alan watts essays falling in love

Alan Watts on Love, the Meaning of Freedom, and the Only Real Antidote to Fear

By maria popova.

“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb 1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss . “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

Half a century before her, Leo Tolstoy — who befriended a Buddhist monk late in life and became deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy — echoed these ancient truths as he contemplated the paradoxical nature of love : “Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only.”

That in love and in life, freedom from fear — like all species of freedom — is only possible within the present moment has long been a core teaching of the most ancient Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions. It is one of the most elemental truths of existence, and one of those most difficult to put into practice as we move through our daily human lives, so habitually inclined toward the next moment and the mentally constructed universe of expected events — the parallel universe where anxiety dwells, where hope and fear for what might be eclipse what is, and where we cease to be free because we are no longer in the direct light of reality.

The relationship between freedom, fear, and love is what Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) explores in one of the most insightful chapters of The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety ( public library ) — his altogether revelatory 1951 classic, which introduced Eastern philosophy to the West with its lucid and luminous case for how to live with presence .

Drawing on his admonition against the dangers of the divided mind — the mindset that divides us into interior self-awareness and external reality, into ego and universe, which is the mindset the whole of Western culture has instilled in us — he writes:

The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.

This model of freedom is orthogonal to our conditioned view that freedom is a matter of bending external reality to our will by the power of our choices — controlling what remains of nature once the “I” is separated out. Watts draws a subtle, crucial distinction between freedom and choice:

What we ordinarily mean by choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting “I” into pleasure and out of pain. But the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You cannot plan to be happy. You can plan to exist, but in themselves existence and non-existence are neither pleasurable nor painful.

Stripped of the paraphernalia of circumstance and interpretation, our internal experience of being unfree stems from attempting impossible things — things that resist reality and refuse to accept the present moment on its own terms. Watts writes:

The sense of not being free comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even meaningless. You are not “free” to draw a square circle, to live without a head, or to stop certain reflex actions. These are not obstacles to freedom; they are the conditions of freedom. I am not free to draw a circle if perchance it should turn out to be a square circle. I am not, thank heaven, free to walk out of doors and leave my head at home. Likewise I am not free to live in any moment but this one, or to separate myself from my feelings.

Without the motive forces of pleasure and pain, it might at first appear paradoxical to make any decisions at all — a contradiction that makes it impossible to choose between options as we navigate even the most basic realities of life: Why choose to take the umbrella into the downpour, why choose to eat this piece of mango and not this piece of cardboard? But Watts observes that the only real contradiction is of our own making as we cede the present to an imagined future. More than half a century before psychologists came to study how your present self is sabotaging your future happiness , Watts offers the personal counterpart to Albert Camus’s astute political observation that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” and writes:

I fall straight into contradiction when I try to act and decide in order to be happy, when I make “being pleased” my future goal. For the more my actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all. For all pleasures are present, and nothing save complete awareness of the present can even begin to guarantee future happiness. […] You can only live in one moment at a time, and you cannot think simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are enjoying listening to the waves. Contradictions of this kind are the only real types of action without freedom.

Only with such a recalibration of our reflexive view of freedom does James Baldwin’s insistence that “people are as free as they want to be” begin to unfold its layered meaning like a Zen koan, to be turned over in the mind until the deceptively simple shape unfolds its origami-folded scroll of deep truth.

In what may be the most elegant refutation of the particular strain of hubris that embraces determinism in order to wring from it the self-permission for living with delirious freedom from responsibility, Watts writes:

There is another theory of determinism which states that all our actions are motivated by “unconscious mental mechanisms,” and that for this reason even the most spontaneous decisions are not free. This is but another example of split-mindedness, for what is the difference between “me” and “mental mechanisms” whether conscious or unconscious? Who is being moved by these processes? The notion that anyone is being motivated comes from the persisting illusion of “I.” The real man * , the organism-in-relation-to-the-universe, is this unconscious motivation. And because he is it, he is not being moved by it. […] Events look inevitable in retrospect because when they have happened, nothing can change them. Yet the fact that I can make safe bets could prove equally well that events are not determined but consistent . In other words, the universal process acts freely and spontaneously at every moment, but tends to throw out events in regular, and so predictable, sequences.

