Alan Watts’ 9 best phrases to reflect on

Alan Watts’ phrases are an invitation to deeper reflection, the one in which everything and nothing act as the perfect combination to discover what is impossible to capture with words. These are sentences capable of shaking our conception of the world, life and relationships to take us to the fertile abyss of our own being.

Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) was a British philosopher, writer and lecturer. Known for his interpretation of Eastern philosophy, as well as for his interest in disseminating it and bringing it closer to the Western world. He was a man of provocative lucidity, which he combined in a simple – and at the same time magical – way with irony and a sense of humor. His objective: to stimulate reflection on existence, generating questions capable of breaking schemes and deconstructing realities.

Watts wrote more than 25 books and a large number of articles on topics related to identity, the search for happiness, consciousness, Zen, the nature of reality and love in its broadest and deepest sense. Some of his best-known works are The wisdom of insecurity (1951), The path of Zen (1957) and The Way of the Tao (1975), among others.

In this article we leave you a small selection of the best quotes by Alan Watts that They are a challenge for those who love to navigate the ocean of existence and a gift to enjoy to feel more alive.

Alan Watts’ phrases are a treasure to turn to if we want to question ourselves and get to know the truth. A valuable legacy to delve into to remove those veils that prevent us from seeing clearly and achieving well-being.

The thought trap

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about other than the thoughts themselves, in this way they lose contact with reality and are destined to live in a world of illusions.”

We can be owners or slaves of our thoughts, it depends on us. Because, although the thought is not bad in itself, it can become dangerous when we cling to it and get lost in the vicious cycles of beliefs.

Being infallible, perfect, feeding a single conception of the world, and therefore truly believing that others cannot fail us, and if they do, expelling them from our side, are just some of the most common ways to distance ourselves from reality and feed our own suffering.

Thought is a very powerful tool that you have to know how to master, use in moderation and prune when he deploys his tricks to confuse us and induce us to self-deception. For Alan Watts, there is no better way to manage it than to surrender to the evidence of the present, to the deep connection with what we are being and feeling now.

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The limits of words

“Words cannot express more than a small fragment of human knowledge, because what we can say and think is always immensely less than what we experience.”

Language is a social instrument, a tool invented by man capable of generating realities that facilitate understanding – and also make it difficult, depending on the case. Its richness allows us great precision, but it has its limits. Because Sometimes words, whether spoken or written, are not enough. to give an acceptable resolution to what we feel, so that others can see it.

The problem is to stay in the reductionism of language and assume that we cannot go further. It would be something like remaining myopic to the world of the sensible, of experience and this is only living halfway or even much less. Hence, Alan Watts showed his concern about this issue.

The secret of the road

“The meaning and objective of dancing is dance. Like music, it is fully realized in each moment of its course. You don’t play a sonata to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in the endings, composers would only write last movements.

This is one of Alan Watts’ phrases that can generate tasty fruits if we sow it in our memory. The enjoyment of the journey is much more enriching than the achievement of any success or objective. The experience of each moment, the connection with the present is what gives us the awareness of real existence.

Some of us have the bad habit of obsessing over the endings, of savoring the summit without taking into account the route. This bad habit is still an unfair judgment: With ignorance of the path that has led us to the goal, the effort we have made is also overshadowed.

The importance of the present

“If my awareness of the future and the past makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to ask myself if I am really living in the real world.”

The present is a recurring theme in history as despised in the same. For this reason we should not let it pass us by. When a topic is repeated so much and is mentioned by personalities with such disparate ideologies, we should not ignore it, quite the contrary. In some way it means that it is one of our pending subjects.

We live lost in the labyrinth that unites the past and the future without being aware that we are possessors of the key that opens the exit door: the present. In general, we do well at telling ourselves stories full of fears, worries and guilt. We wander around crestfallen and exhausted in what one day was and what another will be. However, only when we manage to be present, will we be able to experience our most real existence.

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The great value of detachment

“Detachment means feeling no remorse for the past or fear for the future; Letting life take its course without trying to interfere with its movement and change, without trying to prolong the pleasant things or cause the unpleasant things to disappear. To act in this way is to move to the rhythm of life, to be in perfect harmony with its changing music, this is called enlightenment.

Clinging to things, situations and people is building walls that prevent the art of flowing with life in exchange for suffering. Feeding ideas of belonging, control and power distances us from our most genuine essence. to locate ourselves in the earthly universe of the material and in the duality of pleasure-displeasure.

Without a doubt this is one of Alan Watts’ phrases in which we can see his knowledge of Eastern philosophy reflected. We must forget that idea that something or someone belongs to us because otherwise we will become victims of the fear of loss and this will only lead us to plunge into a spiral of suffering.

The art of knowing how to give up is the key to freeing ourselves from the traps of expectations and desire. And once achieved, it will be much easier to connect with a state of plenitude and harmony.

The value of impermanence

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”

Another of Alan Watts’ phrases that is worth burning into your mind. The impermanence or anicca It is the law of temporality, the one that affirms that nothing remains because everything is constantly changing. Even though today seems the same as yesterday, there are differences, not only around us, but also within us.

Accept impermanence, integrate it as part of our philosophy of life, It is the first step to free ourselves from the deceptions of desire, ego, ignorance and unbridled passion. for sensitive experiences. These two phrases from Alan Watts remind us of this.

“Most human activities are designed to make permanent experiences and joys that are only adorable because they are changing.”

The security inconsistency

“It is useless to say that we should not want security. We have to discover that there is no security, that looking for it is painful and that when we imagine having found it, we don’t like it. The main thing is to understand that there is no security.”

We hate uncertainty and everything that comes with it, like not having control. The problem is that We do not know – or we ignore at times – that there is nothing safe around us, so there is a lot of illusion in everything we believe.. In fact, as soon as we begin to believe in security we create the possibility of suffering for something, of surrendering to the web of needs and fears.

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Some of Alan Watts’ phrases from his work The wisdom of security They make us reflect on this topic. For example, in one of them he expresses “if to enjoy a pleasant present we must have the security of a happy future, we are “asking for the moon””. Because? Because, as we have already said before, to a large extent we lack certainty, which opens the door to enjoying uncertainty. So, It is inevitable that we feel pain, that we are disappointed and that at times, we navigate angry seas of suffering.

Believing we protect ourselves behind the shield of security is nothing more than a mirage, a hallucination that serves us in the short term but has its consequences in the long run. In fact, the more security we seek, the more we will suffer. Because nothing is static, everything tends towards dynamism, movement, change and therefore, the probability of not remaining.

The concept of interdependence

“Each person is a unique manifestation of the whole, since each branch is a particular extension of the tree.”

This is one of Alan Watts’ phrases most connected to Buddhist philosophy and one of its fundamental concepts: interdependence. According to Buddhism, every element is born depending on another, That is, things exist depending on one another due to causes and conditions that are in constant flux, interacting with each other. And therefore, they would be empty by themselves. From this perspective, the fact that things exist in some way and we can interact with them means that they lack inherent existence.

Perhaps it is a complex concept to understand at first, since in some way it marks movement and interaction as a fundamental condition for the consciousness of existence. Thus, when we immerse ourselves in duality, when our mind creates the separation of entities and immerses itself in personal identity, then suffering becomes possible.

As we see, Alan Watts’ phrases are a valuable legacy to reflect and raise awareness. These are sentences that invite us to expand our visual and mental spectrum to go further. A collection of small pills of wisdom to always keep in mind on our path of personal evolution.

Finally, we leave you part of one of Alan Watts’ most famous lectures on the spectrum of love that will surely not leave you indifferent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJh1f4hk3qw