"The more deeply I go into myself, the more I am not myself, and yet this is the very heart of me."
— Alan Watts
(Source: zeneurotic)
What if money were no object?
(Source: justaskinnyboy.com, via arthangover)
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” — Alan Watts
"The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present."
— Alan Watts
(Source: zenjournal)
Alan Watts: Being Aware of Awareness
The creators of an ongoing film about Alan Watts are in the business these days of sharing some great Alan Watts content via a regular podcast. This week, Zencast.org featured a beautiful, 25 minute introduction to Zen shared by the filmmakers. Delivered in his concise and eloquent manner, Watts explains that Zen is more akin to psychotherapy than religion, and grips the center of what Zen is all about — waking up from the flawed intuition that “you” are a meaningful “center of sensitivity locked up in a bag of skin”.
"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together."
— Alan Watts
(Source: zenjournal)
From “Nation of Rebels” by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter:
As early as 1959, Alan Watts recognized that the version of Zen that the Beats had adopted bore little resemblance to the real thing. In his essay “Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen,” he worried about the manner in which the ancient way of liberation had become a caricature, an excuse for “the cool, fake-intellectual hipster searching for kicks, dropping bits of Zen and jazz jargon to justify disaffiliation from society which is in fact just callous exploitation of other people.”
… (But) it doesn’t particularly matter whether the counterculture actually does Zen justice. The question of authenticity is beside the point, because what really matters is that they thought that Zen had what they needed.
Page 1 of 2