Only by such a misapprehension of freedom, Watts observes, do we ever feel unfree: When we enter a state that causes us psychological pain, our immediate impulse is to get the “I” out of the pain, which is invariably a resistance to the present moment as it is; because we cannot will a different psychological state, we reach for an easy escape: a drink, a drug, a compulsive scroll through an Instagram feed. All the ways in which we try to abate our feelings of abject loneliness and boredom and inadequacy by escaping from the present moment where they unfold are motivated by the fear that those intolerable feelings will subsume us. And yet the instant we become motivated by fear, we become unfree — we are prisoners of fear. We are only free within the bounds of the present moment, with all of its disquieting feelings, because only in that moment can they dissipate into the totality of integrated reality, leaving no divide between us as feelers and the feelings being felt, and therefore no painful contrast between preferred state and actual state. Watts writes:

So long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom. […] It sounds as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing “stuck” or fixed about the reality of the moment. When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, without calling it “fear,” “bad,” “negative,” etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead. The feeling no longer perpetuates itself by creating the feeler behind it.

To dissolve into this total reality of the moment is the crucible of freedom, which is in turn the crucible of love. In consonance with Toni Morrison’s insistence that the deepest measure of freedom is loving anything and anyone you choose to love and with that classic, exquisite Adrienne Rich sonnet line — “no one’s fated or doomed to love anyone” — Watts considers the ultimate reward of this undivided mind:

The further truth that the undivided mind is aware of experience as a unity, of the world as itself, and that the whole nature of mind and awareness is to be one with what it knows, suggests a state that would usually be called love… Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a uni verse and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole… This, rather than any mere emotion, is the power and principle of free action.

Complement this fragment of the timelessly rewarding The Wisdom of Insecurity with Watts on learning not to think in terms of gain and loss and finding meaning by accepting the meaninglessness of life , then revisit Seneca on the antidote to anxiety and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s almost unbearably beautiful poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death.”

— Published March 16, 2021 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/03/16/alan-watts-freedom-fear-love/ —

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The Library of Consciousness

Spectrum of love, november 1969.

Alan Watts explores love in its many forms, from desire to divine connection. He argues against forcing or faking love, saying real charity can’t be willed. Instead, Watts suggests honestly examining one’s own selfish motivations, since even egotism stems from a distorted love. By following our inner drives, love can unfold organically. Watts sees embracing risks as better than bottling up this energy, which leads to self-destruction. Allowing love to flow freely, despite heartbreaks, enables human flourishing. For Watts, light passes through a prism, but it’s all love.

I’m going to talk to you this evening on the subject of the spectrum of love. We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat. We would like to be like that, and (by and large) man’s religions are attempts to cultivate that same power in ordinary people. But unfortunately, they normally go about this task as one would attempt to make the tail wag the dog.

I remember when I was a small boy in school, I was enormously interested in being able to do my schoolwork properly. And everybody told me that I didn’t work hard enough, and that I ought to work. I had an intense desire to do this. But when I asked, “How do you work?” everybody shut up like a clam. So I was extremely puzzled. But there were teachers who apparently knew how to work and had attained considerable heights of scholarship, and I admired them very much for their attainments. And so I thought that maybe I could learn the secret by copying their mannerisms. I would imitate the style of handwriting that they used, I would use the same kind of pen, I would affect the same mannerisms of speech and gestures and, insofar as I could get around the school uniform, even of clothing. I must assure you, this was of course a private school in England, not a public school in America.

But none of this revealed the secret because I was, as it were, copying the outward symptoms and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work. And exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love. When we study the behavior of people who have the power of love within them, we can catalog how they behave in various situations, and out of this catalog formulate some rules.

One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are apt—but not always so—but they apt very often to play it rather cool on sexual love. The reason for this is, generally speaking, unknown to preachers, but it is because an erotic relationship with the external world operates (so far as they are concerned) between that world and every single nerve ending. Their whole organism, in all its aspects—physical, psychological, and spiritual—is an erogenous zone. And therefore, their flow of love is not specialized or canonized so exclusively in the genital system as is with most other people. Especially in a culture such as ours where, for so many centuries, that particular expression of erotic love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable kind of love that there is, and so we have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. It isn’t always the right place for it.

