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
Alan Watts quotes about
The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.
We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world?
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.
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.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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.
Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.