Alan Watts Quotes

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

Sensation is amphibious: at the same time it joins us to and divides us from things. It is the door through which we enter into things but also through which we come out of them and realize that we are not things.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

...Therefore it is said: 'The perception of a phenomenon IS the perception of the Universal Nature, since phenomena and Mind are one and the same.'

Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

The observer is the observed.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

All phenomena are empty.

Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again in dreams.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

Life is but thought.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.