality, in the same sense as lines of latitude and longitude and the measurements of the clock; which is why one of the means of maya, illusion, is measurement. Things are measurements; they are units of thought, like inches are measurements. There are no things in physical nature. How many things is a thing? However many you want. A 'thing' is a 'think', a unit of thought; it is as much reality as you can catch hold of in one idea." ~Alan Watts...

..."Let’s say we take us the basic supposition which is the thing that one sees and the experience of awakening or whatever you want to call it. That this now moment, in which I’m talking and you are listening, is eternity. That although we have somehow calmed ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, and that we are vaguely frustrated and worried and so on and that it ought to be changed. This is IT, so you don’t need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you must not try to do anything, because that is doing something; and how to explain that, because there is nothing to explain, because that is the way, it is Now you see. And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up." ~Alan Watts...

…"The game our country is playing is nothing really happens unless its in the newspapers" ~Alan Watts…

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..."When a thief is robbing a house and the police enter on the ground floor, the thief goes up to the second floor, and when the police follow up the stairs the thief goes higher and higher until at last he gets out at the rooftop. And in the same way, when one really feels oneself to be the lower self that is to be a separate ego, and then the moralists come along – they are of course the police – and say ‘you are not to be selfish’ – then the ego dissembles and he tries to pretend that he is a good person after all. Therefore one of the ways of doing this is for the ego to say – ‘I believe I have a higher self.’ And I would say why do you believe that? Do you know the higher self? ‘No, if I knew it I would behave differently. But I am trying to get there.’ Well why are you trying to get there? ‘Well then the police wouldn’t come around. Then the moralists wouldn’t preach at me. And I could feel I was doing my duty, behaving as a proper member of society.’ But all this is a great phony front. If you don’t know that there is a higher self and you believe that there is one, on who’s authority do you believe this?" ~Alan Watts...

..."The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!" ~Alan Watts...

..."It comes, then, to this: that to be viable, livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game -and the 'must' here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents." ~Alan Watts...

..."We must therefore imagine a new kind of individuality in which there are two spheres with a common center. The outer sphere is the finite consciousness, the ego, the superficial individual, which believes itself to be the willing agent and knower, or the passive sufferer, of deeds and experience. But the inner sphere is the real self, unknown to the conscious ego. For the latter is the temporary disguise or dream of the former, and the real Self would not only be unafraid of entering into dreams of intense suffering; it would all the time be experiencing the process as delight and bliss, as an eternal game of hide-and-seek." ~Alan Watts...

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..."The most profound metaphysical questions are expressed in the most common phrases of everyday life. Who do you think you are? Who started this? Are we going to make it? Where are we going to put it? Who's going to clean up? Where the hell d'you think you're going? Where do I come in? What's the time? Where am I? What's up? Which is which? Who's who? Do you mean it? Where do we get off? Are you there? But there seems to be one that must be asked right at the beginning. Is IT serious?" ~Alan Watts...

..."Drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But beyond these occasional lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a system of total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of logic and language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that 'energy which is eternal delight' can consist with the misery and suffering of everyday life." ~Alan Watts...

..."The idea of mystical experiences resulting from drug use is not readily accepted in Western societies. Western culture has, historically, a particular fascination with the value and virtue of man as an individual, self-determining, responsible ego, controlling himself and his world by the power of conscious effort and will. Nothing, then, could be more repugnant to this cultural tradition than the notion of spiritual or psychological growth through the use of drugs. A 'drugged' person is by definition dimmed in consciousness, fogged in judgment, and deprived of will. But not all psychotropic (consciousness-changing) chemicals are narcotic and soporific, as are alcohol, opiates, and barbiturates. The effects of what are now called psychedelic (mind-manifesting) chemicals differ from those of alcohol as laughter differs from rage, or delight from depression. There is really no analogy between being 'high' on LSD and 'drunk' on bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should one drive while reading a book, playing a violin, or making love. Certain creative activities and states of mind demand a concentration and devotion that are simply incompatible with piloting a death-dealing engine along a highway." ~Alan Watts...

