Showing posts with label Alan Watts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Watts. Show all posts

Saturday, October 14, 2023

The Eternal Energy of the Universe


"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.
...
Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to 'feel it in your bones.'
...
Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about,
because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Eternal Energy


"You, yourself, are the
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.
...
We are the eyes of the cosmos.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
 and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Wednesday, January 04, 2023

Meditative Inseparability


"Now, of course, reality—from a philosopher’s point of view—is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me: what do I mean by reality? Am I talking about the physical world of nature, or am I talking about a spiritual world, or what? And to that, I have a very simple answer. When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept. So, in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that’s also a philosophical concept. And reality itself is not a concept. Reality is [imagine hearing Alan Watts striking a standing bell], and we won’t give it a name.

Now, it’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world. For example, in the real world there aren’t any things, nor are there any events. That doesn’t mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank. It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not—out there, as constellations—already grouped in the sky.

So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference. And meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. That is to say, that we become interiorally silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time, that is to say, we talk to ourselves."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Essential Lectures, Meditation

Thursday, December 22, 2022

Reality of the Infinite


"... for as the reality of light cannot be proved or described in terms of visible shape, the reality of the infinite cannot be proved in terms of the finite. For this reason every attempt to prove the existence of God by logic is a foregone failure. Logic cannot reach God. It may travel backwards in time from effect to cause, effect to cause, but as long as it stays in time, as it must, it cannot touch the eternal. That which doesn't not begin with the infinite cannot end with it."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Friday, August 19, 2022

Universe as Self-Excited Circuit

“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 (1915 - 1973)

"Each query of equipment plus reply of chance inescapably do build a new bit of what we call “reality”. Then for the building of all of law, “reality” and substance… what choice do we have but to say that in some way, yet to be discovered, they all must be built upon the statistics of billions upon billions of such acts of observer-participancy."

"Beginning with the big bang, the universe expands and cools. After eons of dynamic development it gives rise to observership. Acts of observer-participancy... in turn give tangible 'reality' to the universe not only now but back to the beginning. To speak of the universe as a self-excited circuit is to imply... a participatory universe."

John Archibald Wheeler (1911 - 2008)

“You are not a drop in the ocean.
You are the entire ocean in a drop."

Rumi (1207 - 1273) 

Sunday, July 24, 2022

Like a Wave from the Ocean


We do not "come 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.
...
The only way to make sense
out of change is to plunge into it,
move with it, and join the dance.
...
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.
When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water,
because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
...
You are a function of what
the whole universe is doing
in the same way that a wave
is a function of what the
whole ocean is doing."

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Friday, January 07, 2022

Wiggly Order


"When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess...They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order. Now, take a look at yourselves. You are all wiggly...We are just like clouds, rocks and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you criticize the way the stars are arranged?"

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
The Tao of Philosophy 

Sunday, December 12, 2021

A Magical Illusion


"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."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973) 

Sunday, November 07, 2021

Symbols, Signs, and Time


"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 an all-powerfully 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. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Waves


 "You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way
that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Order of Thought


"But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Arbitrary Divisions


"The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Existence Itself


"If you awaken from this illusion,
and you understand that
black implies white,
self implies other,
life implies death.
You can feel yourself,
not as a stranger in the world,
not as something here on probation,
not as something that has
arrived here by fluke,
but you can begin to feel
your own existence as
absolutely fundamental.
What you are basically,
deep, deep down,
far, far in,
is simply the fabric
and structure of
existence itself."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Sunday, November 04, 2018

Complicated Little Curlicues


"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Sunday, May 13, 2018

The Illusion of Time


"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 infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully 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. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Magical Illusion


"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."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Process


“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually - if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning - you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as - Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so - I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.” 

Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Saturday, April 08, 2017

Looking at Yourself


"How many of us now realize that space is the same thing as mind, or consciousness? That when you look out into infinity you are looking at yourself? That your inside goes with your entire outside as your front with your back? That this galaxy, and all other galaxies, are just as much you as your heart or your brain? That your coming and going, your waking and sleeping, your birth and your death, are exactly the same kind of rhythmic phenomena as the stars and their surrounding darkness? To be afraid of life is to be afraid of yourself."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Only in the Mind


"To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao. In reality there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in the minds of men that such concepts exist."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Receiving the World


"Paradoxical as it may seem,
the purposeful life has no content,
no point. It hurries on and on,
and misses everything. Not hurrying,
the purposeless life misses nothing,
for it is only when there is
no goal and no rush that
the human senses are
fully open to receive the world."

(1915 - 1973)