Quotes by Alan Watts

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.

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....

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.

 When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

Der Mensch kann sich nicht helfen. Das ist das typische menschliche Problem. Der Gegenstand der Angst braucht nicht eine unmittelbar bevorstehende Operation sein. Es kann das Problem der Miete des nächsten Monats sein, eines drohenden Krieges oder sozialen Elends, des Sparens für das Alter oder schließlich des Sterbens. Dieser Störenfried der Gegenwart braucht durchaus nicht eine Furcht vor der Zukunft zu sein. Er kann sogar aus der Vergangenheit sein, eine Erinnerung an ein Leid, an ein Verbrechen oder eine Indiskretion, die die Gegenwart mit einem Gefühl des Unwillens oder der Schuld belastet. Der Macht der Erinnerungen und Erwartungen ist derart wirklich, dass für die meisten Menschen Vergangenheit und Zukunft noch wirklicher sind, als die Gegenwart. Die Gegenwart kann nicht glücklich gelebt werden, wenn die Vergangenheit nicht bereinigt und die Zukunft nicht hell mit Versprechungen ist.

Das ursprüngliche Ideal des Mönches (bikkhu) war ein sehr hohes; in sozialer Hinsicht hatte er die wichtigste Aufgabe, Führer, Weiser und Freund der Volksgemeinschaft zu sein. Zum Entgelt dafür wurde er mit Nahrungsmitteln beschenkt. Da die buddhistischen Grundsätze ihm die höchste Ehrfurcht vor allen Dingen dieser Welt zur Pflicht machten, war er bemüht, alles, was man ihm gab, bis zum äußersten zu nutzen, so daß nichts der Verschwendung heimfiel.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

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."

If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."