Alan Watts

You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.

Quote sourced from Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal. 1973, p. 124. Text available at organism.earth/library/docume…

@AlanWattsDaily Without contextual backing, this supposed and uncited quote of his is null. unity is not an infinite truth when truth is not infinite but instead 'for the infinite'

Not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of life, and not to see the unity of being and non-being is the fear of death.

There are two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, in the intensity of joy, we forget past and future, let the present be all, and thus do not even stop to think, “I am happy.”

If you will think for a moment of what you were before you were born, you will come to the rather puzzling conclusion that “you before you were born” are impossible to think about. Before you were conceived by your father and mother in the womb, you can’t remember anything. You don’t even remember darkness, not even a blank. Your background, your past history, right at its beginning, seems to be a state of complete annihilation of your ego, of your personality. And yet, oddly enough, here you are. After you die, you may presumably go again into a state which we can imagine only as complete annihilation, of complete nothingness. And, if so, you will—won’t you?—be in the same sort of condition as you were before you were born. You came out of that state, though. Should you be afraid to return to it?

Q. If you knew the atom bomb was about to fall, what would you do? A. I should go right on eating dinner. Q. Do you think mankind is going to blow itself off the earth with atom bombs in the near future? A. No. I think there would be a very serious danger if real do-gooders came to power in the United States or Russia, but since Khrushchev is a gangster and Ike a representative of American business, this won't happen. It's just in the self-interest of both sides not to do it. Q. Do you think mankind is going to blow itself off the earth with atom bombs in the near future? A. No. I think there would be a very serious danger if real do-gooders came to power in the United States or Russia, but since Khrushchev [Putin] is a gangster and Ike [Trump] a representative of American business, this won't happen. It's just in the self-interest of both sides not to do it. Q. Why do you vote at all? As you said before, "The world might change, but not because you're trying to change it." And isn't that merely fatalism? A. Why do I vote? Because if there were a tie and the casting vote might have been mine, I'd feel such a fool. But, seriously, the question shows you're not getting my point. The problem is not whether to act or not to aet, what to do or what not to do. The Chinese saying goes, "When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way." Thus, what I am saying is that the world cannot be changed by the "wrong" people, however right their doing or not-doing. And, by the "wrong" people, I mean those who act from the feeling that man is separate from the natural universe — either pushing it around or being pushed around by it. The ideas of individual freedom and fatalism rest on the same assumption — that man is separate, the boss or the puppet. In my view, he cannot act with wisdom unless he feels that what he does and what nature does are one and the same.

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

We need a natural history of theology, wherein the development of religious ideas and practices is studied, not as something good for life or bad for it, but as a form of life itself, like a particular species of flower or bird.

This thing that we call life requires space, air, earth, ground, and all that sort of thing. And so we are joined by the space between us. But this is ordinarily ignored, just in the same way as our interest does not focus upon the inseparability of every conceivable thing.

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean.

You have within you the most amazing logical analyzer that exists in the known world. And the point is to get it to work for you.

The fun of this whole thing is to make patterns, to figure out games, to do something with it.

We want to get as fast as possible from one place to another; to get rid of space and to get rid of time. And the result of this is, of course, that—as we get rid of space and time, as we make all places almost immediately accessible by jet aircraft—all places become the same place. So naturally, the tourist who is beguiled into taking a holiday in Honolulu asks, “Is Honolulu still ‘somewhere else?’ Is it still a land of girls in hula skirts, and naked breasts, and palm trees, and luaus, and so on?” Well, they’ll make it like it is, vaguely. But of course it isn’t. Honolulu is the same place as Coney Island, Atlantic City. Tokyo is just the same: it is simply an extension of Los Angeles; one of our suburbs. Because the faster you can get from place to place, the more you have conquered the limitations of time and space, the more everywhere is the same place.

@ZeroNarrative Alan Watts. Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality. 1970. Text can be viewed at organism.earth/library/docume…

@AlanWattsDaily An AI Alan Watts? Nice grouping of em dash characters. More AI slop added to the slop. This does not end well. Keep it up!

Being enlightened—in the Buddhist sense of the word—is a sort of calamity, because you found out the ruse which you were playing on yourself: you found out that the universe is a system which creeps up on itself and says BOO! and then laughs at itself for jumping. In other words, it is a self-surprising arrangement so as to avoid the monotony and boredom of knowing everything in advance. So you and I have all conspired with ourselves to pretend that we’re not really God—but of course we are! That’s perfectly obvious! We’re all apertures through which the universe is looking at itself.

@LeHeresiarch Alan Watts. “Manifesto to Cut the Big Hang-Up.” Published in the “East Village Other,” Volume 3, Number 4, page 2. Available at Organism Earth: organism.earth/library/docume…

@AlanWattsDaily I haven't heard this Watts seminar before. Got a link for me?

Capitalism, the obsession of making money, and socialism, the project of robbing the rich to pay the poor, are alike forms of the delusion that money is wealth, and belong to the pre-technological and pre-electronic age. Yet, in this country, not one single major political party—left or right—has any notion of putting such a scheme into practice.

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.

We are so unaccustomed to acting with spontaneity that we have no faith in it, and therefore we don’t (as it were) acquire practice in the use of spontaneous action. We are only practiced in the use of deliberate action. And what Zen proposes to do is to give us training in the practice of spontaneous action.

The dream—or the nightmare—of the great tomorrow is a present fantasy which distracts us from both reality and eternity.

I'm often silent. Because, after all, we have to be silent some of the time—don't we?—in order to hear what other people have to say, and therefore to have something to talk about. In just the same way, our minds have to be silent some of the time if we are really to have anthing to think about excent thoughts.

And also, people tend to think all the time. This becomes, for every civilized community, every civilized person, a sort of habit which is like constantly talking to yourself. Now, of course, when you meet me here on the TV screen, I'm always talking—or almost always—but I assure you, I am not always talking.

The more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. And as a result of this we tend to live in a world that is in some ways unsatistying, lacking in vitality and life.