alanwilsonwatts

[alanwilsonwatts]

Alan Watts, in my own way

[alanwilsonwatts]

[alanwilsonwatts]

[alanwilsonwatts]

“The moment has arrived when a really thoroughgoing spiritual materialism is the intelligent and essential attitude for the management of technology, and for helping mankind to be something better than the most predatory monster yet evolved.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“Don’t hurry anything. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about what progress you’re making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“Intellectualisation creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“Integrity of personality is far better preserved by the faith of self-giving than the shattering anxiety of self-preservation.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“Fake courage is still a form of armour. And, therefore, so long as there is armour, so long as there are defensive walls, they will provoke attack. 

Real courage is not an armour; it is not a character armour. Real courage is possible only through seeing. It’s not possible through belief in the divine self, which we all share in common—as if that were something you could believe in. 

This is only to be discovered through not hanging onto anything, not having any armour, not having any beliefs, not having any kind of gimmick with which you try to hold the weaving smoke in position. You don’t need it.

If you really are the basis of the world, you don’t need a belief that that is so.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“You may be bored. [You may be] feeling sort of empty and at a loose end and think ‘Well, um, I don’t know, let’s go and commit adultery. It might liven things up!’

That would be what they call in Zen: raising waves when no wind is blowing. 

Or, in the same way, a lot of people, instead of saying ‘let’s commit adultery’ when they feel sort of bored, say ‘Let’s go and eat something.’

And so they become fatter and fatter and fatter because they’re filling the spiritual vacuum in their psyche with food, which doesn’t do the job. It’s not the function of food to fill spiritual vacuums.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it then you make it worse because you project onto it all kinds of bogies and threats which don’t exist in it at all.

Whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away. Because the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and materialise itself out of your own substance. It will kill you eventually because it will take over all your own vitality. 

So, then, whenever confronted with a ghost walk straight into it. And it will disappear.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“I am not trying to help you or improve you; I accept you as you are. I am not out, therefore, to save the world.

Of course, when a stream or a bubbling spring flows out from the mountains, it is doing its thing. And if a thirsty traveler helps himself, well, that’s fine.

When a bird sings, it doesn’t sing for the advancement of music, but if somebody stops to listen and is delighted, that’s fine.

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.”

- Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon.

Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“Conscious attention is not really the effective controlling force in your life, it’s merely the lookout. It's merely an information source which warns the organism as a whole of unusual features of the environment. […] It is the troubleshooter—and if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, well then, you become one-sided and you become a perpetually anxious person.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“We seldom realise, 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

[alanwilsonwatts]

“The idea that there are no wrong feelings is an immensely threatening idea to people who are afraid to feel in any case.”

Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]

“The mystic is the one who feels that everything that happens is in some way harmonious, in some way right, [and] in some way an integral part of the universe.

When we translate that into the moral sphere (the sphere of human conduct) the equivalent is this: there are no wrong feelings.

There may be wrong actions in the sense of actions contrary to the rules of human communication, but the way you feel towards other people (loving, hating, et cetera.) [isn’t wrong]. There are no wrong feelings.

So to try and force one’s feelings to be other than what they are is absurd and furthermore dishonest.”

— Alan Watts

[alanwilsonwatts]