Alan Watts
I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.Collection: Wave Of Life
If a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field.Collection: Flower
No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.Collection: Risk
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.Collection: Cutting
In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.Collection: Simplicity
The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.Collection: Art
The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.Collection: Cutting
Where-so-ever beings 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.Collection: Differences
...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.Collection: Problem
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.Collection: Guilt
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.Collection: Unity
All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.Collection: People
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.Collection: Inspiring
so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy.Collection: Fall
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.Collection: Inspiring
Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.Collection: Opposites
The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.Collection: Giving
A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.Collection: Flames
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...Collection: Bangs
Society is our extended mind and body.Collection: Mind
A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.Collection: Attention
you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance."
The menu is not the meal.Collection: Inspiring
If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Journey
When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Stars
The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.Collection: Marijuana
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.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Inspiring
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.Collection: Lonely
What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.Collection: Sleep
Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.Collection: Educational
If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.Collection: Wake Up
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.Collection: Life
This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.Collection: Mean
Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.Collection: Unity
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.Collection: Inspirational
Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.Collection: Laughter
So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.Collection: Money
For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.Collection: Desire
Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.Collection: Inspiring
If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.Collection: Moon
The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.Collection: Life
The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.Collection: Beach
To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.Collection: Thinking
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.Collection: Christian
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!Collection: Rejection