Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Wattswas a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 January 1915
The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.
Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.
You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.
The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.
Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony