This is a curated selection of Alan Watts quotes on free will (personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Alan Watts’ books (Amazon).
Post Contents:
- Illusion Indoctrination
- Doer, Thinker, Controller, Experiencer
- Determinism, Fatalism, etc
- A Harmonious Happening
- Doing & Happening
- Victim/Puppet or Everything?
25+ Alan Watts Quotes on Free Will, The Doer, & The Happening
Illusion Indoctrination
“Zen is the essential insight that the individual will is a fiction … The insight of Zen is that there is no individual will.” — Alan Watts
“Society pulls this trick on every child from earliest infancy. In the first place, the child is taught that he is responsible, that he is a free agent, an independent origin of thoughts and actions—a sort of miniature First Cause … He can’t help accepting it, just as he can’t help accepting membership in the community where he was born. He has no way of resisting this kind of social indoctrination.” — Alan Watts
“Now, when your identity is defined by society, you cannot resist it. You don’t have the knowledge, you don’t have the wisdom, you don’t have the resources to understand that something’s being put over on you. You cannot but help believe the definition of you as a free agent. But you believe yourself to be a free agent as a result of not being free—that is to say, of being hopelessly unable to resist society’s identification of you.” — Alan Watts
“The innocent victim of this indoctrination cannot understand the paradox. He is being told that he must be free. An irresistible pressure is being put on him to make him believe that no such pressure exists. The community of which he is necessarily a dependent member defines him as an independent member.” — Alan Watts
“The self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force. This, in turn, arises from the definition of man as an independent agent—in the universe but not of it—saddled with the job of bending the world to his will.” — Alan Watts
Doer, Thinker, Controller, Experiencer
“When you look for doers as distinct from deeds, you can’t find them. Just as when you look for stuff underlying the patterns of nature: you can’t find any stuff. You just find more and more patterns.” — Alan Watts
“We come to feel that we really are separate things, that we are agents and sources of action, that we are actually responsible for what we do, that there is that ego-thing inside us, which is the initiator, the doer, the will behind all action … If you have understood clearly that you (as a separate will or a separate ego) are a fiction, then on the one hand you can’t change it, and on the other hand you can’t do nothing about it. Because there is no agent, no separate doer—either to do something about it, or to do nothing about it.” — Alan Watts
“When you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing … There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own.” — Alan Watts
“When you come to see that you can do nothing—that the play of thought, of feeling, et cetera just goes on by itself as a happening—then you are in a state which we will call ‘meditation.'” — Alan Watts
“This is another meaning of the Taoist idea of wĂş wĂ©i … The deeper meaning of this idea is that nothing acts of itself. There is, as it were, no such thing as an agent. For action is the nature of the whole thing.” — Alan Watts
Determinism, Fatalism, etc
“The determinists will tell you that the organism is the puppet of the environment; the free-willists will say that the organism can kick the environment around to a great extent. I want to say that there’s a single dance.” — Alan Watts
“Does the concept of will fit in? Not really, no. I will try to show you, practically, why it is an unnecessary concept; how you can have far more energy without using your will than you can with using it. See, the will implies a separation of man and nature, and therefore we ask the question, ‘Do we have free will?’ or, ‘Are we determined?’ That means: are you a bus or a tram? And both concepts are off the point, because both of them presuppose a fundamental separation of the individual from the universe.” — Alan Watts
“There is no determinism in this, just as there is no idea of old-fashioned free will. You learn to see that there is simply one behavior pattern working, which we will call the organism-environment. And if you understand that, you understand that you are this totality organism-environment.” — Alan Watts
“You live in a world which is determined/free … In a way, all your behavior is free if you define ‘you’ as the totality of the situation. On the other hand, all your behavior is determined if you define ‘you’ as some separate unit within this total situation.” — Alan Watts
“To be inevitably compelled by God is to be one with God, and that in this way, determinism becomes freedom.” — Alan Watts
A Harmonious Happening
“When you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening … This Happening may be called God, or the Tao, or the All-ah!” — Alan Watts
“…a very overwhelming feeling that everything that happens—everything I have ever done, everything anybody else has ever done—was part of a harmonious design. That there is no error at all…” — Alan Watts
“Human behavior—its ups and its downs—is no different in principle from the behavior of the clouds, or of the wind, or of dancing flames in the fireplace … We are just as much a part of the natural order as flames in the fire or stars in the sky.” — Alan Watts
“All you see is what goes on that is happening of itself. You’re breathing, the wind is blowing, the trees are waving, your blood is circulating, your nerves are tingling. It’s all going on of itself. That’s you. That’s the real you—the you that goes on of itself … When we stop, we find a world that is happening rather than being done—and that happening, as distinct from doing, is our fundamental Self.” — Alan Watts
“What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing … The real, deep down you is the whole universe, and it’s doing your living organism, and all its behavior.” — Alan Watts
Doing & Happening
“You become aware that this happening isn’t happening to you, because you are the happening. The only you there is is what’s going on … You get this odd feeling of a synthesis between doing and happening, in which doing is as much happening as happening, and happening is as much doing as doing.” — Alan Watts
“You begin to realize something which is rather difficult to describe: that what you call your experience is a ‘do-happening’ … You are both what you do and what happens to you.” — Alan Watts
“What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do … What you are is the universe—in fact, the works; what there is, and always has been, and always will be for ever and ever—performing an act called John Doe.” — Alan Watts
“When you decide, you don’t first decide to decide, and decide to decide to decide. You just decide, but that means there’s something else behind it … If decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide—an infinite regression … We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it … For a decision—the freest of my actions—just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.” — Alan Watts
“Realize the unity of the voluntary and the involuntary. That’s really what’s meant by doing the will of God: do the will.” — Alan Watts
Victim/Puppet or Everything?
“Instead of what you thought you were, there is a happening. And that happening is the whole universe going along. You are not its victim, you are not its puppet. Also, you are not pushing it around. There is neither fate nor free will. There is just this happening. There is nature going along, and that’s you.” — Alan Watts
“Man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is. Not otherwise.” — Alan Watts
“Supposing that God is the one playing all the parts … All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation.” — Alan Watts
“If you define yourself as the works, then nobody’s imposing on you. You’re not a victim. You’re doing it … Then you can say—with gusto—’I am responsible for this life. Whether comedy or tragedy—I did it.’ And it seems to me that that is a basis for behavior and going on which is more fundamentally joyous, and profitable, and great, than defining ourselves as miserable victims, or sinners, or what have you.” — Alan Watts
“If I define myself as the whole field of events—we’ll say the organism-environment field, which is the real me—then all the things that happen to me may be called my doing.” — Alan Watts
“In the moment of death many people undergo the curious sensation not only of accepting but of having willed everything that has happened to them … not willing in the imperious sense; it is the unexpected discovery of an identity between the willed and the inevitable.” — Alan Watts
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