ALAN WATTS QUOTES Advice? I dont have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If youre writing, youre a writer. Write like youre a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and theres no chance for a pardon. Write like youre clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and youve got just one last thing to say, like youre a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for Gods 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 were not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or dont. Who knows, maybe youre one of the lucky ones who doesnt 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 dont 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. 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, Thats 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. Ive seen quite a bit of it and I know theres lots that I havent seen, but still its you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I wont be happy if Ive got you in a cage. Youd be a bird without song. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything. We could say that meditation doesnt have a reason or doesnt have a purpose. In this respect its unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we dont do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. 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. We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin. A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy. The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that , since he has given no thought to his position. But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. When I scan this view, I dont do it line by line, I see the whole thing at once We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible. The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained--though the zest of the game is to pretend there is. We do not come into into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin. Your soul isnt in your body; your body is in your soul. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about I. 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. The only Zen youll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin. You didnt come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It seems that I know that I know. What I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin. Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of ones being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent. The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless. When your eyes are functioning well you dont see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes arent working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you dont hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means theres something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes - it means somethings wrong with your functioning. . . . technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the some process as the universe. The minds the standard of the man. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. Saints need sinners. The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it 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. We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible. We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves. No ones mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. - Alan Watts (1915 - 1973) #alanwatts
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 08:45:30 +0000
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