Become What You Are

by Alan W. Watts

a man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.

The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be changed; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point.

Our unwillingness to feel is the very measure of our ability to feel, for the more sensitive the instrument, the greater its capacity for pain, and so for reluctance to be hurt.

The point is that our feelings are not really a kind of resistance, a kind of fight with the course of events. They are a harmonious and intelligent response. A person who did not feel frightened at the threat of danger would be like a tall building with no “give” to the wind. A mind which will not melt—with sorrow or love—is a mind which will all too easily break.

But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work; we try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation which, like birth, begins as a pain and turns into a child.

But it is just when I discover that I cannot surrender myself that I am surrendered; just when I find that I cannot accept myself that I am accepted.

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal.

When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind.

In actually doing it, the idea of doing it disappears—

the so-called self is a construct of words and memories, of fantasies which have no existence in immediate reality.

Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.

Real concentration is therefore a rather curious and seemingly paradoxical state, since it is at once the maximum of consciousness and the minimum of ego-feeling, which somewhat gives the lie to those systems of Western psychology which identify the conscious principle with the ego.

To want pleasure is to lack it.

To know that you can do nothing is the beginning.

Thoughts are often wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity till death tramples it to fragments. . .

the difference between the sage and the ordinary man is that the latter fails to realize it.

But tomorrow never comes.

Reality is whatever exists.