..."What I think an awakening really involves is a re-examination of our common sense. We've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious. And our speech reflects them; its 252

commonest phrases. 'Face the facts.' As if they were outside you. As if life were something they simply encountered as a foreigner. 'Face the facts.' Our common sense has been rigged, you see? So that we feel strangers and aliens in this world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because this is what we are used to. That's the only reason. But when you really start questioning this, say 'Is that the way I have to assume life is? I know everybody does, but does that make it true?' It doesn't necessarily. It ain't necessarily so. So then as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture, you find you get a new kind of common sense. It becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."So in the same way Einstein's relativity theories--the curvature of the propagation of light, the idea that time gets older as light moves away from a source, in other words, people looking at the world now on Mars, they would be seeing the state of the world a little earlier than we are now experiencing it. That began to bother people when Einstein started talking about that. But now we're all used to it, and relativity and things like that are a matter of common sense today. Well, in a few years, it will be a matter of commons sense to many people that they're one with the universe. It'll be so simple. And then maybe if that happens, we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense. With love instead of with hate for our environment." ~Alan Watts...

..."Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around, that's how it feels inside your head. The color of this room is back here in the nervous system, where the optical nerves are at the back of the head. It's in there. It's what you're experiencing. What you see out here is a neurological experience. Now if that hits you, and you feel sensuously that that's so, you may feel therefore that the external world is all inside my skull. You've got to correct that, with the thought that your skull is also in the external world. So you suddenly begin to feel 'Wow, what kind of situation is this? It's inside me, and I'm inside it, and it's inside me, and I'm inside it.' But that's the way it is." ~Alan Watts...

...“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” ~Alan Watts...

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...“We have to ask ourselves the question, quite fundamentally, whats all the trouble? In other words, what is your state of mind when you contemplate the possibility of everything becoming nothing? Alright, so the universe is a transitory system, like the bubble, like smoke, like foam on the water, so what? And so how easy, just go along with it, dissolve. So whats the problem? Why don't we want to give up? What do we think were going to get by holding on and by resisting the dissolution...What do your really feel like inside at the prospect of everything becoming nothing, of this whole thing being a bubble that dissolves. That the most frightening thing about death is that there might be something beyond it, and You dont Know what IT IS." ~Alan Watts...

...“No amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish. So long as you think, and feel, that you are a someone contained in your bag of skin, and that’s all, there is no way whatsoever of your behaving unselfishly. Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you’re still tied to the wheel of becoming by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehavior's." ~Alan Watts...

...“So Buddha saw that all his yoga exercises and ascetic disciplines had just been ways of trying to get himself out of the trap in order to save his own skin, in order to find peace for himself. And he realized that that is an impossible thing to do, because the motivation ruins the project. He found out, then, see, that there was no trap to get out of except himself. Trap and trapped are one, and when you understand that, there isn’t any trap left.” ~Alan Watts...

..."Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen." ~Alan Watts...

..."The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." ~Alan Watts... 255

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..."When we decide, we're always worrying- 'did I think this over long enough? did I take enough data into consideration?'- and if you think it through you find that you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite. So what you do is: you go through the motions of thinking about what you will do about this, and then when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment. But we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right. It's amazing how often it works." ~Alan Watts...

..."This is the loneliness of liberation, of no longer finding security by taking sides with the crowd, of no longer believing that the rules of the game are the laws of nature. It is thus that transcending the ego leads to great individuality." ~Alan Watts...

..."Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command." ~Alan Watts...

..."You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes." ~Alan Watts...

..."I’m afraid some of my colleagues would not approve of that attitude because it is widely believed and said that in order to advance in the spiritual life – whatever that is – it is essential that you have a guru, and that you accord to that guru, perfect obedience. And so I’m often asked the question 'Is it really necessary to have a guru?' I can answer that only by saying 'Yes, it is necessary if you think so.' In the same spirit as it is said that anybody who goes to a psychiatrist, ought to have their head examined." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mysticsensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete." ~Alan Watts...

..."I wonder what is meant when we use the word 'I'. I have been very interested in this problem, and have come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination, a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of nature. As a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment, and when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we see a profound discord begin to separate man and nature as is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it." ~Alan Watts...

