Become What You Are Quotes

“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.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. Buddhism perceives the beauty of change, for life is like music in this: if any note or phrase is held for longer than its appointed time, the melody is lost. Thus Buddhism may be summed up in two phrases: “Let go!” and “Walk on!” Drop the craving for self, for permanence, for particular circumstances, and go straight ahead with the movement of life.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“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.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Chuang-tzu: ‘‘The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“you want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. Therefore to see it clearly, your mind must be free from wandering words and from the floating fantasies of”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“ALMOST EVERY FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF LIFE can be expressed in two opposite ways. There are those who say that to attain the highest wisdom we must be still and calm, immovable in the midst of turmoil. And there are those who say that we must move on as life moves, never stopping for a moment either in fear of what is to come or to turn a regretful glance at what has gone. The former are as those who listen to music, letting the flow of notes pass through their minds without trying either to arrest them or to speed them on. Like Chuang-tzu’s perfect man, they employ their minds as a mirror: it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep. The latter are as those who dance to music, keeping pace with its movement and letting their limbs flow with it as unceasingly and as unhesitatingly as clouds respond to the breath of wind. The one seems to reflect events as they pass, and the other to move forward with them. Both points of view, however, are true, for to attain that highest wisdom we must at once walk on and remain still. Consider life as a revolving wheel set upright with man walking on its tire. As he walks, the wheel is revolving toward him beneath his feet, and if he is not to be carried backward by it and flung to the ground he must walk at the same speed as the wheel turns. If he exceeds that speed, he will topple forward and slip off the wheel onto his face. For at every moment we stand, as it were, on the top of a wheel; immediately we try to cling to that moment, to that particular point of the wheel, it is no longer at the top and we are off our balance. Thus by not trying to seize the moment, we keep it, for the second we fail to walk on we cease to remain still. Yet within this there is a still deeper truth. From the standpoint of eternity we never can and never do leave the top of the wheel, for if a circle is set in infinite space it has neither top nor bottom. Wherever you stand is the top, and it revolves only because you are pushing it round with your own feet.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever. . . . You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now.”—from Become What You Are”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life; he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, a mere pedant absorbed in the dry bones of something which the life has long deserted. A symphony is not explained by a mathematical analysis of its notes; the mystery of a woman’s beauty is not revealed by a postmortem dissection; and no one ever understood the wonder of a bird on the wing by stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. To understand these things, you must live and move with them as they are alive. The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao. “What is the Tao?” A Zen master answers, “Usual life is the very Tao.” “How does one bring oneself into accord with it?” “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it.” For to imagine that there is a “you” separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“How can we bring ourselves into accord with this Tao? A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. But he was not altogether right. For the curious thing is that you cannot get out of accord with it even if you want to; though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment. However far back or forward they try to escape they can never be separated from the moment, for those thoughts are themselves of the moment; just as much as anything else they partake of, and, indeed, are the movement of life which is Tao. You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now—otherwise you would not be here. Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it. So become what you are.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this Now; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“The universe is everlasting. The reason that the universe is everlasting is that it does not live for itself. Therefore it lasts. Therefore the sage puts himself behind, and finds himself in front, regards his person as outside himself, and his person is preserved. Is it not because he does not live for himself that he realizes himself?”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“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.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“We are really stuck with ourselves, and our attempts to reject or to accept are equally fruitless, for they fail to reach that inaccessible center of our selfhood which is trying to do the accepting or the rejecting.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“People imagine that letting themselves go would have disastrous results; trusting neither circumstances nor themselves, which together make up life, they are forever interfering and trying to make their own souls and the world conform with preconceived patterns. This interference is simply the attempt of the ego to dominate life.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Just as the bird leaves no trace, no record of its flight upon the void, so human desire can gain nothing out of life. But to realize this is at once to become the sage, since the greatest wisdom lies on the other side, immediately on the other side, of the greatest despair. It is, of course, something more than despair—a joy, a sense of creative life and power, I might even say a security and certainty, beyond any imagining. But this is a way of feeling which the will and the imagination are as unable to bring about as to make one’s bones grow or decrease the speed of the pulse. They must happen by themselves.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“All this is equally exasperating for the person who is doing the pointing, for he wants to show me something which, to him, is so obvious that one would think any fool could see it. He must feel as we all feel when trying to explain to a thick-headed child that two times zero is zero and not two, or some other perfectly simple little fact. And there is something even more exasperating than this. I am sure that many of you may, for a fleeting moment, have had one clear glimpse of what the finger was pointing at—a glimpse in which you shared the pointer’s astonishment that you had never seen it before, in which you saw the whole thing so plainly that you knew you could never forget it . . . and then you lost it. After this, there may be a tormenting nostalgia that goes on for years. How to find the way back, back to the door in the wall that no longer seems to be there, back to the turning which led into paradise—which wasn’t on the map, which you saw for sure right here. But now there is nothing. It is like trying to trace someone with whom you fell in love at first sight, and then lost touch; and you go back to the original place of meeting again and again, trying in vain to pick up the threads. If”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“a Chinese poem says: Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple. For the image represents a number of qualities which are, in fact, aspects of the same thing. It represents the sage’s freedom and detachment of mind, a skylike consciousness in which experience moves without leaving any stain. As another poem says: The bamboo shadows sweep the stairs, But stir no dust. Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its natural surroundings. The image also represents the fact that the way of the sage cannot be traced and followed, since no authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions. But there is actually the most intimate connection between these two apparently separate uses of the metaphor—the way of the sage, on the one hand, and the impermanence of life, on the other. And the connection reveals the one deepest and most central principle of those Asian philosophies which so puzzle the Western mind by identifying the highest wisdom with what, to us, seems the doctrine of abject despair. Indeed, the word despair in a particular sense is the proper translation of the Hindu–Buddhist term nirvana—to “de-spirate,” to breathe out, to give up the ghost. We cannot understand how the Asians manage to equate this despair with ultimate bliss—unless, as we are prone to suppose, they are after all a depraved and spineless people, long accustomed to fatalism and resignation.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Lao-tzu didn’t actually say very much more about the meaning of Tao. The Way of Nature, the Way of happening self-so, or, if you like, the very process of life, was something which he was much too wise to define. For to try to say anything definite about the Tao is like trying to eat your mouth: you can’t get outside it to chew it. To put it the other way round: anything you can chew is not your mouth.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Become What You Are

