Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Alan Watts, fully Alan Wilson Watts

English-born American Philosopher, Writer, Exponent of Zen Buddhism

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."

"Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is."

"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."

"If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are ?crying for the moon.? We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end."

"I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good ?I? who is going to improve the bad ?me.? ?I,? who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward ?me,? and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently ?I? will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make ?me? behave so badly."

"The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces? The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes. As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men ? so much so that in a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation. Already the human computer is widely displaced by mechanical and electrical computers of far greater speed and efficiency. If, then, man?s principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines? If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork."

"The ?primary consciousness,? the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., ?everyone will die?) that the future assumes a high degree of reality ? so high that the present loses its value. But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements ? inferences, guesses, deductions ? it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances."

"There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the ?I,? but it is just the feeling of being an isolated ?I? which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want. To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet."

"The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ?I? out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ?I? or mind can be found. To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, ?I am listening to this music,? you are not listening."

"To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. It is like the Persian story of the sage who came to the door of Heaven and knocked. From within the voice of God asked, ?Who is there? and the sage answered, ?It is I.? ?In this House,? replied the voice, ?there is no room for thee and me.? So the sage went away, and spent many years pondering over this answer in deep meditation. Returning a second time, the voice asked the same question, and again the sage answered, ?It is I.? The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third time, and, at his knocking, the voice once more demanded, ?Who is there?? And the sage cried, ?It is thyself!? The door was opened."

"The notion of a separate thinker, of an ?I? distinct from the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes. It is like whirling a burning stick to give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire. If you imagine that memory is a direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and the present experiences. You reason, ?I know this present experience, and it is different from that past experience. If I can compare the two, and notice that experience has changed, I must be something constant and apart.? But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves? To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no ?I? which can be protected."

"Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of ?instinctual wisdom.? Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb ? without verbalizing the process or knowing ?how? it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between ?I? and my experience. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it."

"While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, ?I am reading.? Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading?? In other words, when present experience is the thought, ?I am reading,? can you think about yourself thinking this thought? Once again, you must stop thinking just, ?I am reading.? You pass to a third experience, which is the thought, ?I am thinking that I am reading.? Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once? In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience."

"In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience."

"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."

"The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ?I? out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ?I? or mind can be found."

"To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, ?I am listening to this music,? you are not listening."

"This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. 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. 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."

"While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, ?I am reading.? Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading?? In other words, when present experience is the thought, ?I am reading,? can you think about yourself thinking this thought? Once again, you must stop thinking just, ?I am reading.? You pass to a third experience, which is the thought, ?I am thinking that I am reading.? Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once."

"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 separate 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. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. ?I came into this world.? ?You must face reality.? ?The conquest of nature.?"

"A less brainy culture would learn to synchronize its body rhythms rather than its clocks... In other words, the interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism. If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork."

"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."

"A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence."

"A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world."

"A particularly significant example of brain against body, or measures against matter, is urban man?s total slavery to clocks. A clock is a convenient device for arranging to meet a friend, or for helping people to do things together, although things of this kind happened long before they were invented. Clocks should not be smashed; they should simply be kept in their place. And they are very much out of place when we try to adapt our biological rhythms of eating, sleeping, evacuation, working, and relaxing to their uniform circular rotation. Our slavery to these mechanical drill masters has gone so far and our whole culture is so involved with it that reform is a forlorn hope; without them civilization would collapse entirely. A less brainy culture would learn to synchronize its body rhythms rather than its clocks."

"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion."

"A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted."

"A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."

"A scholar tries to learn something every day; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily."

"A similar solution applies to the ancient problem of cause and effect. We believe that every thing and every event must have a cause, that is, some other thing(s) or event(s), and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects. So how does a cause lead to an effect? To make it much worse, if all that I think or do is a set of effects, there must be causes for all of them going back into an indefinite past. If so, I can't help what I do. I am simply a puppet pulled by strings that go back into times far beyond my vision."

"A successful college president once complained to me, I?m so busy that I?m going to have to get a helicopter! Well, I answered, you?ll be ahead so long as you?re the only president who has one. But don?t get it. Everyone will expect more out of you."

"A witty attack on the illusion that the self is a separate ego that confronts a universe of alien physical objects."

"According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real me than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!"

"According to tradition, the originator of Taoism, Lao-tzu, was an older contemporary of Kung Fu-tzu, or Confucius, who died in 479 B.C.1 Lao-tzu is said to have been the author of the Tao Te Ching, a short book of aphorisms, setting forth the principles of the Tao and its power or virtue (Te e). But traditional Chinese philosophy ascribes both Taoism and Confucianism to a still earlier source, to a work which lies at the very foundation of Chinese thought and culture, dating anywhere from 3000 to 1200 B.C. This is the I Ching, or Book of Changes."

"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."

"All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty?religions."

"All memory is really a form of regurgitation of undigested experience."

"All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the map and the territory and, he might have added, between the flag and the country."

"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."

"Although sounds of high vibration seem to be continuous, to be pure sound, they are not. Every sound is actually sound/silence, only the ear does not register this consciously when the alternation is too rapid. It appears only in, say, the lowest audible notes of an organ. Light, too, is not pure light, but light/darkness. Light pulsates in waves, with their essential up/down motion, and in some conditions the speed of light vibrations can be synchronized with other moving objects so that the latter appear to be still. This is why arc lights are not used in sawmills, for they emit light at a pulse which easily synchronizes with the speed of a buzz saw in such a way that its teeth seem to be still."

"Among the educated young there is therefore a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole hip subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young people to correct the self?destroying course of industrial civilization."

"Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves."

"And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on."

"And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words? As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning."

"And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much as the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning."

"Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth"; but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race ? I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 2000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise."

"An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency."

"And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment."

"And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact. It is made, as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it."

"And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is."