Alan Watts

Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized. But when one tries to hold on to it, change is everywhere apparent, since, like one's own shadow, the faster one pursues it, the faster it flees.

We are belatedly realizing that the ill-treatment of the environment is damage to ourselves - for the simple reason that the subject and object cannot be separated, and that we and our surroundings are the process of a unified field.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living fully now.

When a fish swims, he swims on and on, and there is no end to the water. When a bird flies, he flies on and on, and there is no end to the sky. From the most ancient times, there was never a fish who swam out of the water or a bird that flew out of the sky. Yet when the fish needs just a little water, he uses just a little, when he needs a lot, he uses lots. Thus the tips of their heads are always at the outer edge (of their space). Yet if there were a bird who first wanted to examine the extent of the sky, or a fish who first wanted to examine the extent of the water — and then tried to fly or to swim, they will never find their own ways in the sky or the water.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive...the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

The whole situation in and around at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are able to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virue" or "grace" or "power”, but best understood as Tao realized in man.

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.

There is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live in it, one cannot live anywhere.

Our problem is that the power of thought allows us to construct symbols of things, separate from the things themselves. This includes our ability to create a symbol, an idea of ​​ourselves, outside of ourselves. Because idea is much easier to grasp than reality, and symbol is much more stable than fact, we learn to identify with our idea of ​​ourselves. Hence the subjective feeling of an "I" that "has" a mind, of an isolated inner subject that goes through its experiences involuntarily. With its characteristic emphasis on the concrete, Zen shows us that our precious self is only an idea, useful and quite legitimate if taken only for what it is, but disastrous if identified with our true nature. The unnatural awkwardness of a certain kind of self-consciousness occurs when we are aware of a conflict or contrast between the idea of ​​ourselves on the one hand and the concrete, immediate sense of self on the other.

From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paperwork with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will be all too late.

Now—unless some zoologist can dig up a weird exception—humans are the only living beings who wear clothes. They are also the only beings who laugh, for humor is the property of humanity and consists, essentially, in not taking oneself seriously. (Consider the situation of someone chasing a hat blown off by the wind.) People can laugh at themselves because they know, deep down, that their lives are a big act, a put-on.

You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.

Therefore, at about the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a "regular job." I have not always been able to fulfill this vow. I have had to work (in a reasonably independent manner) for the Church and for a graduate school, but since the age of forty-two I have been a free lance, a rolling stone, and a shaman...

There is no place in Buddhism for the use of effort. Just be ordinary and nothing more. Ease your bowels, expel the water, put on your clothes, eat your food. When you are tired, go and lie down. Ignorant people will laugh at you, but wise people will understand... As you go from place to place, if you look upon each one as your home, they will all be so indeed, for when circumstances occur, you should not try to change them. Thus your feeling habits, which produce the karma for the Five Hells, will of themselves become the Great Ocean of Liberation.

This is the Daoist philosophy of naturalness, according to which a person is not truly free, detached, or pure when his state is the result of an artificial (crafted, unnatural, affected) discipline. That person only imitates purity, "pretends" to have clear consciousness. Hence the unpleasant complacency of those who are deliberately and methodically religious.

Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy.

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 untruly 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.

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.

Doctors try to get rid of their patients - clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church.

You are something that the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry.

In having a flawed sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment.

1/7 of your life should be madness.

Why do we love nonsense? Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his „Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe...”? Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and „Hey-nonny-nonny” and all those babbling choruses? Why is it that when we get „hep” with jazz we just go „Boody-boody-boop-de-boo” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging with it? It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world, not necessarily going anywhere. It seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense. Still, we want to use the word “significant.” Is this significant nonsense? Is this a kind of nonsense that is not just chaos, that is not just blathering balderdash, but rather has in it rhythm, fascinating complexity, and a kind of artistry? It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning.

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 seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

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 though of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thsu incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the 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.

All perfect accomplishment in art or life is accompanied by the curious sensation that it is happening of itself - that it is not forced, studied, or contrived. Thos is not to say that everything which is felt to happen of itself is a perfect accomplishment; the marvel of human spontaneity is that it has developed the means of self-discipline - which becomes repressive only when it is felt that the controlling agent is separate from the action. But the sensation that the action is happening of itself, neither from an agent nor to a witness, is the authentic sensation of life as pure process, in which there is neither mover nor moved. Process without source or destination, verb without subject or object - this is not deprivation, a the word "without" suggests, but the "musical" sensation of arriving at every moment in which the melody and rhythm unfold.

Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, it is the breathing of eternity.

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

Human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.