Alan Watts - The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Alan Watts
Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

Alan Watts
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Alan Watts
The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

Alan Watts
If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

Alan Watts
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, I am listening to this music, you are not listening.

Alan Watts
The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.

Alan Watts
More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.

Alan Watts
To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Alan Watts
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Alan Watts
The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.

Alan Watts
At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it.

Alan Watts
We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives.
As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves.
The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot

Alan Watts
It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I".

Alan Watts
Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer.

Alan Watts
When you really understand that you are
what you see and know, you do not run around
the countryside thinking, "I am all this!"
There is simply all this...

Alan Watts
So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

Alan Watts
The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.

Alan Watts
The question "What shall we do about it?" is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.

Alan Watts
To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.

Alan Watts
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.

Alan Watts
The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.

Alan Watts
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

Alan Watts
The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Alan Watts
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don't like it.

Alan Watts
It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

Alan Watts
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

Alan Watts
For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

Alan Watts
To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

Alan Watts
The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.

Alan Watts