Excerpts from Alan Watts’ Become What You Are:
Though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment.
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
The one important result of any serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. […] The people who have quite genuinely died to themselves make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.
Our attempts to stand above (our) emotions and control them are the emotions themselves at play.
Your everyday mind is the Tao.
Reality is not symbols, it is not work and thoughts it is not reflections and fantasies.
If you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into reality, you have stopped concentrating.
Man is in himself a little universe; the ordering of his mind and body is as complex as the ordering of the stars.
Tao = The Way of Nature
Anything you can define or imagine, anything you can understand or desire, is not the Tao. […] It’s too close to be seen and too obvious to be noticed or understood.
(The Tao is) the you that grows your nervous system, rather than the you that uses the nerves to decide, think and act.
(The ego is) a result-seeking mechanism.
Your aim is to preserve and perpetuate yourself, but in the larger context of the universe there is no reason, no purpose for this aim.
There is no way, no method, no technique which you or I can use to come into accord with the Tao, because every how, every method implies a goal. […] We have to see that there is no way. […] All striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile — since the very seeking thrusts them away.
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
The way of the sage cannot be traced and followed, since no authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions.
Nirvana, release from suffering and desire, is called unattainable — not because it does not happen but because there is no way of seeking it. […] To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Lesson One is: “I give up.” […] Just watching, without purpose.
My very substance, that which I am, is altogether beyond grasping or knowing.
Something which cannot be expressed in any form of words; an experience which every man must undergo for himself; which can no more be passed on from one man to another than you can eat another person’s food for him.
(Zen) has no symbolic meaning, and is ‘about’ nothing. […]The same is true of the universe, no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao.
All possible things, events, thoughts and qualities are aspects of a single Reality which is sometimes called the Self of the universe. […] All that is known by the senses, thought in the mind or felt in the heart is Brahman.
Eternity is beyond time; it is ‘now.’ The days and nights of Brahman are spread out in time in rather the same way as a ball of thread an inch in diameter is unrolled to the length of a hundred yards. Its real state resembles the ball, but to be presented to the human mind it has to be unrolled. For our idea of time is spatial; it has length, which is a spatial dimension. But eternity has no length, and the nearest thing to it in our experience is what we call the present moment. It cannot be measured, but it is always here.
Brahman is nothing other than what we are beholding at this moment. […] Brahman can only be realized, which is to say made real for you, by letting life live you for a while instead of trying to make yourself live life. You will soon reach the point where you will be unable to tell whether your thoughts and feelings are your own or whether life put them into you, for the distinction between yourself and life will have disappeared. If the truth be known, there never was any distinction, save in our imaginations.
Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or denial about anything. […] There can be no distinction between Reality and illusion if there is only Reality.
We can only think of what is going on now, even if we are thinking of the past or the future.
You can’t diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao.