Alan Watts Quotes About Awareness
-
It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.
→ -
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.
→ -
If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then , my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
→ -
As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
→ -
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
→ -
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
→ -
If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
→ -
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.
→
Related Authors
-
Eckhart Tolle Author -
Ram Dass Teacher -
D.T. Suzuki Author -
Ken Wilber Writer -
Terence McKenna Philosopher -
Joseph Campbell Writer -
Robert Anton Wilson Author -
Jean Burden Poet -
Timothy Leary Psychologist -
Monica Furlong Author -
-
Gautama Buddha Founding Figure -
Sam Harris Author -
Carl Jung Psychiatrist -
Adyashanti Writer -
Jiddu Krishnamurti Writer -
Seraphim Rose Author -
Deepak Chopra Author -
Nhat Hanh Monk