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Alan Watts Quotes

“Not to recognize the esoteric sciences is to disregard most that has contributed to the advancement and improvement of the human state during the last five thousand years… the time is most appropriate for the further restoration of this sacred tradition.”

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- Dr. Henry L. Drake

"Why are these Alan Watts quotes of esoteric wisdom on a therapy website?"  Esoteric wisdom was an ancient form of medicine.  Later, sciences based on philosophers' knowledge replaced sages' wisdom and healing became unsustainable (read more...).  Short for Esoteric Wisdom Therapy™, Esotherapy®, restores esoteric science as medicine that heals mind, body, spirit, our families without division.

Alan Watts (January 6th, 1915 – November 16th, 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.   He is credited with having brought the Eastern mysticism to the West, by “translating” for the Western minds the important philosophical ideas of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zen philosophies.  He considered himself a “spiritual entertainer” and his seminars attracted a great number of people who sought insight into life.

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Regrettably, in the 60’s and 70’s what began as a search for divine insight within, became a reaction to the confines

imposed by the older generation’s misunderstanding of the teachings of Christ and the Old Testament which was meant to “set you free.”  In this counterculture, the awareness teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, Christianity and Judaism, equally, were turned against the search for the higher consciousness all these spiritualities sought.

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Alan Wilson Watts, along with D.T. Suzuki, brought to the Western minds an Eastern understanding of the Zen and Buddhist minds that adds to the Judeo-Christian understanding, a missing piece of the puzzle: the mystery of the wisdom of Spirit that is unlike the thoughts of the minds of people.  I hope that you will enjoy these pearls of wisdom and will be able to integrate them into your understanding of life to create a larger meaning.

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts quote

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan Watts

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts mystic quote

“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.”
― Alan Watts

“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts famous quote

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― 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

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts spiritual quote

“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

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
― Alan Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“The art of living... is neither careless 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 spiritual quote

“Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him 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

“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.”
― Alan Watts

 

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
― Alan Watts famous quote

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
― Alan Watts spiritual quote

“Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.”
― Alan Watts

“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
― Alan Watts quote

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
― Alan Watts mystical quote

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
― Alan Watts

“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”
― Alan Watts quote

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Wisdom is the lot of sages and knowledge is that of philosophers.  Why do these differences matter?

“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“

 

Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”― Alan Watts spiritual quote, The Essential Alan Watts

 

“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 mystic quote

 

“The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.”― Alan Watts

 

“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”― Alan Watts“

 

Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.Ӊۥ Alan Watts mystic quote, The Wisdom of Insecurity

 

“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.”― Alan Watts quote

 

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”― Alan Watts mystic quote, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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