Alan Watts Quotes

What you see as cosmos is a living mind - intelligent space.

We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.

I'd like to see education play a larger role in our daily lives, have people come to a larger understanding - a "bigger picture" understanding - of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

I think there is something very consoling in feeling lost in space but also feeling grounded, and seeing that all of this is part of a bigger clockwork

The greatest benefit derived from the study of science is that it lifts you out of and above the littleness of daily trials. We learn to live in the universe as a part of it; we cannot seperate ourselves from it - our every act connects us with it - our every act affects the whole. Standing under the canopy of stars and remembering their presence you could scarcely do a petty deed, or think a wicked thought.

We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.

If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.

Everything is interconnected. The moment you take philosophy, psychology, religion and business and look at the underlying commonalities, that's when you start looking at business in a different way.

No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.

Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

You might have heard about a transformation that can occur when someone first sees Earth from space - how it becomes harder to think about 'my country' or 'my people' and harder not to think about 'our planet.' I can tell you, that transformation is real.

The paradigm of the 'Aquarian Conspiracy' sees humankind embedded in nature. It promotes the autonomous individual in a decentralized society... The new perspective respects the ecology of everything: birth, death, learning, health, family, work, science, spirituality, the arts, the community, relationships, politics.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

Everything connects to everything; therefore, as we change, the world cannot but change with us.

I can see how everything relates to everything else when I think that nothing is merely coincidental. If everything that happens is inevitable, then the world is connected and whole.

Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens... within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe.

The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.

Any prediction worth its weigh would consider the spiritual, material, and unintended consequences of introducing a new technology to the world. It would proceed from the kind of understanding Chellis articulated: Life is Whole.

Become aware that there are no accidents in our intelligent universe. Realize that everything that shows up in your life has something to teach you. Appreciate everyone and everything in your life.

We must learn how to think like the planet.

If we were to focus our attention on one particular problem and neglect the others, we would fail to see the true scope of our current global issues. The changes made in that form of thinking are limited and self-contained.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.