7 Alan Watts Quotes on Ego

Alan Watts quotes on ego

6. Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word 'water' is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

12. Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say 'But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it.' Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: 'I want something more', because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

14. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

21. The transformation of human consciousness though meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual oneupmanship, and Guru competitions.

23. If you know that 'I', in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God.'

27. I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. Obviously a body requires air, and the air must be within a certain temperature range. The body also requires certain kinds of nutrition. So in order to occur the body must be on a mild and nutritive planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning regularly around in a harmonious and rhythmical way near a certain kind of warm star. That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. However we do not normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract idea of our self.

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.