“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
“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.”
“Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.”
“So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union. In other words, look at the number of people we know who are terrified of silence, and who have to have something going all the time, some noise streaming into their ears. They’re doing that because of their intense sense of loneliness. And so when they feel silent, they feel lonely and they want to escape from it. Or people who just want to get together. As we say, they want to escape from themselves. More people spend more time running away from themselves. Isn’t that wretched? What a definition. What an experience of self if it’s something you’ve always got to be running away from and forgetting. Say you read a mystery story. Why? So you forget yourself. You join a religion. Why? To forget yourself. You get absorbed in a political movement. Why? To forget yourself. Well it must be a pretty miserable kind of self if you have to forget it like that. Now for a person who doesn’t have an isolated sense of self, he has no need to run away from it, because he knows.”
“To spread joy, you have to have it. To impart delight, you have to be more or less delightful. And to be delightful is not some factor of trying to make yourself look delightful, it is to do things that are delightful to you. You become thereby delightful to others.
That is to say people who are interesting are people who are interested.
Any person for example who is constantly thinking about all sorts of other things and other people and so on, because they are fascinating, becomes a fascinating person.
But a person who doesn’t think about anybody else, and who’s got very little going on inside their skull, is boring… if you try to enrich your personality by taking a course in ‘how to win friends and influence people,’ or ‘how to be a real person,’ you become just a washout. Because you’ll be in a sort of small circle, as it were. You’ll be like someone who tried to get good nutrition by biting his nails, and then the fingers next, and then half an arm gone and so on. You’re entirely nourishing yourself with yourself.
“A little bit of resistance, you see, is great. So there must always be resistance in change; otherwise there couldn’t even be change. There’d just be a ‘pfft!’ The world would go ‘pfft!’ and that’d be the end of it.
But because there’s always some resistance to change, there is a wonderful manifestation of form, there is a dance of life. But the human mind, as distinct from most animal minds, is terribly aware of time. And so we think a great deal about the future, and we know that every visible form is going to disappear and be replaced by so-called others. Are these others, others? Or are they the same forms returning? Of course, that’s a great puzzle. Are next year’s leaves that come from a tree going to be the same as this year’s leaves? What do you mean by the same? They’ll be the same shape, they’ll have the same botanical characteristics. But you’ll be able to pick up a shriveled leaf from last autumn and say ‘Look at the difference. This is last year’s leaf; this is this year’s leaf.’ And in that sense, they’re not the same. (…)
So this is the nature of change. If you resist it, you have duhkha, you have frustration and suffering. But on the other hand, if you understand change, you don’t cling to it, and you let it flow, then it’s no problem. It becomes positively beautiful, which is why in poetry, the theme of the evanescence of the world is beautiful.”
“Beyond all these is the possibility that civilization may be a huge technological success, but through methods that most people will find baffling, frightening, and disorienting — because, for one reason alone, the methods will keep changing. It may be like playing a game in which the rules are constantly changed without ever being made clear — a game from which one cannot withdraw without suicide, and in which one can never return to an older form of the game.”
— Alan Watts, “The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”