Of course, also, people who exude love are apt to give things away. They are in every way like rivers: they stream. And so when they collect possessions and things that they like, they are apt to give them to other people. Because, did you ever notice that when you give things away, you keep getting more? In the same way as you create a vacuum, nature abhors a vacuum, and more flows in? So noticing this, the codifiers of loving behavior write down that you should give so much money to tax deductible institutions, and to the poor, and that you should be nice to people, that you should act towards your relatives and your friends and indeed even enemies as if you loved them, even if you don’t. And, of course, for Christians and Jews and believers in God there is a peculiarly difficult task enjoined upon us, namely: that thou shalt love the Lord thy God. And not only, here, going through the motions of it externally, but with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And that is, of course, very demanding indeed.

But you see what is happening: it is as if, for example, we admired the music of a certain composer and, having studied his style very thoroughly, we draw up rules of musical composition based on the behavior of this composer. We then send our children to music school where they learn these rules in the hope that, if they apply them, they will turn into first-class musicians—which they usually fail to do. Because what might be called the technique of music, as the technique of morals, as well as, say, the technique of speech, of language, is very valuable because it—and I repeat: if—you have anything to express. But if you don’t have anything to say, not even the greatest mastery of English will stand you in good stead unless you can manage to fool your listeners by talking beautiful nonsense and make it sound profound.

So the question and the puzzle remains. You cannot imitate this thing, there is no way of getting it, and yet it is absolutely essential that we have it. Because, obviously, the human race is not going to flourish harmoniously unless we are enabled to love each other. But the question is: how do you get it? Is it something you simply have to contract, like measles? Or, as theologians say, is it a gift of divine grace which somehow is dished out to some but not to others? And if there is no way of getting divine grace by anything you do, as the Calvinists aver, then we better just sit around and wait until something happens. Although Calvinists never did that. They were almost depressingly energetic.

But surely we can’t be left in that kind of a hopeless situation. There must be some way of getting the grace or getting divine charity or love—some sort of wangle, some sort of way in which we can, as it were, open ourselves so as to become conduit pipes for the flow. And so the more subtle preachers try to see if we can open ourselves, and teach methods of meditation and spiritual discipline in the hope that we can contact this power. The less subtle preachers say, “You don’t have enough faith, you don’t have enough guts, you don’t have enough willpower. If you only put your shoulder to the wheel and shoved, you would be, of course, an exemplar and a saint.” Actually, you will only be an extremely clever hypocrite.

The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence. When you deal with the so-called practical world, and people don’t behave as you would wish they would, you get out the army or the police force or the big stick. And if those strike you as somewhat crude, you resort to giving lectures—and I mean lectures in the sense of a pi-jaw: a solemn adjuration and exhortation to behave better next time.

Now, let us look at some of the practical consequences of adjuring people and commanding people to love. Many a parent says to the child, “Nice children love their mothers. And, of course, I’m sure you’re a nice child. You ought to love your mother—but not because I, your mother, say so, but because you really want to do so.” Because one of the difficulties is: that none of us, in our heart of hearts, respect love which is not freely given. If, for example, you are an ailing parent, and you need to be looked after, and you have a son or daughter who feels dutifully that they should look after you—because after all, you’ve done so much for them. But somehow, your living with your father or mother prevents you from having a home and a life of your own. Naturally, you resent this duty. And your parent is well aware that you resent it, even if they pretend to ignore it. They therefore feel guilty that they have imposed upon your loyalty. And you, in turn, can’t really disclose from yourself the fact that you hate them for getting sick, even though they couldn’t help it. And therefore nobody enjoys the relationship. It is a painful duty carried out.

And the same thing would naturally happen if, after a number of years, having (at the altar) made a solemn and terrible promise that you would love your wife and husband come what may forever and ever till death do you part, then suddenly you find that you really haven’t the heart to do it any more. Then you feel guilty, and that you ought to love your wife, family, or whatever. And naturally this is a sort of fiasco, as would be obvious if you were to ask your wife: “Do you really love me?” and she were to reply, “I’m trying very hard to do so.”