“I am reminded of the apocryphal conversation between Confucius and Lao Tzu when the former had been prating of universal love without the element of self: 'What stuff!' cried Lao Tzu, 'Does not universal love contradict itself? Is not your elimination of self a positive manifestation of self? Sir, if you would cause the world not to lose its source of nourishment— There is the universe: its regularity is unceasing. There are the Sun and Moon: their brightness is unceasing. There are the stars: their groupings never change. There are the birds and the beasts: they flock together without varying. There are trees and shrubs: they grow upwards without exception. Like these, accord with the Dao— with the way of all things— and be perfect. Why then these vain struggles after charity and duty to one's neighbor as though beating a drum in search of a fugitive? Alas, Sir you have brought much confusion into the mind of man.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“quotes Goethe: the highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“This is why all the great Asian philosophies begin with the practice of concentration, that is, of attentive looking. It is as if to say, ‘‘If you want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. Therefore to see it clearly, your mind must be free from wandering words and from the floating fantasies of memory.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Buddhist metaphor of the doctrine which is like a raft for crossing a river. When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Thus the one important result of any really serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. And this precisely is that death to oneself which is the improbable source of a way of life so new and so alive that it feels like having been born again.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“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.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“man became overrational and forgot the gods and demons, relegating them to the realm of outworn superstitions. He looked for them in the skies and found only infinite spaces, dead rocks, and orbs of burning gas. He looked for them in thunder and wind and found only unintelligent forces of the atmosphere. He looked for them in woods and caverns and found only scuttling animals, creaking branches, shadows, and drafts. He thought that the gods were dead but in fact they became much more alive and dangerous because they were able to work unrecognized.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“disciple came to Zen Master Chao-chou and asked, “I have just come to this monastery. Would you mind giving me some instruction, please?” The master replied, “Have you eaten your breakfast yet, or not?” “Yes, I have, sir.” “Then wash your dishes.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“While living, be a dead man, thoroughly dead; Then, whatever you do, just as you will, will be right.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are

“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists forever. This movement and change has been called Tao by the Chinese. . . . A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. But he was not altogether right. For the curious thing is that you cannot get out of accord with it even if you want to; though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment.”
― Alan W. Watts, Become What You Are