212 Quotes by Alan W. Watts

The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature, because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.

[I]t is not quite true that one must wait for something to happen spontaneously. For the heart is beating, the breath is moving, and all the senses are perceiving. A whole world of experience is coming to the organism of itself, without the slightest forcing. This spontaneous arrival of experience is not actually passive; it is already spontaneous action.

[C]onsciousness is no mere phosphorescent scum upon the foundations of fire and rock - a late addition to a world which is essentially unfeeling and mineral. [...] It is in the living organism that the whole world feels: it is only by virtue of eyes that stars themselves are light.

The full splendour of sexual experience does not reveal itself without a new mode of attention to the world in general.

It is true that in Taoism and Tantric Buddhism there are what appear to be techniques or 'practices' of sexual relationship[.] Their use is the consequence rather than the cause of a certain inner attitude, since they suggest themselves almost naturally to partners who take their love as it comes, contemplatively, and are in no hurry to grasp anything from it.

Thus contemplation or meditation which seeks a result is neither contemplation nor meditation, for the simple reason that contemplation (kuan) is consciousness without seeking. Naturally, such consciousness is concentrated, but it is not 'practising concentration;' it is concentrated in whatever happens to be its 'eternal now.

[T]he things which we criticize most readily in others are usually things of which we are least conscious in ourselves.

[T]he full and real self is not the willing and deliberating function but the spontaneous.

The more inward and central the form of activity, the less it partakes of the mask of the ego. To unveil the flow of thought can therefore be an even greater sexual intimacy than physical nakedness.