You see, the difficulty of it is this: you cannot teach a selfish person to be unselfish by any means. That is to say, whatever a selfish person does—whether it be giving his body to be burned, or giving all that he possesses to the poor—he will still do it in a selfish way of feeling. And he will be able to do this with extreme cunning, and marvelous self-deception, and deception of others besides. But the consequences of fake love are almost invariably destructive because they build up resentment on the part of the person who does the fake loving as well as on the part of those who are its recipients. This is why the foreign aid program has been such a dismal failure.

Now, of course, you may say that I am talking in a very impractical way because you would say, “Well, do we just have to sit around and wait until we become inwardly converted, and learn through the grace of God or some sort of magic how to love? And in the meantime do nothing about it, and conduct ourselves as selfishly as we feel?” There is, as a matter of fact, something to be said for that. Because the first problem in the whole of this is honesty. And the reason why the Lord God says at the beginning of things, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind” is not because the Lord God is stupid, but because he’s very clever. That which appears to be a commandment is actually a challenge—or what in Zen Buddhism is called a kōan : a spiritual problem. Because if you exercise yourself resolutely, in trying to love God and/or your neighbor, you will find that you get more and more tangled up. You will realize increasingly that the reason why you are attempting to obey this as a commandment is that you want to be the right kind of person. And obviously you want to be the right kind of person for your own reasons.

And so if you do, in the first place, feel selfish and come to the conclusion as a result of trying various experiments with love that you love yourself more than anybody else, the proper thing to do is to investigate your self love to find out why you love yourself and what you mean by “yourself” when you say you love yourself. For the reason is this: love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity. Everybody has it. Existence is love. But it’s like water flowing through a hose: it depends in which direction you point it. So everybody has the force running. And maybe the way in which you find the force of love operating in you is that you have a passionate like of booze, or ice cream, or automobiles, or good-looking members of the opposite sex, or even the same sex. But there is love is operating.

And people, of course, tend to distinguish between the various kinds of love. There are good kinds (such as divine charity), and allegedly bad kinds (such as “animal lust”). But it should be understood, I think, that they’re all forms of the same thing. But they differ in rather the same way that the colors of light—of white light—divide into the spectrum when passed through through a prism. So we might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud’s libido, and the violet end of the spectrum of love is agapē , the (what is called) divine love or divine charity. And that, in the middle (the various yellows, blues, and greens) are friendship, human endearment, consideration, and all that sort of fellow feeling. But it’s all the same thing.

And so the thing is, first of all, to get it moving. To follow whatever kind of love you have in the first place. Because you cannot control love until you have some to control; until you have it running. You’ve got to get your car running before you could learn how to drive it. You will not become a skillful driver by sitting in a still car in a garage anymore than you will become a skilled dancer if you simply never move your arms and legs. And so the first thing, then, is to discover what indeed you do love, if anything. And you will find there is something. And then go into the nature of that.

Now, it’s said that selfish people love themselves. I would say that that is really a misunderstanding of the whole thing, because “yourself” is something that is really impossible to love. There are various reasons for this, but one obvious reason is that loving one’s self is as difficult as kissing your own lips. One’s self—when you try to focus on it, to love it or to know it—is oddly elusive. It always slips away like the pursued tail of a dog who is trying to get hold of his own tail. So to pursue your own end has some difficulties about it.

If you explore what you love when you say you love yourself, you will make the startling discovery that everything you love is something which you thought was other than yourself. Even if it be very ordinary things, such as ice cream or booze—in the conventional sense, booze is not you, nor is ice cream. Certainly, it turns into you in a manner of speaking when you consume it. But then you don’t have it anymore. And so you look around for more in order to love it once again. But so long as you love it, you see, it’s never you. When you love people, however selfishly you love them—because of the pleasant sensations they give to you—still, it is somebody else that you love. And as you inquire into this, as you follow honestly your own selfishness, many interesting transformations begin to come about in you.

