“Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.”
-Alan Watts quotes about meditation
Meditation has been shown to be one of the most powerful practices you can do for improving your life. When you meditate, you allow yourself to be in the moment and focus on your breath. This can help calm your mind and allow you to think more clearly.
Alan Watts was an influential philosopher and meditation teacher who believed that meditation was one of the most important tools you can have for achieving peace and happiness in your life. As he said, “Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”
If you’re looking for some inspiring quotes about meditation, you’re in luck! Alan Watts is a famous philosopher and author who has written extensively on the topic of mind and thought. Here are five of his most famous quotes about meditation.
Top Alan Watts Meditation Quotes:
1.
“You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.”
– Alan Watts
2.
“Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
– Alan Watts
3.
“Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”
– Alan Watts
4.
“People become concerned with being more humble than other people.”
– Alan Watts
5.
“Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.”
– Alan Watts
6.
“There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to “get culture” or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.”
– Alan Watts
7.
“If you can’t meditate in a boiler room, you can’t meditate.”
– Alan Watts
8.
“We are all as much extraordinary phenomena 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.”
– Alan Watts
9.
“Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.”
– Alan Watts
10.
“We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.”
– Alan Watts
11.
“When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”
– Alan Watts
Alan Watts Books About Meditation:
Alan Watts was great on the subject of meditation and wrote several books on the topic. Check out some of his best reads below:
1. Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation
ISBN: 1577312147, 9781577312147
Length: 128 pages
2. Meditation
ISBN: 0515041084, 9780515041088
Length: 63 pages
3. Alan Watts Teaches Meditation
ISBN: 1559272139, 9781559272131
Length: 90 pages
4. Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek
ISBN: 1591791650, 9781591791652
Length: 192 pages
5. The Way of Zen
ISBN: 0375705104 , 9780375705106Length: 236 pages
Conclusion
We have discussed Alan Watts quotes about meditation. As you can see, understanding how meditation works can make it easier to master a practice that has shown amazing results for thousands of people over the years!
With so many benefits of meditation such as stress relief, improved concentration and even reduced anxiety levels, it is safe to say that this practice has been around for ages! However, do not get too carried away with the effects because if done without proper guidance or training it can lead to mental issues like schizophrenia.
So before going full throttle at your first session of mindfulness at home, make sure you read up on how to meditate in terms of the right mindset and techniques.
Hope you have learned something new about meditation by reading these quotes. Please share if you enjoyed them!
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