Does It Matter? Quotes

“Instant coffee, for example, is a well–deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion. But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Evil” read backwards is “live.” Demon est deus inversus.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“But just exactly what is the “good” to which we aspire through doing and eating things that are supposed to be good for us? This question is strictly taboo, for if it were seriously investigated the whole economy and social order would fall apart and have to be reorganized. It would be like the donkey finding out that the carrot dangled before him, to make him run, is hitched by a stick to his own collar.
For the good to which we aspire exists only and always in the future. Because we cannot relate to the sensuous and material present we are most happy when good things are expected to happen, not when they are happening. We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come. We are therefore a civilization which suffers from chronic disappointment—a formidable swarm of spoiled children smashing their toys.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze—a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“Among the educated young there is therefore a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole “hip” subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young people to correct the self–destroying course of industrial civilization.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the map and the territory and, he might have added, between the flag and the country.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Life seems to be a system that eats itself to death, and in which victory equals defeat.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Life, like getting an erection, is a spontaneous process which collapses when one tries to force it to happen.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“We are particular and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pâté de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement—and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy. A”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“The concepts of health and sickness, good and evil, better and worse, have the same use and relation to life as those of long and short, high and low to carpentry: even a short piece of wood can be three inches long. Even cancer is called a growth, and when Ramana Maharshi was dying of cancer he resisted the doctors,
saying, “It wants to grow, too. Let it.” This is, perhaps, an extreme example of renunciation—not of love
or energy—but of willing right as against wrong, and thus of renouncing one’s own separateness from
everything that happens, which is what Tillich called “the courage to be.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment of the physical and immediate present. By this definition, most Americans are abstractionists. They hate material, and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and clouds of poisonous gas. As”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“The truth is that people who live for the future are, as we say of the insane, “not quite all there”—or here: by overeagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and, when overused, it destroys all its own advantages. The”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“the greatest illusion of the abstract ego is that it can do anything to bring about radical improvement either in itself or in the world.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines,”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“So, according to Vedanta, the central doctrine of Hinduism, all bodies are the clothes of the one and only Self in its innumerable disguises, and the whole universe is a masquerade ball pretending to be a tragedy and then realizing that it’s a ball.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns—called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of “I” do not effectively include these relationships. You say, “I came into this world.” You didn’t; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and
perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“The United States of America” can mean two quite different things. The first is a certain physical territory, largely on the North American continent, including all such geographical and biological features as lakes, mountains and rivers, skies and clouds, plants, animals, and people. The second is a sovereign political state, existing in competition with many other sovereign states jostling one another around the surface of this planet. The
first sense is concrete and material; the second, abstract and conceptual.
If the United States continues for very much longer to exist in this second sense, it will cease to exist in the first.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of selfforgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Timothy Leary was not so wide of the mark when he said that we must go out of our minds (abstract values) to come to our senses (concrete values). For coming to our senses must, above all, be the experience of our own existence as living organisms rather than “personalities,” like characters in a play or a novel acting out some artificial plot in which the persons are simply masks for a conflict of abstract ideas or principles. Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns—called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of “I” do not effectively include these relationships. You say, “I came into this world.” You didn’t; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree. So”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“The effects of what are now called psychedelic (mind–manifesting) chemicals differ from those of alcohol as laughter differs from rage or delight from depression. There is really no analogy between being “high” on LSD and “drunk” on bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should one drive while reading a book, playing a violin, or making love. Certain creative activities and states of mind demand a concentration and devotion which are simply incompatible with piloting a death–dealing engine along a highway.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Let’s say (since in writing a book one has to say something) that reality or existence is a multidimensional and interwoven system of varying spectra of vibrations, and that man’s five senses are attuned only to very small bands of these spectra. That sounds very profound and may mean nothing at all, but in reading it one should attend to the sound of the words rather than their meaning. Then you will get my point.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

“Being “high” on LSD and “drunk” on bourbon. True, no one in either state should drive a car, but neither should one drive while reading a book, playing a violin, or making love.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“The reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“Civilized people, whether Western or Eastern,
need to be liberated and dehypnotized from their systems of symbolism and, thereby, become more
intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world. For lack of such awareness our
consciousnesses and consciences have become calloused to the daily atrocities of burning children with
napalm, of saturation bombing of fertile earth with all its plants, wild animals, and insects (not to mention
people), and of manufacturing nuclear and chemical weapons concerning which the real problem is not so
much how to prevent their use as how to get them off the face of the earth.”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter?

“If, if we get our heads straight about money, I predict that by ad 2000, or sooner, no one will pay taxes, no one will carry cash, utilities will be free, and everyone will carry a general credit card. This card will be valid up to each individual’s share in a guaranteed basic income or national dividend, issued free, beyond which he may still earn anything more that he desires by an art or craft, profession or trade that has not been displaced by automation. (For detailed information on the mechanics of such an economy, the reader should refer to Robert Theobald’s Challenge of Abundance and Free Men and Free Markets, and also to a series of essays that he has edited, The Guaranteed Income. Theobald is an avant–garde economist on the faculty of Columbia University.)”
― Alan W. Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality