Alan W. Watts

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of _ Nothing is left but to love.

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.

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.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don__ grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

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. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.

It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance _ lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt

Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they__l say you__e crazy and you__e blasphemous, and they__l 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, __y goodness, I__e just discovered that I__ God,_ they__l laugh and say, __h, congratulations, at last you found out.

The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of "goo.