"At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a 'problem' of it." (Alan Watts)
"Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world - a place where they are one." (Alan Watts)
"Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering." (Alan Watts)
"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes them tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know." (Alan Watts)
"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." (Alan Watts)
"I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is." (Alan Watts)
"I simply feel that a human being must always recognize that he is qualitatively more than any system of thought he can imagine, and therefore he should never label himself. He degrades himself when he does." (Alan Watts)
"If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it." (Alan Watts)
"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops. And, in each reflected dewdrop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." (Alan Watts)
"It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in words of Chuang-tzu: 'The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.' In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal NOW. For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this NOW; by themselves they are illusions. 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 persists for ever." (Alan Watts)
"Life is not a problem to be solved,
nor a question to be answered.
Life is a mystery to be experienced." (Alan Watts)
"Our sense of individualismthat each of us is alone and separateis a culturally implanted hallucination." (Alan Watts)
"The art of meditation is neither mindless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive." (Alan Watts)
"The future is a concept - it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now." (Alan Watts)
"The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe." (Alan Watts)
"The transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather than unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, ‘The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.'" (Alan Watts)
"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." (Alan Watts)
"This - the immediate, everyday, and present experience—is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe." (Alan Watts)
"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." (Alan Watts)
"To discover the ultimate Reality of life- the Absolute, the eternal, God - you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. These idols are not just crude images. [...] They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind, and heart to reality. The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it." (Alan Watts)
"To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.” (Alan Watts)
"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean." (Alan Watts)
The way an ecologist describes human behavior is that an action - what you do - is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something that the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. [...] The Real You is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down You IS the Whole Universe." (Alan Watts)
"Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be." (Alan Watts)
No comments:
Post a Comment