- Link
- Amazon Link
- Creator(s)
- Alan Watts
- Publisher
- Pantheon Books
- Year
- 1951
- Started
- Monday, March 20, 2023
- Finished
- Friday, March 25, 2023
- Time Spent
- 4.5hrs
This book. On the Thursday before I finished the book I had planned on marking this a favorite, I really was enjoying it. Then in the penultimate chapter there was an inexcusable and unnecessary term used in an off-handed and throw away example. It really soured the book for me.
I think there are some thought provoking quotes/thoughts here, but I'm not sure if Alan Watts accidentally stumbled his way into these, or was actually passing along wisdom.
I dug into the author a little bit after finding disappointment, and was only further disappointed by what I found. Let's just say, in the future before buying and reading any books I will be doing a bit of research on their authors and contents.
I'll leave the quotes I noted during my read, cause I do think there is some wisdom in these words.
Quotes
Belief clings, but faith lets go.
But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear you do not understand it and you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and God.
For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.
Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give.
Clocks should not be smashed; they should simply be kept in their place. And they are very much out of place when we try to adapt our biological rhythms of eating, sleeping, evacuation, working, and relaxing to their uniform circular rotation.
To hold your breath is to lose your breath.
If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we already know, we may as well stay shut.
To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.