..."Everybody who is at all sensitive and awake to their own problems, and humanity's problems, is trying to change themselves. We know we cannot change the world unless we change ourselves. If we are all individually selfish, we are going to be collectively selfish. As it is said in the Bible, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and love your neighbor as yourself.' We all agree that we must love, but we do not, and this becomes particularly appalling when we enter into the higher realm of spiritual development. Everybody these days is interested in spiritual development, and wisely so, because we want to change our consciousness. Many people are well aware that this egocentric consciousness is a hallucination, and they presume it is the function of religion to change it. After all, that is what the Zen Buddhists, and all these yogis in the Orient are doing. They are changing their state of consciousness to get something called satori, or mystical experience, or nirvana, or moksha." ~Alan Watts...

..."Lao-tzu says, 'The scholar learns something every day, the man of Tao unlearns something every day, until he gets back to non-doing.' Just simply, without comment, without an idea in your head, be aware. What else can you do? You don't try to be aware; you are. You will find, of course, that you can not stop the commentary going on inside your head, but at least you can regard it as interior noise. Listen to your chattering thoughts as you would listen to the singing of a kettle." ~Alan Watts...

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..."When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory, which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now, and therefore it is spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but of course we don't really know what randomness is. What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth." ~Alan Watts...

..."Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It’s a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird." ~Alan Watts...

...“The reason I became a philosopher is that ever since I was a little boy I always felt that existence as such was weird! I mean, here we are. Isn’t that odd!” ~Alan Watts...

..."We have made death howl with all kinds of ghouls. We have invented dreadful afterlives. The Christian version of heaven is as abominable as the Christian version of hell. Nobody wants to be in church forever!” ~Alan Watts...

..."On another occasion I looked for a long time at a colored reproduction of Van Eyck's Last Judgment, which is surely one of the most horrendous products of human imagination. The scene of hell is 261

dominated by the figure of Death, a skeleton beneath whose batlike wings lies a writhing mass of screaming bodies gnawed by snakes which penetrate them like maggots in fruit. One of the curious effects of LSD is to impart an illusion of movement in still images, so that here the picture came to life and the whole entanglement of limbs and serpents began to squirm before my eyes. Ordinarily such a sight should have been hideous, but now I watched it with intense and puzzled interest until the thought came to me, 'Demon est deus inversus—the Devil is God inverted—so let's turn the picture upside down.' I did so, and thereupon burst into laughter for it became apparent at once that the scene was an empty drama, a sort of spiritual scarecrow, designed to guard some mystery from profanation by the ignorant. The agonized expressions of the damned seemed quite evidently 'put on,' and as for the death's-head, the great skull in the center of the painting, it became just what a skull is—an empty shell—and why the horror when there is nothing in it?" ~Alan Watts...

..."When God created the Universe, it was created like all stars, all planets, all galaxies, they're vaguely spherical, he created this and he said, 'Have a ball'." ~Alan Watts...

...“To try to see God is like trying to look at your own eyes, for he is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. This, however, is a truth which the human mind can hardly accept, because it is too proud and self-assertive and lacks the grace to receive such a gift. Man is always trying to manufacture a God, or a sense of God, for himself and therefore ignores the one that is actually given, because there is no credit to be gained in accepting a gift.” ~Alan Watts...

..."And so I talk in the same spirit. I don’t have a group of followers. I’m not trying to make disciples; because I work on the principle of a physician rather than a clergyman. A physician is always trying to get rid of his patients, and send them away healthy to stand on their own feet, whereas a clergyman is trying to get them as members of a religious organization so that they will continue to pay their pledges, pay the mortgage on an expensive building and generally belong to the church, boost its membership and thereby prove – by sheer weight of numbers – the veracity of its tenants. My objective is really to get rid of you so that you won’t need me or any other teacher." ~Alan Watts...

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..."My whole work in religion and philosophy has been to convey this feeling to others, to show that our apparent separateness from what there IS and all that there IS arises from our failure to notice space as a vital reality. Although this feeling has not protected me from a vast amount of folly and confusion...IT has nevertheless delivered me from basic, existential anxiety." ~Alan Watts...

..."You may say that you take The Bible as your authority, or the Roman Catholic Church; and the Roman Catholic following very often says that the individual mystic experience is not to be trusted because of it’s liability to be interpreted in a whimsical and purely personal way, and that it has to be guarded against excesses by the substantial and objective traditions of the Church. But those traditions are held to be substantial and objective only because those who follow believe it to be so. 'They' say so, and if you follow it, you say so. So, the question comes back to you...Why do you believe? Why do you form this opinion? Upon what basis does all this rest?" ~Alan Watts...

...“All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures. They contain no information for most of us on how we grow our brains, how we work our nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape our bones. That isn’t contained in the sensation, or the image, we call the ego. So, obviously then, the ego is not myself.” ~Alan Watts...

..."What, finally, of the strong impression delivered both by the psychedelics and by many forms of mystical experience that the world is in some way an illusion? A difficulty here is that the word 'illusion' is currently used pejoratively, as the negative of everything real, serious, important, valuable, and worthwhile. Is this because moralists and metaphysicians are apt to be personality types lacking the light touch? Illusion is related etymologically to the Latin ludere, to play, and thus is distinguished from reality as the drama is distinguished from 'real life.' In Hindu philosophy, the world is seen as a drama in which all the parts—each person, animal, flower, stone, and star—are roles or masks of the one supreme Self, which plays the lila or game of hide and seek with itself for ever and ever, dismembering itself as the Many and remembering itself as the One through endless cycles of time, in the spirit of a child tossing stones into a pond through a long afternoon in summer. The sudden awakening of the mystical experience is therefore the one Self remembering itself as the real foundation of the seemingly individual and separate organism." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Our difficulty in accepting for ourselves so important a part in the actual creation or manifestation of the world comes, of course, from this thorough habituation to the feeling that we are strangers in the universe—that human consciousness is a fluke of nature, that the world is an external object which we confront, that its immense size reduces us to pitiful unimportance, or that geological and astronomical structures are somehow more real (hard and solid?) than organisms. But these are actually mythological images of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—ideas which, for a while, seemed extremely plausible, mostly for the reason that they appeared to be hard-boiled, down to earth and tough-minded, a currently fashionable posture for the scientist. Despite the lag between advanced scientific ideas and the common sense of even the educated public, the mythology of man as a hapless fluke trapped in a mindless mechanism is breaking down." ~Alan Watts...

..."There seems to me a strong possibility that the psychedelics (as a medicine rather than a diet) may help us to 'trigger' a new sense of identity, providing the initial boost to get us out of the habit of restricting 'I' to a vague center within the skin. That they make us aware that our whole knowledge of the external world is a state of our own bodies is not a merely technical and trivial discovery. It is the obverse of the fact that our own bodies are functions, or behaviors, of the whole external world. This— at first—weird and mystical sensation of 'unity with the cosmos' has been objectively verified. The mystic's subjective experience of his identity with 'the All' is the scientist's objective description of ecological relationship, of the organism/environment as a unified field." ~Alan Watts...

..."What else could a light shine in if it wasn't the darkness?" ~Alan Watts...

...“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” ~Alan Watts, The Way of Liberation...

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..."Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it's not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is really extremely simple, and that is the way it is." ~Alan Watts...

..."The center of Hinduism is an experience called Moksha, liberation, in which, through the dissipation of the illusion that each man and each woman is a separate thing in a world consisting of nothing but a collection of separate things, you discover that you are, in a way, on one level an illusion, but on another level, you are what they call 'the self,' the one self, which is all that there is. The universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. When it plays 'hide,' it plays it so well, hides so cleverly, that it pretends to be all of us, and all things whatsoever, and we don't know it because it's playing 'hide.' But when it plays 'seek,' it enters onto a path of yoga, and through following this path it wakes up, and the scales fall from one's eyes." ~Alan Watts...