One of the most interesting transformations of being directly and honestly selfish in the same way that, for example, cats are, is that you stop deceiving people. A great deal of damage is done in practical human relations by saying that you love people when what you mean is that you ought to and you don’t really. You give the wrong impression, and people begin to expect things of you which you are never going to come through with. We have been taught, for example, that we ought to love our enemies. Now, we don’t really understand what it means to love our enemies. We think it means to be charitable towards them in the hope that we will convert them and so that they will cease to be our enemies. The real reason for loving enemies is that one needs enemies. They’re terribly important to you.

For example, I think that some of you here feel that you belong to a nice set of people. It may be an ordinary kind of bourgeois coterie of pleasant squares, or it may be a church group of some kind, a club, or a special cult, or just a group of friendly drinkers. But at any rate you feel that, by virtue of membership in this society, you belong to a special in-group of nice, or saved, people. Now, when you consider what nice people talk about when they sit around the dinner table and have an opportunity to nurture their collective ego, you will find that the most fascinating topic of conversation is the nasty people: how awful they are, what dreadful things they do, and what is it all coming to? And this very, very satisfactory condemnatory conversation nurtures your ego. But people who do that don’t seem to realize that they thereby depend on the nasty people in order to know that they’re nice. They are, as a matter of fact, highly indebted to them. On the other side of the picture, the nasty people—they, on their side, consider that they really are the best people, and nurture their collective ego by blasting the bourgeoisie, the squares, the WASPs, know-nothings, or whoever they may be. And so for the collective ego of the non-squares, the squares are extremely necessary. If they were to disappear tomorrow, many of us would lose of cause.

Now, the minute you begin to become aware of this, it’s rather embarrassing. It’s, of course, humorous, and I’m glad that you see this. Because at once you begin to realize how much you depend on an enemy, or an outsider, or a group of damned people as distinct from your own group of saved people. And so you begin to realize that if your collective ego, or your self, depends on your being on the in, but you can only be on the in with relation to something that is out. And since the in and the out are inseparable if there is to be any in or any out, you suddenly discover that “yourself” is bigger than you thought it was. It includes the other and you can’t do without it.

This brings about a fundamental change in the understanding of the meaning and nature of “self.” And thereupon there comes a change of attitude to other people, even if you continue with some formal opposition to them and disapproval of them. When, then, you are honestly clear with yourself what you like and what you dislike, and then, at the same time, your self begins more and more to include that were hitherto defined as being not yourself, your love—which is what you are—begins to express itself quite naturally and unaffectedly in a wider way.

Now, to trust one’s self to be capable of love, to bring up love—in other words, to function in a sociable way and in a creative way—is to take a risk. It’s a gamble. Because you may not come through with it. And in the same way when you fall in love with somebody else, or you form an association with somebody else, and you trust them, they may, as a matter of fact, not fulfill your expectations. But that risk has to be taken. The alternative to taking that risk is much worse than trusting and being deceived. In other words, to live together you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks, but in the long run it’ll work out. My point is that if you don’t take them, the results will be so much worse than any kind of wild anarchy that could be conceived.

You see, here we are now as a highly disciplined human race with all kinds of rules and religions, and what are we about to do? Blow ourselves completely to pieces. Was this all a good gamble? Because, you see, in tying up love in knots and becoming incapable of it, you can’t destroy this energy. You turn it—when you won’t love and you won’t let it out, the thing comes out in the form of self-destruction. The alternative to self-love, in other words, is self-destruction. Because you won’t take the risk of loving yourself properly. You will be compelled instead to destroy yourself.

So, which would you rather have? Would you rather have a human race which isn’t always very well controlled and sometimes runs amok a little bit, but on the whole continues to exist with a good deal of honesty and delight, when delight is available? Or would you rather have the whole human race blown to pieces and cleaned off the planet, reducing the whole thing to a nice, scoured rock with no dirty disease on it called life? But I repeat the point that is necessary to understand this whole thing: that love is a spectrum. There is not, as it were, nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. If you find that only one of these forms exists in you, if at least you will water it, the rest of the plant will blossom as well. But the essential prerequisite from the beginning is to let it have its way.

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Where does this Alan Watts audio clip come from?

I'm trying to locate the source of an Alan Watts quote/audio clip that has been used in numerous YouTube edits. It is referenced in some places as the 'Falling Into Love' lecture, but there is no such lecture listed on the Alan Watts website, or anywhere else legitimate (that I can find, anyhow) - just on YouTube and personal blogs, etc. who I think are basically all just referencing each other.

The quote is:

"Well now really when we go back into falling in love. And say, it's crazy. Falling. You see? We don't say "rising into love". There is in it, the idea of the fall. And it goes back, as a matter of fact, to extremely fundamental things. That there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life. You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don't really know that the floor's not going to give under your feet ... so, actually, therefore, the course of wisdom, what is really sensible, is to let go, is to commit oneself, to give oneself up and that's quite mad. So we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity."

My daughter came across this on YouTube and loved it so much she used it as a voice over for a portion of her major HSC dance film assessment. The problem is, we now have to locate the complete lecture so that we can purchase a copy of it and obtain public performance/licensing rights (for a potential awards night performance), but after weeks and weeks of googling obsessively trying to find it, listening to literally hours and hours of Alan Watts lectures on YouTube, and making multiple attempts at contacting the Alan Watts group directly, i've come up empty.

Various people online have suggested that it is part of the 'Spectrum of Love' lecture, but i've listened to that entire lecture and couldn't find this section. I also tried any other love/relationship-related lectures he gave, but still nothing. The most useful thing I found was an extended version of the clip, titled 'Love and Marriage', which contains the bit we're after, but this isn't an entire lecture, and therefore isn't listed on the Alan Watts website for purchase. I'm assuming that this is from another lecture that has been cut in half (this clip is about 30mins, and most lectures are about an hour long) and then re-named, but there is no reference to the original lecture anywhere.

We're getting slightly desperate, as the cut-off date for submitting the purchase/licensing information is fast approaching, and as it stands I can't even tell them which lecture it's from! If anyone could give me any sort of help with this I would be eternally grateful.

This is the YouTube video my daughter originally found .

This is the 'Love and Marriage' clip that I found .

• reference-request

It appears to originate in this lecture:

https://www.alanwatts.org/searchable/1-4-4-divine-madness/

The audio of which can be purchased here: https://alan-watts-electronic-university.myshopify.com/products/philosophy-and-society

See here for more information about that website. maybe you can contact them to ask about licensing: https://www.alanwatts.org/about/

Note that the text that you are interested in appears to end the lecture.

• That's it! I cannot thank you enough, you have absolutely saved me. I've purchased the lecture pack, and i'll have a go at contacting them through the website you found in the morning (I had previously been trying to contact them via alanwatts.com, not alanwatts.org - i'm not sure if these are essentially the same site/run by the same people, but i'll give it a go anyhow). Thank you thank you thank you. You have honestly made my day, I am SO grateful! :D –  Kate Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 13:41

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Top 50 Alan Watts Quotes on Love and Life

