Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown Quotes

“You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight—and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“who believe more firmly in the Devil than in God are always afraid that if they let go, the Devil will take over first, unaware that not having let go is the Devil already in full control.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“How many of us now realize that space is the same thing as mind, or consciousness? That when you look out into infinity you are looking at yourself? That your inside goes with your entire outside as your front with your back? That this galaxy, and all other galaxies, are just as much you as your heart or your brain? That your coming and going, your waking and sleeping, your birth and your death, are exactly the same kind of rhythmic phenomena as the stars and their surrounding darkness? To be afraid of life is to be afraid of yourself.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“For the trouble with our rich and powerful people is not so much that they are wicked, but that they do not enjoy themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“The way of Wisdom lies, therefore, in recognizing things which happen to you as your own karma—not as punishments for misdeeds or rewards for virtue (for there really is no “bad” or “good” karma), but as your own doing. For in this way you come to see that the real “you” includes both the controlled and the uncontrolled aspects of your experience.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“As soon as we freed ourselves from the mirage of hurrying time—which was nothing more than the projection of our own impatience—we were alive again, as in childhood, to the miracles and ecstasies of ordinary life. You would be astounded at the beauty of our homes, our furniture, our clothes, and even our pots and pans, for we have the time to make most of these things ourselves, and the sense of reality to see that they—rather than money—constitute genuine wealth.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“They found security in letting go rather than in holding on and, in so doing, developed an attitude toward life that might be called psychophysical judo. Nearly twenty-five centuries ago, the Chinese sages Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu had called it wu-wei, which is perhaps best translated as “action without forcing.” It is sailing in the stream of the Tao, or course of nature, and navigating the currents of li (organic pattern)—a word that originally signified the natural markings in jade or the grain in wood. As this attitude spread and prevailed in the wake of Vibration Training, people became more and more indulgent about eccentricity in life-style, tolerant of racial and religious differences, and adventurous in exploring unusual ways of loving.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“The future is unknown. Prophecy contaminates it with the past, which is why liberated people do not bother with fortunetelling or astrology, and why the happy traveler wanders and does not let himself be the slave of maps, guidebooks, and schedules, using them but not being used by them.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead. But this is the secret of Goethe’s Stirb und werde, “Die and come to life.” For the job of compassion in a sick society only the dead need apply.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“Do not suppose, however, that we are merely a society of lotus-eaters, lolling on divans and cuddling lovely women. Ecstasy is something higher, or further out, than ordinary pleasure, and few hippies realized that its achievement requires a particular discipline and skill that is comparable to the art of sailing. We do not resist the vibrations, pulses, and rhythms of nature, just as the yachtsman does not resist the wind. But he knows how to manage his sails and, therefore, can use the wind to go wherever he wishes. The art of life, as we see it, is navigation.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“as masters of technical weapons we are fighting the environment as if we still believed ourselves to be strangers on the earth, sent down into this world from a purely abstract, ideational, and spiritual heaven.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“When I stand by the stream and watch it, I am relatively still, and the flowing water makes a path across my memory so that I realize its transience in comparison with my stability. This is, of course, an illusion in the sense that I, too, am in flow and likewise have no final destination—for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water. Feeling”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“When you no longer make the distinction between the universe and how you are acting upon it, you are really on your own and so acquire a sense of responsibility.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“Thus not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of life, and not to see the unity of being and nonbeing is the fear of death.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“I know, then, that after I die other bodies, other eyeings, will be born. But this is really the same thing as saying that after I die I will again awake as a baby—any baby, but only one—just as I did before but without remembering the previous trip. For anyone who argues that after death there will be nothingness forever is really saying that when he dies the universe will cease to be. But we know that it goes on after people die, and that because it does the eyeing it is really more my self than this particular body.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“When there is a crack in the Cosmic Egg, Buddha is about to be born.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“It is not well known that all the best angels wear their haloes jauntily, over one ear.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“The whole history of religion is the history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“But Jesus had to speak through a public-address system—the only one available—which distorted his words, so that they came forth as the bombastic claim to be the one and only appearance of the Christ, of the incarnation of God as man. This is not good news. The good news is that if Jesus could realize his identity with God, you can also—but this God does not have to be idolized as an imperious monarch with a royal court of angels and ministers. God, as “the love which moves the sun and other stars,” is something much more inward, intimate, and mysterious—in the sense of being too close to be seen as an object.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“The energy and material which we have all squandered on making war since even 1914 could have warmed, fed, and clothed everyone on Earth, but we go about this atrocious squandering in the name of such immaterial and irrelevant fantasies as religion, honor, ideology, progress, racial purity, and patriotism—the last being not love of one’s country but of the idea of one’s country”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“If the earth is man’s extended body, to be loved and respected as one’s own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“What happens with your stream of experience if you realize that no one is in control of it? If you see that it is just going along of itself, unpushed and unpulled? (This is what the Chinese writing on this page means: The Tao, the course of nature, flows of itself.) You can get the feel of it by breathing without doing anything to help your breath along. Let the breath out, and then let it come back by itself, when it feels like it. And then out again when it wants to go out.”
― Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“Spencer Brown puts it) once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence (i.e., prior to emergence state) of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“On the one hand, there are people known as straight, regular, square (and there are also cubes and tesseracts), classified, degreed, graduated, and moneyed, who live in little boxes made of ticky-tacky, cultivate lawn order, and want to get things ironed out in nothing flat. On the other, there are bohemians, nuts, bums, freaks, eccentrics, beatifics, whollymen, courtesans, vagrants, and hippies (a name which ought to have something to do with the dangerous curves of women’s hips), who want to experience the universe in a groovy, swinging, ecstatic, syncopated, rock-and-rolling, mind-blown, turned-on, and far-out way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“What is real, if you have decided to live in the dimension of space and time, is muscle and nerve.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“The precious … uniqueness which the human individual claims is conferred on him not by possession of an immortal soul but by possession of a mortal body.… If death gives life individuality and if man is the organism which represses death, then man is the organism which represses his own individuality.” Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

“In sum, then, I have tried to show that reincarnation has very strong theoretical probability, without resorting to the paranormal evidence and even without being able to explain the transmission of memories. I have carefully avoided bringing in the moral and retributive arguments, since they have little force, and I do not find a person’s fortunes or misfortunes explained by a former life. I find the explanation postponed, as in all attempts to explain the present by the past. But it is basically an intellectual block to find it incredible that you have more than one life. It is just as incredible that we have this one. It is still more incredible to suppose that what has happened once cannot happen again.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown