Alan Watts

Apart from life, the self is as meaningless as a solitary note taken from a symphony.

The feeling of boredom can be very interesting if you look into it.

There is a Zen poem that says, "If you ask where the flowers come from, even the God of Spring doesn't know.“

Each experience is for this reason partial, incomplete and no amount of these fragments ever add up to a whole experience, a true fulfillment.

Our hunger for time is the direct result of our specialization in narrowed attention. Of the mode of consciousness which takes the world in serially, one thought and one thing at a time.

Usual cosmic jazz. That’s what there is, and every bit of it is happening now.

In your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving you express that which it is which moves the sun and other stars.

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel in other words that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate.

Here in this present moment life is most lively; here alone do we really exist.

You will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky—you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel, and know.

Buddha's doctrine: man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.

You can look at every little detail of life in a new way, saying, “Oh! Look at that!” By living totally here and now, one's eyes are opened in astonishment.

And you don't even try to hurry up and get to the end of it all faster, because just like music, the point of listening isn't to get to the end of the piece—you can sit back with interest and let it all be.

And when you become awake to that, boredom ends, and you are delivered from the cycles—not in the sense that they disappear, but that you no longer go through them. Well, you do go through them, but you realize they're not going anywhere.

The secret to waking up from the drama—all these endless cycles—is to realize that only the present exists. It's the only time there is.

Karma means: what happens to me is what I do.

So we need those people, even if they aren’t playing our game, because it reminds the government in no uncertain terms that there’s something more important going on.

The outsider lives up there in the mountains at the highest peak of human evolution—their consciousness is one with the divine, and that’s just great. It makes you feel a little better to have somebody like that around. That person is realized—they know what it’s all about.

Laughter is threatening to tyrants.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.