6 Alan Watts Quotes on Consciousness

Alan Watts quotes on consciousness

20. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

26. How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

29. It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas this Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness.

35. Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

39. Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, 'Why, that's me!' And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes that appears - now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown - and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.

43. You can't get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego. Sorry, but it can't be done . . . If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle. You'd be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry.