Tao Te Ching
Alan Watts
1915 – 1973 CE
Episcopal priest become Buddhist, trickster, "philosophical entertainer,” counterculture hero, gifted speaker, and transducer to the West of Eastern philosophy; Watts wrote more than 25 books and in 1953 began a 9-year series of weekly radio broadcasts that continue being re-broadcast today. A friend and collaborator with Gary Snyder and Joseph Campbell, an inspiration for Robert Anton Wilson and Werner Erhard; Watts was criticized by teachers like Philip Kapleau, D. T. Suzuki, and Robert Baker Aitken but defended and described as a “great bodhisattva” by Shunryu Suzuki. Equating mystical experience with ecological awareness and Buddhism with psychotherapy, Watts became a bridge between culture and nature criticizing the modern view of “progress,” the idea of an absolute morality, and the ego-centricism preventing individual and international peace.
Lineages
American (USA) Hindu Taoist Trickster
Eras
Sources
Unlisted Sources
Beyond Theology (1964)
Nature, Man and Woman (1958)
Nature, Man, and Woman (1958)
The Way of Zen (1957)
Quotes by Alan Watts (51 quotes)
“When we no longer confuse ourselves with the definition of ourselves that others have given us, we are at once universal and unique.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“‘official psychotherapy’ lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing… the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
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“The test of liberation is not whether it issues in good works; the test of good works is whether they issue in liberation.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“when we have Eros dominated by reason instead of Eros expressing itself with reason, we create a culture this is simply against life”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“When technology is used to increase employment rather than get rid of it, work becomes an artificial creation of ever more meaningless routines”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“There was never a moralist at any time who was not certain that things were going from bad to worse.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Our custom has almost always been to look outside ourselves for ethical standards instead of feeling free to base our principles simply upon what we would like to do and have done to us.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“If there is anything to learn from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure [and] only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“the erotic is deeper than the genital. Beyond the play of the penis in the vagina lies the play of the organism in its environment—the polymorphous eroticism of man's original body”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“all art is propaganda... the artist is not a harmless eccentric but one who—under the guise of irrelevance—creates and reveals a new reality [while] in the value system of civilization, of compulsive survival, the artist is irrelevant.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“to say 'must' to rhythm is to stop it dead... All perfect accomplishment in art or life is accompanied by the curious sensation that it is happening of itself—not forced, studied, or contrived”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Music and pure mathematics are closer to life than are languages which point to meanings beyond themselves. Ordinary language refers to life, but music is living.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“The extremity of the situation itself,[ the suffering] generates compassion because the most intense darkness is itself the seed of light, and all explicit warfare is implicit love.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Buddhism and Taoism—unlike Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism—are not whole cultures but critiques of culture: endearing, non-violent revolutions or 'loyal oppositions' to the cultures they live in.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“The point is not that the problem has no solution, but that it is so meaningless that it need not be felt as a problem.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Social conditioning depends entirely on persuading people not to accept themselves.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“The normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“ego is the role, the 'act' [and when] it is understood that the ego is a social fiction, life ceases to be problematic”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Pain and death expose the pretense that one's inmost self is permanent, that it is in control. Hence the obscure but powerful feeling that one ought not to suffer or die.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Society persuades the individual to do what it wants by making it appear that its commands are the individual's inmost self... I am actually being controlled by other people's words and gestures masquerading as my inner or better self.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat... liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“If science is to become our way of liberation, its theoretical view must be translated into feeling... Western science must have its own yoga, and some outgrowth of psychotherapy is the natural candidate”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“The ego is in every sense a story… To identify with the ego is to confuse the organism with its history, to make its guiding principle a narrowly selected and incomplete record… and therefore liberation from the ego is synonymous with the full acceptance of death.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“As the Chinese Taoists have seen, there is really no alternative to trusting man's nature. It is the most practical of practical politics.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“LIfe is not a problem so why are you asking for a solution? The real problem is believing that the question makes sense.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“There is no knowledge except knowledge of the present, there is no observer separate from the flow of events and as a result, the sense of self shifts from an independent observer to everything that is observed.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“There is absolutely no point in clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick if it is just that they may live to be naked, hungry, and sick again, or live merely to be able to do the same for others.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Respect ethical tradition not because is is sacrosanct but because it is the only way of being in communication with others.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure... they only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Psychotherapy and liberation are completed in the moment when shame and guilt collapse, when the organism is no longer compelled to defend itself for being an oganism.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“The high art of a true Bodhisattva is possible only for him who has gone beyond all need for self-justification, for so long as there is something to prove, some ax to grind, there is no dance.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“We have 16th century personalities in the world of 20th century concepts because social conventions lag far behind the flight of theoretical knowledge.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“Tao is not pursuing any purpose, and therefore is not meeting any difficulty.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“symptoms... say, anxiety, migraine, depression, alcoholism, phobia, or lethargy enable the person to control others without accepting responsibility for doing so.”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“one is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“When looking at the external world as a mirror, we may exclaim with amazement, 'Why, that's me!'”
from Psychotherapy East and West
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“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
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“one of the most precious gifts of Asia to the world, the origins of Zen are as much Taoist as Buddhist... a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought... Zen may be regarded as the fulfillment of long traditions of Indian and Chinese culture”
from The Way of Zen (1957)
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“Confucianism preoccupies itself with conventional knowledge... presides over the socially necessary task of forcing the original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention...The individual defines himself and his place in society in terms of the Confucian formulae... a task that involves not only conflict and pain, but also the loss of that peculiar naturalness and un-self-consciousness for which little children are so much loved, and which is sometimes regained by saints and sages.”
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“it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it”
from The Way of Zen (1957)
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“if we think of spirituality... as including an intense awareness of the inner identity of subject and object, of man and the universe... sexuality... would naturally become one of the chief spheres of spiritual insight and growth.”
from The Way of Zen (1957)
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“The culture of Victorian England—a culture of the most elegant lasciviousness—offers a striking example of this religious prurience. Extreme modesty and prudishness in the home so heightened the fascination of sex that prostitution, even for the upper classes, flourished”
from Nature, Man and Woman (1958)
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“No one has done better in conveying Lao Tzu's simple and laconic style of writing, so as to produce an English version almost as suggestive of the many meanings intended... and what it has to say is exactly what the world, in its present state, needs to hear.”
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“Governments maintain this sense in a mild form by seeing to it that the laws are so complex that every citizen is inadvertently guilty of some crime, making it possible to convict anyone when convenient.”
from Beyond Theology (1964)
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“We are therefore a civilization that suffers from chronic disappointment—a formidable swarm of spoiled children smashing their toys.”
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“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 to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.”
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“No one has done better in conveying Lao Tzu's simple and laconic style of writing, so as to produce an English version almost as suggestive of the many meanings intended. this is a most useful, as well as beautiful, volume—and what it has to say is exactly what the world, in its present state, need to hear.”
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“The culture of Victorian England—a culture of the most elegant lasciviousness—offers a striking example of this religious prurience. Extreme modesty and prudishness in the home so heightened the fascination of sex that prostitution, even for the upper classes, flourished.”
from Nature, Man, and Woman (1958)
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“To really do nothing, with perfection, is as difficult as doing everything.”
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“Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning, covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum.”
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