..."People study Zen, and they say that getting rid of your ego is a superhuman task. I assure you it is very, very difficult to get rid of your ego. You have to sit for a long time, and you are going to get the sorest legs. It is hard work, and all you wretched kids who think you are getting rid of your ego with easy yoga do not know what you are in for. The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist. There is nothing to get rid of. It is an illusion, as I have tried to explain, but still you ask how to stop the illusion. But who is asking?" ~Alan Watts...

..."Let it be clear, furthermore, that the ego-fiction is in no way essential to the individual, to the total human organism, in fulfilling and expressing his individuality. For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree." ~Alan Watts...

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..."That is why I am not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is talk about What IS. It amuses me to talk about What IS because IT is wonderful. I love IT, and therefore I like to talk about IT. My whole approach is not to convert you, not to make you over, not to improve you, but for you to Discover that if You really knew the Way You Were, things would be Sane." ~Alan Watts...

..."So you see, if you become aware of the fact that YOU are ALL of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're DOING, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only beating your heart, but that you ARE shining the sun." ~Alan Watts...

..."You're breathing The wind is blowing The trees are waving Your nerves are tingling

The individual and the universe Are inseparable But the curious thing is Very few people are aware of IT" ~Alan Watts...

..."Thus bamboozled, the individual--instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world--is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present--that is, of really living." ~Alan Watts... 270

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..."For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some Other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, 'Now, I've arrived!' Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be Alive NOW." ~Alan Watts...

..."Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination." ~Alan Watts...

..."In the spiritual world there is no top and bottom of the class; here all men and all things are equal and whatever they do can go neither up nor down. The only difference between a sage or mystic and ordinary, unenlightened man is that the one realizes his identity with God or Brahman, whereas the other does not. But the lack of realization does not alter the fact." ~Alan Watts...

...As Alan Watts once said, "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."... Everything in our life is always neutral, its our thoughts which create this imaginary division of right or wrong. Strip away the false division of thoughts, and YOU too will SEE that everything IS Always the way IT's supposed to BE...

..."Your self image includes all kinds of illusions of which you are completely unaware, for example, that time is real and that there is such a thing as a past, which is pure conjecture. Nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us, and they are not included in our image of ourselves, nor is there any information included in our image of ourselves about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe. In all this is a very impoverished image." ~Alan Watts...

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..."You can describe it as if you were omnipotent, like God, or as if it were completely deterministic and you hardly existed at all. But remember, both points of view are right, and we will see where that gets us. We do not feel that ordinarily, do we? What we feel, instead, is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves I would rather say, with our image of ourselves. That is the person, or the ego. You play a role; you identify with that role. I play a role called Alan Watts. And I know very well that it is a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary, but I find this one is best for making a living. But I assure you that is a mask and I do not take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of guru, or savior of the world just breaks me up, because I know me. Besides, it is very difficult to be holy, in the ordinary sense. So, I know I am not that, but most of us are taught to think that we are whom we are called." ~Alan Watts...

..."When Einstein propounded the theories of relativity, people said they couldn't understand it. It used to be something at a cocktail party to be introduced to somebody who understands Einstein. Now every young person understands Einstein and knows what it's about. You've got even one year of college, you know what relativity is. And you know it not only in an intellectual way, you know this as a feeling, just as you have a feeling of the roundness of the world, especially if you travel a lot on jet planes. So I feel that in just that way, within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe." ~Alan Watts...

..."Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." ~Alan Watts...

..."You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things which 'happen' to us, rather than things that we do. In other words, we don't assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape. You can say to a beautiful girl, 'Gee, you're gorgeous,' and she'd say 'How like a man, all you think about is bodies. My body was given to me by my parents, and I'm not responsible for it, and I'd like to be admired for my self and not for my chassis.' And so I'd tell her 'You poor little chauffeur. You've disowned your own being and identified yourself not 274

being associated with your own body.' I agree that if she had a terrible body with a lousy figure, she might want to feel that way, but if she is a fine-looking human being, she should get with it and not disown herself. But this happens again and again." ~Alan Watts...

..."And that's why, really, things like Astrology, although interesting, are rather ridiculous. Because if you know the future there's no surprise for you." ~Alan Watts...

...Alan Watts once said, “Waking UP to Who You ARE requires letting go of Who You Imagine Yourself to BE.” How many of Us ARE Stuck living with a illusion of the Self? Who ARE YOU Really? Your name? Your job or role in life? Deep Down within Your perceived shell, who IS the ONE who Really SEE's through Your EYEs?...

..."What is called the Zen problem, or koan, is likened to a person who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron. He cannot gulp it down and he cannot spit it out. Or it is like a mosquito biting an iron bull. It is the nature of a mosquito to bite and it is the nature of an iron bull to be unbiteable. Both go on doing what is their nature, and so, nothing can happen. Soon you realize you are absolutely up against it. There is absolutely no answer to this problem, and no way out. Now, what does that mean? If I cannot do the right thing by doing, and I cannot do the right thing by not doing, what does it mean? It means, of course, that I who essayed to do all this is a hallucination. There is no independent self to be produced. There is no way of showing it because it is not there. When you recover from the illusion and you suddenly wake up, you think, 'Whew, what a relief.' That is called satori." ~Alan Watts...

..."You see, to go out of your mind, at least once a day, is tremendously important because by going out of your mind you will come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are overrational, you are like a very rigid bridge and because it has no give, no craziness in it, will be blown down with the first hurricane." ~Alan Watts...

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..."If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world." ~Alan Watts...

...“The world of form and illusion which the majority take to be the real world is none other than the play of the Spirit, or, as the Hindus have called it, the Dance of Shiva. He is enlightened who joins in this play knowing it as play, for man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” ~Alan Watts, Become What You ARE...

...“Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief’ or wish to BE…Faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to BE. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the UNknown. Belief clings, but faith let’s go…Faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.” ~Alan Watts...

...“It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about 'I'.” ~Alan Watts...

..."Anxiety is the condition that comes upon us when we fundamentally mistrust ourselves, when we mistrust our own nature, and are trying to keep such a tight grip on it that we start to tremble, as one's hand starts to tremble if you become extremely anxious to hold it still." ~Alan Watts...

..."The people who have hope in the future are the miserable people, because they are like donkeys chasing carrots that are dangled before their noses from sticks attached to their collars. And they pursue

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and they purse in vain, always hoping that tomorrow will be the great thing, and therefore are incapable of enjoying themselves today." ~Alan Watts...

..."My problem as a writer, using words, is to dispel the illusions of language while employing one of the languages that generates them." ~Alan Watts...

..."It is surely absurd to seek God in terms of a preconceived idea of what God is...To believe in God and to look for the God you believe in is simply to seek confirmation of an opinion. To ask for a revelation of God's will, and then to 'test' it by reference to your own preconceived moral standards is to make a mockery of asking. You knew the answer already. Seeking 'God' in this way is not more than asking for the stamp of absolute authority and certainty on what you believe in any case, for a guarantee that the unknown and the future will be a continuation of what you want to retain from the past-a bigger and better fortress for 'I'." ~Alan Watts...

..."To discover the ultimate Reality of life- the Absolute, the eternal, God - you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. These idols are not just crude images...They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind, and heart to reality. The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it." ~Alan Watts...

..."There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the Buddha into a metaphysical position. ‘Is the world eternal?’ The Buddha says nothing. ‘Is the world not eternal?’ And he answers nuttin’. ‘Is the world both eternal and not eternal?’ And he don’t say nuttin’. ‘Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?’ And STILL he don’t say nuttin’. He maintains what is called the noble silence. Sometimes called the thunder of silence, because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void. It is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people. It’s better to destroy people’s beliefs than to give them beliefs. I know it hurts, but it is The Way." ~Alan Watts...

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..."Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one's own. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God." ~Alan Watts...

..."As with the two poles of a magnet, North is quite different from South and yet they ARE both part of One magnet. In precisely the same way, You ARE both what You DO and what Happens to You. You have a little Game in which You play that You are not responsible for what happens to You, You are only responsible for what You DO. This illusion allows You to compete with the two sides of Yourself. IT IS like getting two knitting pins, one in each hand, and having a fencing match with Yourself." ~Alan Watts...

..."So you see, when you ask ‘How to I obtain the knowledge of God, how do I obtain the knowledge of liberation?’ all I can say is it’s the wrong question. Why do you want to obtain it? Because the very fact that you’re wanting to obtain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there. You already have IT. But of course, it’s up to you. It’s your privilege to pretend that you don’t. That’s your game; that’s your life game; that’s what makes you think your an ego. And when you want to wake up, you will, just like that. If you’re not awake, it shows you don’t want to. You’re still playing the hide part of the game. You’re still, as it were, the self pretending it’s not the self. And that’s what you want to do. So you see, in that way, too, you’re already there." ~Alan Watts...

..."So your body knows that its energy system is one with and continuous with the whole energy system, and that if it's in any sense true to say that I am my body, and that I beat my heart, and that I think by growing a brain, where do you draw the line between what you think and the power to think? Do you think with your brain in the same way that you carve wood with a knife? Y'know, it's an instrument that you pick up and use. I don't think our bodies are just instrumental in that way. They're something we are doing, only we don't think about it, in the sense that we don't have to consider when we get up in the morning as an act of voluntary behavior how to connect all of the switches in our brain to get us ready for the day; they come on automatically. But this automatic or, I would rather call it, spontaneous functioning of the brain is what is called in Japanese 'shizen'(?), that is to say, the spontaneity of nature. It does all this, and what we perform consciously is simply a small fragment of our total activity, of which we happen to be aware in a special way. We are far more than that. And it isn't only, say, that the sun is 280

light because we have eyes and optical nerves which translate the energy of the sun into an experience called 'light.' It is also that that very central fire of the sun is something that you are doing just as much as you are generating temperature in your body." ~Alan Watts...

..."So anyway, then, this is a drama, I'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I'm not trying to prove it, I'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, this means that you're not victims of a scheme of things, of a mechanical world, or of an autocratic god. The life you're living is what YOU have put yourself into." ~Alan Watts...

..."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...

..."While modern astronomy tells us of our insignificance beneath the stars, it also tells us that if we lift so much as a finger, we affect them. It is true that we are transient, that we have no abiding self, but the fabric of life is such that one broken thread may work immeasurable ruin. The magnitude of the world with whose destiny we are bound up increases rather than diminishes our importance. Nature may seem to have little regard for individuals; it may let them die in millions as if it mattered nothing. But value is in quality, not quantity. A pea may be as round as the world, but as far as roundness is concerned, neither is better than the other. And man is in himself a little universe; the ordering of his mind and body is as complex as the ordering of the stars. Can we say, then, that the governing of man's universe is less important because it is different in size?" ~Alan Watts...

..."The root of the difficulty is that we have developed the power of thinking so rapidly and one-sidedly that we have forgotten the proper relation between thoughts and events, words and things. Conscious thinking has gone ahead and created its own world, and, when this is found to conflict with the real world, we have the sense of a profound discord between "I", the conscious thinker, and nature." ~Alan Watts...

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..."There are all sorts of schools of thought, and they disagree with each other, they debate with each other, but so far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't know what I thought unless there were people who had different opinions than mine. Therefore, instead of saying to those people, 'You ought to agree with me,' I'd say to them, 'Thank you so much for disagreeing, because now I know where I am.' I wouldn't know otherwise. In other words, the in goes with the out; the solid with the space. It's a very funny thing. Take any highly organized system of life. Take the way a garden exists. It's full of, in a sense, competitive species. Snails and thrushes and various insects that are supposed to be at war with each other. And because their fights keep going on, the life of the garden as a whole is maintained. And so I can't say 'All snails in this garden should be abolished, so that the lettuces should thrive,' because if there aren't some snails around there, the birds won't come around, because they like the snails. And the birds do all sorts of things for my garden, not to mention supplying it with manure and all kinds of things. So I need them around. So the price of having birds is snails that eat your lettuces. And so on. I mean, this is merely an instance, an example of this. The funny thing is, though, that when you realize this, and you suddenly see for the first time that you and your point of view, and everything that you stand for and believe in-and you think 'Boy, I'm going to stand for that and I'm going to fight for that!'-that it depends on its opposite. When you get that, it starts giving you the giggles, and you begin to laugh at yourself, and this is one of the most amazing forces in life, the creative force is human. Because when you are in a state of anxiety, and you are afraid that black may win over white, that darkness may conquer light, that non-being may conquer being, you haven't seen this point. When it strikes you that the two go together, the trembling emotional feeling which we call anxiety is given another value, and it's called laughter." ~Alan Watts...

..."No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." ~Alan Watts...

..."There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one of the aspects of the godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and Shiva to the destructive aspect. When Narada came to Vishnu and said, 'What is the secret of your maya?' Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. The moment he fell under the water he was born as a princess in a very great family, and went through all the experiences of childhood as a little girl. She finally married a prince from another kingdom and went to live with him in his kingdom. They lived there in tremendous prosperity, with palaces and peacocks, but suddenly there was a war and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed. The prince himself was killed in battle, and he was cremated. As a dutiful wife, the princess was about to throw herself weeping on to the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of suttee or self-sacrifice. But suddenly Narada woke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by his hair by Vishnu, who said, 'For whom were you weeping?'... So, that is the idea of 283

the whole world being a magical illusion, but done so skillfully - by whom? By you, basically. Not 'you' the empirical ego, not 'you' who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories that are strung together into what you call 'my everyday self.' Rather, it is the 'you' that is responsible for growing your hair, coloring your eyes, arranging the shape of your bones. The deeply responsible 'you' is what is responsible for all this." ~Alan Watts...

..."Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mysticsensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete." ~Alan Watts...

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Alan Watts Books:

* 1936 The Spirit of Zen, Paperback. * 1937 The Legacy of Asia and Western Man * 1940 The Meaning of Happiness, Paperback. * 1948 Behold the Spirit:A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, Vintage * 1950 Easter - Its Story and Meaning * 1950 The Supreme Identity, Vintage * 1951 The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage * 1953 Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Beacon Press * 1957 The Way of Zen, Vintage Spiritual Classics * 1958 Nature, Man, and Woman, Vintage * 1960 "This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Vintage * 1961 Psychotherapy East and West, Vintage * 1962 The Joyous Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness * 1963 The Two Hands of God - The Myths of Polarity * 1964 Beyond Theology - The Art of Godmanship, Vintage * 1966 The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Vintage * 1967 Nonsense, Stolen Paper Editions * 1970 Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality, Vintage * 1971 Erotic Spirituality - The Vision of Konarak * 1972 The Art of Contemplation * 1972 In My Own Way - An Autobiography 1915-1965, Vintage * 1973 Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal,

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Posthumous publications of Alan Watts (collections of lectures and writings put together after his departure)

* 1974 The Essence of Alan Watts, Celestial Arts * 1975 Tao: The Watercourse Way, with Al Chung-liang Huang, Pantheon * 1976 Essential Alan Watts * 1978 Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life * 1979 Om: Creative Meditations * 1982 Play to Live * 1983 Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self * 1985 Out of the Trap * 1986 Diamond Web * 1987 The Early Writings of Alan Watts, Ten Speed Press * 1990 The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings, Ten Speed Press * 1994 Talking Zen, Weatherhill * 1995 Become What You Are, Shambhala * 1995 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion * 1995 The Philosophies of Asia, Tuttle Publishing * 1995 The Tao of Philosophy, Tuttle Publishing * 1996 Myth and Religion, Tuttle Publishing * 1997 Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking, Tuttle Publishing * 1997 Zen and the Beat Way, Tuttle Publishing * 1998 Culture of Counterculture, Tuttle Publishing * 1999 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion, Tuttle Publishing * 2000 Still the Mind : an introduction to meditation, New World Library, * 2000 What is Zen?, New World Library * 2000 What is Tao?, New World Library, * 2002 Zen, The Supreme Experience, Vega Press 286

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Alan Watts – Book https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alan-Watts-Wisdom-Book/422707047812206

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