Before we look at some of the best Alan Watts Quotes, lets read more about him

Alan watts was one of the best philosophers, authors and speakers of modern history., he did extensive research on zen buddhism, and then published one of his first books on the topic – the way of zen ., alan watts since then wrote over 25 books on various topics such as philosophy, eastern and western religion, semantics, natural history, cybernetics and the anthropology of sexuality. he was full of intellect and often talked a lot about buddhism, mindfulness and meditation, and how to live a fulfilling life., he also has numerous inspirational speeches on youtube, many with millions of views., we have compiled the best alan watts quotes on love, life, meaning and success., 1. “muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” – alan watts, 2. “you can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.” – alan watts, 3. “the most dangerous risk of all: the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” – alan watts, 4. “this is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. and instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” – alan watts, 5. “problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” – alan watts, 6. “one is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.” – alan watts, alan watts quotes on love, 7. “never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.” – alan watts, 8. “money is an abstraction. it cannot, of itself, buy any pleasure whatsoever. because all pleasures involve skill and love.” – alan watts, 9. “love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity, everybody has it.” – alan watts, 10. “life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. faith in life, in other people, and in oneself, is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.” – alan watts, 11. “people who exude love are apt to give things away. they are in every way like rivers; they stream. and so when they collect possessions and things they like, they are apt to give them to other people. because, have you ever noticed that when you start giving things away, you keep getting more” – alan watts, 12. “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.” – alan watts, 13. “peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. no work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” – alan watts, 14. “we seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. for we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” – alan watts, 15. “to have faith is to trust yourself.” – alan watts, 16. “just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.” – alan watts, 17. “man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” – alan watts, 18. “trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” – alan watts, 19. “you are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” – alan watts, 20. “a scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.” – alan watts, 21. “the real you is the whole universe.” – alan watts, 22. “every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.” – best  alan watts quotes, 23. “don’t make a distinction between work and play. regard everything that you’re doing as play, and don’t regard for one minute that you have to be serious about it.” – alan watts quotes, 24. “we are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. we have no present. our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. we do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. and are therefore out of touch with reality. we confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. we are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” – best ever  alan watts  quote, 25. “when we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.” – alan watts, 26. “if you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed.” – alan watts, 27. “no one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.” – alan watts, 28. “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, 29. “the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – alan watts, 30. “hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. one learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.” – alan watts, 31. “our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.” – alan watts, 32. “normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.” – alan watts, 33. “the art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. it consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.” – alan watts, 34. “it’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.” – alan watts, 36. “the meaning of life is just to be alive. it is so plain and so obvious and so simple. and yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” – alan watts, 37. “you are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” – alan watts, 38. “tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. there is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.” – alan watts, 39. “if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. you’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don’t like doing, which is stupid.” – alan watts, 40. “i have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” – alan watts, 41. “ zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about god while one is peeling potatoes. zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.” – alan watts, 42. “we cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” – alan watts quotes, 43. “the more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.” – alan watts, 44. “if we cling to belief in god, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.” – alan watts, 45. “through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. we are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” – alan watts, 46. “things are as they are. looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.” – alan watts, 47. “to have faith is to trust yourself to the water. when you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. instead you relax, and float.” – alan watts, 48. “what i am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. you are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.” – alan watts, 49. “the reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.” – alan watts, 50. “try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” – alan watts, few more thought-provoking quotes:, 51. “omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.” – alan watts, 52. “my image of me is not at all your image of me.” – alan watts, 53. “you don’t look out there for god, something in the sky, you look in you.” – alan watts, 54. “the reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. there are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.” – alan watts, 55. “we do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.” – alan watts, 56. “how is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.” – alan watts, 57. “what the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag but you see, that’s what people do.” – alan watts, 58. “saints need sinners.” – alan watts, 59. “philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.” – alan watts, 60. “the positive cannot exist without the negative.” – alan watts, 61. “everything that happens, everything that i have ever done, everything that anybody else have ever done is part of a harmonious design, that there is no error at all.” – alan watts, 62. “meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” – alan watts, 63. “your soul is not in your body; your body is in your soul.” – alan watts, 64. “life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….” – alan watts, 65. “to put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. to hold your breath is to lose your breath.” – alan watts, 66. “for there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.” – alan watts, 67. “there will always be suffering. but we must not suffer over the suffering.” – alan watts, 68. “you’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.” – alan watts, 69. “like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves – mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.” – alan watts, 70. “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, 71. “don’t hurry anything or worry about the future or worry about what progress you’re making. just be entirely content to be aware of what is.” – alan watts, 72. “zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.” – alan watts quotes on zen , 73. “what happens if you know that there is nothing you can do to be better it’s kind of a relief, isn’t it you say ‘well, now what do i do’ when you are freed from being out to improve yourself, your own nature will begin to take over.” – alan watts, 74. “to travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, to travel well is better than to arrive.” – alan watts travel quotes, 75. “when you know that you have to go with the river, suddenly you acquire—behind everything that you do—the power of the river.” – alan watts, 76. “only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results.” – alan watts, 77. “paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. it hurries on and on, and misses everything. not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.” – alan watts, 78. “waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” – alan watts, 79. “tomorrow never comes.” – alan watts, 80. “when a bird sings, it doesn’t sing for the advancement of music.” – alan watts, 81. “for eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.” – alan watts, 82. “everybody is ‘you’. everybody is ‘i’. that’s our name. we all share that.” – alan watts, 83. “the future is a concept, it doesn’t exist. there is no such thing as tomorrow. there never will be because time is always now. that’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. we find there is only present, only an eternal now.” – alan watts, 84. “nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don’t object to it.” – alan watts, 85. “the best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.” – alan watts, 86. “life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.” – alan watts, 87. “we have frustration because we are fighting the changing of things.” – alan watts, 88. “to be implies not to be.” – alan watts, 89. “ buddha is the man who woke up, who discovered who he really was.” – alan watts, 90. “this whole world is a phantasmagoria, an amazing illusion.” – alan watts, 91. “there is nothing except the eternal now.” – alan watts, 92. “most problems that are solved in a rush are solved in the wrong way, especially emotional problems between people.” – alan watts, 93. “the world is precisely the relationship between the world and its witnesses, and so if there are no eyes in this world, the sun doesn’t make any light, nor do the stars.” – alan watts, 94. “memory creates the future as well as the past, you wouldn’t know that you were going to have anything happen tomorrow if you didn’t have something yesterday.” – alan watts, 95. “choice is not a form of freedom in the sense of the word; choice is the act of hesitation that occurs before making a decision.” – alan watts, 96. “every manifestation of life is impermanent. our quest to make things permanent, to straighten everything out, to get it fixed is an impossible and insoluble problem.” – alan watts, 97. “creative people can stimulate creativity in others, by osmosis.” – alan watts, 98. “our image of ourselves is completely inaccurate and incomplete.” – alan watts, 99. “no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” – alan watts quotes, 100. “the word ‘person’ comes from the latin word ‘persona’ which referred to the masks worn by actors in which sound would come through. the ‘person’ is the mask — the role you’re playing. and all of your friends and relations and teachers are busy telling you who you are and what your role in life is.” – alan watts, 101. “education, in the real sense, is not preparation for life, it is actually living. it is the child participating in adult concerns. and doing it now and realizing that the point of the process in which the child is engages, is not to prepare the child for the future, but to enjoy doing the thing today.” – alan watts, 102. “faith is, above all, open-ness — an act of trust in the unknown.” – alan watts, related:  top 20 inspirational pema chödrön quotes on life, related:  top 50 buddhist quotes on life, love, karma & bodhidharma, leave a comment cancel reply.

