The Two Hands of God Quotes

“Knowledge is not an encounter between two separate things - a knowing subject and a known object. Knowledge, or better, knowing is a relationship in which knower and known are like the poles in a magnetic field. Human beings are aware of a world because, and only because, it is the sort of world that breeds knowing organisms. Humanity is not one thing and the world another; it has always been difficult for us to see that any organism is so embedded in its environment that the evolution of so complex and intelligent a creature as man could never have come to pass without a reciprocal evolution of the environ­ment. An intelligent man argues, without any resort to supernaturalism, an intelligent universe.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Life is not a matter of life or death; it is a matter of life and death, and ultimately there is nothing to be dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Eyes and light arise mutually in the same way as yin and yang. The universe is not, therefore, composed of independent things, that is: as human thought ordinarily fragments it: but the universe disposes itself as things. It is one body, one field, whose parts give rise to each other as inseparably as fronts and backs, but in an endlessly complex and interconnected maze.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“There emerges, then, a view of life which sees its worth and point not as a struggle for constant ascent but as a dance. Virtue and harmony consist, not in accentuating the positive, but in maintaining a dynamic balance.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“This is the greatness of human consciousness, but at the same time it is always posing the practical problem of how to live upon the lower level when one's understanding reaches to the higher. For if we discover that there is some superior order harmonizing what seem to be conflicts at the level of our normal, individual consciousness, may not this new understanding upset our standards and weaken the will to fight?
If we see that the Good of the world is not the victory of· good over evil but, on the contrary, the tense polarity of good-and-evil in perpetual conflict, is it not possible that this will lead us to a recognition of the function of evil making it difficult for us to fight and hate it?”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“If, then, a pleasurable state is to be conscious, it cannot be constant, for there will be no contrasting ground against which to feel it. Pleasure is thus in fact the configuration pleasure/non-pleasure (e.g., pleasure/pain, pleasure/anxiety, pleasure/boredom, pleasure/hunger, etc.) in which the first term is the figure and the second the ground.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“On the one hand, to withdraw is a separative and thus essentially selfish position. On the other, to choose not to play rather than to play is still to choose, and thus to remain in duality. Therefore the most truly awakened sages are represented as coming back to participate in the life of the world out of ''compassion for all sentient beings,'' playing the game of good against evil, success against failure, in the full knowledge that it is a game [.]”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“This recognition of the two-sidedness of the One is what makes the difference between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of a religion, and the latter is always guarded and is always
mystical or ''closed'' [...] because of the danger that the opposites will be confused if their unity is made explicit. It is thus that mysticism is never quite orthodox, never wholly respectable.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“[T]he paradox of civilization is that the more one is anxious to survive, the less survival is worth the trouble.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“The cosmos is seel as a multi-dimensional network of crystals, each one containing the reflections of all the others, and the reflections of all the others in those reflections... In the heart of each there shines, too, the single point of light that every one reflects from every other.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“For the individual is almost universally unaware that he has learned to confuse himself with a political and legal fiction, a theory of the individual without physical or biological foundation. His identity is thus a construct built up through years of self-dramatization between himself and his associates, that is, a purely artificial status or role. It is this role which he mistakes for his essential self and that he fears to lose in death, And because the role defines him as a separate individual and an independent agent, his identification with it blinds him to his union with the external world.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“And the sage does not see himself as a little thing thrown into a vast and alien space: for him, the thing-space is a unity as inseparable as life-death, up-down, back-front, or inside-outside.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“But the obvious truth of the matter is that life is always structured goo, or gooey structure. When analyzed to the limit, structures turn out to be random quanta, a sort of electronic goo. Under the micro­scope, goo is a system of minute and rapidly changing structures. Absolute goo or absolute structure would thus be total annihilation, and the same will be true of absolute evil and absolute goodness. These harsh alternatives exist only in the abstract. The real world is rather vibration and alternation, the wave that goes up and down at once.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“In the long run, hell and heaven are both seen to be traps, and final liberation comes with realizing that there is nothing to choose between them.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“This, then, is the paradox that the greater our ethical idealism, the darker is the shadow that we cast, and that ethical monotheism became, in attitude if not in theory, the world's most startling dualism.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“The sage no more seeks to obliterate the negative - darkness, death, etc. - than to get rid of autumn and winter from the cycle of the seasons.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“In Chinese thought the essential goodness of nature and human nature is precisely their good-and-bad. The two do not cancel each other out so as to make action futile: they play eternally in a certain order, and wisdom consists in the discernment of this order and acting in harmony with it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“[F]or wherever the negative force is in the ascendant it always contains, by implication, the seed of the positive.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“By and large Western culture is a celebration of the illusion that good may exist without evil, light without darkness, and pleasure without pain, and this is true of both its Christian and secular, technological phases. Here, or hereafter, our ideal is a world in which ''there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."
To give credit where credit is due, it has been a grand illusion.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Now the expansion of consciousness is no other than extending our vision to comprehend many levels at once, and, above all, to grasp those higher levels in which the discords of the lower levels are resolved.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“At times when any sort of puritanism is dominant, or any fanatical, one-sided view of man, the ignored aspect of our nature appears as an external devil, sometimes an angel or fallen spirit, and sometimes in the form of other people [.]”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“May not this, then, be why the figure of the Evil One is simultaneously horrendous and alluring: he represents the extreme of ''self-othering," where, on the human level, man is most ashamed of his own organism, and, on the mythological level, Brahma has lost himself most completely in the maya of separateness.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Yet as the world becomes more intelligible, it also becomes more mysterious - not, perhaps, in the sense of being problematic and baffling, but of being immeasurably grander, vaster, more complex, and, indeed, more imaginative than we had supposed.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Man makes God in his own image, and as he comes to a clearer and more intelligible view of his own image - changing it in the process - he comes to a more intelligible view of God.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Part of the difficulty seems to be that we educate a style of consciousness which ignores whatever is a constant sensation. Consciousness is ever upon the alert for new conditions in the environment so as to keep the rest of the organism I informed about adaptations that must be made, and this style of attention comes to eclipse the more open and total style of sensitivity that we have in the beginning.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Associations which form themselves in poetic imagination are, after all, associations which exist in nature, though not along the lines of connection which factual language ordinarily describes.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“Knowledge is not an encounter between two separate things - a knowing subject and a known object. Knowledge, or better, knowing is a relationship in which knower and known are like the poles in a magnetic field. Human beings are aware of a world because, and only because, it is the sort of world that breeds knowing organisms. Humanity is not one thing and the world another; it has always been difficult for us to see that any organism is r so embedded in its environment that the evolution of so complex and intelligent a creature as man could never have come to pass without a reciprocal evolution of the environ­ment. An intelligent man argues, without any resort to supernaturalism, an intelligent universe.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity

“When the critical intellect looks at anything carefully, it vanishes. [...] The reason is, of course, that ''things'' exist only relatively - for a point of view or for convenience of description. Thus when we inspect any unit more closely we find that its structure is more complex and more differentiated than we had supposed. Its variety comes to impress us more than its unity. This is why there is something of the spirit of debunking in all scholarship and scientific inquiry.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity