Alan Watts Quotes

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

If we achieve satori and the satori shows, like a bit of dogshit stuck to the top of our nose, that is not so good.

It's amazing in the blink of an eye you finally see the light.

The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.

Nobody brainwashed me with God in my head or anything. I just saw this new reality, and I felt like I've been blinded, and I finally took the blindfolds off.

The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.

And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

How can one become enlightened in one single moment? One can, because one is enlightened -- one just has to recognize the fact. It is not something that happens from the outside, it is something that arises from the inside. It has always been there but you were clouded, you were full of thoughts.

Revelation, indeed, as such had no influence on my mind

Madness, and then illumination.

If you have too many epiphanies, you're on some kind of drug.

And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany.

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Delusion will vanish as the light becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the sun alone shines.

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

Occasionally there is a moment in a person's life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment. For a split second he comes into a kind of cosmic understanding. For a trembling breath of time he knows all there is to know. He is loaned the gift the poet yearned for - seeing himself as others see him.

It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

The hour that burst the spirit's sleep.

The Truth is realized in an instant; the Act is practiced step by step.

To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.

If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.