You don't look

You don't look out there for God,

something in the sky,

you look in you.

~Alan Watts

You didn't come

You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. 

You are not a stranger here.

~Alan Watts

Thus bamboozled

"Thus bamboozled, the individual--instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world--is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature."

~Alan Watts

A living body

A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly 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 pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

~Alan Watts

But at any rate

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

~Alan Watts

But I'll tell you

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

~Alan Watts

The only way

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

~Alan Watts

The reason we have poverty

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

~Alan Watts

The reason

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

~Alan Watts

We do not

We do not "come into" into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

~Alan Watts

The religious idea

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

~Alan Watts

The style of God

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

~Alan Watts

Things are as they are

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

~Alan Watts

To have faith

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

~Alan Watts

Wars based on principle

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

~Alan Watts

We cannot

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

~Alan Watts

When your eyes

When your eyes are functioning well you don't see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren't working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don't hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there's something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes - it means something's wrong with your functioning.

~Alan Watts

When you get free

When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.

~Alan Watts

We identify

We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

~Alan Watts

What the devil

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

~Alan Watts