The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTSThe religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTSLife 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 WATTSThe clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
ALAN WATTSTo 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 WATTSNo one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
ALAN WATTSPlaying a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN WATTSWhen we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
ALAN WATTSTry 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 WATTSJust as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
ALAN WATTSHuman desire tends to be insatiable.
ALAN WATTSOne is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
ALAN WATTSThe menu is not the meal.
ALAN WATTSYou’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
ALAN WATTSYou do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
ALAN WATTSIf, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
ALAN WATTSWe 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