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Watts, Alan

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• Elisabeth Gaines 2 &
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Life and Educational Background

Watts was born on January 6, 1915, in Chislehurst, Kent, England, the single offspring of an employee of the Michelin Tire company, Laurence Wilson Watts, and a Christian boarding school teacher, Emily Mary Watts ( 1972 ). During his early years, Watts went to Canterbury, England, where he attended the prestigious boarding institution, King’s Public School. Despite his academic prowess at King’s, he was unable to procure a financial scholarship to Trinity College in Oxford largely due to the Friedrich Nietzschean-styled essay examination Watts wrote.

Without a scholarship, Watts was unable to attend college and succumbed to working random day jobs to support himself while he pursued his own intellectual interests. In 1930, at the age of 15, Watts joined the Buddhist Lodge in London, where he eventually became the editor of the Buddhist Lodge journal, The Middle Way . The first thing Watts published was a booklet titled An Outline of Zen Buddhism in 1932....

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Columbus, P., & Rice, D. (2013). Alan watts—Here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion . State University of New York Press.

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Jung, C. (1980). Psychology and alchemy . Princeton University Press.

Watts, A. (1958). Wisdom of insecurity . Pantheon Books.

Watts, A. (1970). The meaning of happiness . Perennial Library.

Watts, A. (1972). In my own way: An autobiography, 1925–1965 . Pantheon Books.

Watts, A. (1989). The book . Vintage Books.

Watts, A. (2003). Become what you are . Shambhala.

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Elisabeth Gaines

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Steven M. Dunn

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Gaines, E., Dunn, S.M. (2024). Watts, Alan. In: Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Religious Psychology and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38971-9_1985-1

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