Alan Watts Quotes

The only way to change consciousness and the world around us is to start with yourself.

My main life interest and purpose is to bring spiritual awakening into this world, to be a vehicle for the flowering of consciousness, to help people to live more consciously with less unnecessary suffering and self-generated unhappiness.

You can enter yoga, or the path of yoga, only when you are totally frustrated with your own mind as it is. If you are still hoping that you can gain something through your mind, yoga is not for you.

You must be true to your own way until at last you actually come to the point where you see it is necessary to forget all about yourself.

I see the potential for a new world being born in front of me and all around me, and I feel the only way to bring that potential into being is to know myself.

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

Spiritual process is not about chanting a mantra or closing your eyes, spiritual process is essentially about enhancing your perception.

You're revealing something about yourself in a more exaggerated, more fleshed-out way, and it awakens something in you that maybe you didn't know you had.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

The evolutionary impulse is towards disidentification from thinking and the arising of awareness or presence, but the gravitational pull of the old consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, is still quite heavy. It's been around for thousands of years.

Meditation is not an escape. Meditation is the acceptance of life in its totality, with a view to transforming it for the highest manifestation of the divine Truth here on earth

The most effective way to transform into higher consciousness is to pay attention in the present moment.

Making conclusions about life is a sure way to deny yourself the possibility of a human being transforming himself into the Divine.

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.

When emotional intelligence merges with spiritual intelligence, human nature is transformed.

Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.

Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.

Each person's life is like a mandala - a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life ... everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening.

Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.

I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

Inner peace doesn't come from getting what we want, but from remembering who we are.

At midlife, you're pregnant with the best self you can be - someone who has learned enough from both successes and failures to add up to a fine human being.

Becoming integrated and whole is the spiritual path. The body is your vehicle. Your job is to learn about yourself from your experiences and change yourself. This is spiritual growth.

Within the spiritual journey you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.

Meditation, you know, comes by a process imagination. You go through all these processes purification of the elements - making the one melt the other, that into the next higher, that into mind, that into spirit, and then you are spirit.