This post highlights the best Alan Watts quotes on free will.
🔒 Premium members also have access to the companion posts: Alan Watts Synthesis: How to Answer the Ultimate Question of “Who am I?” & Alan Watts Synthesis: How to find Freedom beyond Free Will
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in “quotation marks” is directly from the original author.
- All content is organized into my own themes.
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Post Contents:
- Illusion Indoctrination
- Doer, Thinker, Controller, Experiencer
- Determinism, Fatalism, etc
- A Harmonious Happening
- Doing & Happening
- Voluntary & Involuntary
- Victim/Puppet or Everything?
25+ Alan Watts Quotes on Free Will, The Doer, & The Happening
Illusion Indoctrination
“(We’re) hoaxed into the illusion of being an independent, responsible source of actions.” — Alan Watts
“This self that you have imagined yourself to be is a māyā, an illusion, and you found out that it is because you found out that it’s impotent. It can’t do something. There’s really something that has to be done, but you can’t do it. Also, you can’t help by not doing it. The ego is incapable of either because it is a hoax. It’s a very interesting hoax, and it’s been worthwhile having this drama, but drama it was.” — 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. It is constantly reinforced with rewards and punishments. It is built into the basic structure of the language he is learning.” — 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
“Our society is defining the individual with a double-bind, commanding him to be free and separate from the world, which he is not, for otherwise the command would not work. Under the circumstances, it works only in the sense of implanting an illusion of separateness, just as the commands of a hypnotist can create illusions.” — 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. No amount of preaching and moralizing will tame the type of man so defined, for the hypnotic hallucination of himself as something separate from the world renders him incapable of seeing that life is a system of geological and biological cooperation.” — Alan Watts
“The very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do—that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused.” — Alan Watts
“The adult point of view involves the fiction that ‘I’ exist as an agent independently of everything else that’s going on. And so ask, ‘How can I do this?’ And the important thing is to realize that the feeling of there being this isolated ‘I’ is part of the game, and it has no fundamental reality—except as a convention. And so long as that isn’t clear, we’re confused … If we can see the first part, which is that the ego is purely fictitious … then, immediately, it is clear that what we have called ourselves, what we have thought of ourselves, isn’t able to do anything at all. There follows this kind of silence in which there is nothing to do except watch what happens. But what is happening is watching itself; there is nobody apart from it, watching it. And so we get into the state of meditation—or, as I prefer to call it, contemplation.” — Alan Watts
“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
Doer, Thinker, Controller, Experiencer
“You can’t control your thoughts, you can’t control your feelings, because there is no controller.” — Alan Watts
“There’s no ‘we’ that dances, there’s just the dancing.” — Alan Watts
“You, as ego, cannot change what you are feeling, and you cannot, effectively, try not to change it. There is simply and only what is happening, including those particular thoughts, images, and tensions which you customarily attributed to the phantom thinker and doer … Just as this phantom cannot actually will or do anything, it cannot get rid of itself.” — 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
“If there are deeds but no doer, experiencing but no experiencer, what is reality? What is life? After all, we always thought we knew what pattern was by contrast with stuff, substance with form. But now the contrast has disappeared—we are left with the deed alone, no agent; the form alone, no stuff.” — Alan Watts
“This is another meaning of the Taoist idea of wú wéi … 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
“We always have a funny idea that to get a verb, that is to say to get action, you have to have an agent. Now this is the most ridiculous idea conceivable. How can a noun start a verb? How can a thing start an event? Because there’s no action in a thing. Action can only come from action.” — Alan Watts
“It’s a game of hide-and-seek. Really, when you ask the question, ‘Who is doing the chasing?’ you are still working under the assumption that every verb has to have a subject. That when there is an action there has to be a doer. That’s what I would call a grammatical convention, leading to what Whitehead called the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Like the famous it in ‘It is raining.’ So when you say, ‘There cannot be knowing without a knower,’ this is merely saying no more than, ‘There can’t be a verb without a subject,’ and that’s a grammatical rule, and not a law of nature. Anything you can think of as a thing, as a noun, can be described by a verb. And there are languages which do that. It sounds awkward in English, but face it: 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
“The pretense that things are separable from each other is necessary in order to think and talk about them. The next thing we have to pretend is that there are agents. That, in other words, the human individual is a separate thing, originating action and responsible for it. But in this conception of the completely relative universe, action does not originate at any particular spot. It’s a property of the whole field, as it were, focusing action at these spots. But for purposes of social intercourse we have to pretend that we are individual agents from whom action comes … 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. And so this situation seems, as it were, paralyzing. If you can’t do, and if you can’t don’t, what’s going to happen? But the point of this is that that paralysis is a realization of the unreality of the individual agent.” — Alan Watts
“A kind of a basic problem we’ve got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say separate things, or separate events. That that is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you’re going to have no further problems … There is no such thing as a single, solitary event. The only possible single event is all events whatsoever. That could be regarded as the only possible atom; the only possible single thing is everything.” — 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’. And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal, symbolic chatter going on in the skull—don’t try and get rid of it, because that will again produce the illusion that there’s a controller. Just: it goes on, it goes on, it goes on, and finally it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there’s a silence. And this is a deeper level of meditation.” — 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. Does it kick you around or do you kick it around? And if you think in that way, you lose energy. Just as my finger would lose energy if I separated it from the hand.” — 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. And so you are moving with it in the same way that all the organs of your physical body are moving together, as all the cells of the brain cooperate. You don’t have to make them cooperate, you don’t have to tell them to, you don’t have to arrange a treaty of some kind. They just do so.” — Alan Watts
“In this whole question now of who’s responsible, we get another question coming up: are we again, in human behavior, going to settle for free will or for determinism? I mean, are you responsible for what you do or aren’t you? And we think that there’s a choice here; that we can decide one way or the other. But it so turns out that we have here exactly the same situation as space and solid, and this particle and wave. From one point of view you can look at the situation and say: oh yes, people obviously don’t really do anything, because the ego as an agent or as a source of action is fictitious. Yet, on the other hand, it seems quite apparent that people do do things. And from a certain point of view you have the perfectly clear sensation of making a choice one way or the other when you perform an action. It isn’t that this sensation is simply an illusion. It’s more complex than that. It is, you see, that you live in a world which is determined/free, just like space/solid. And this is only thinkable and soluble if you come to a still deeper understanding that the reason why you have the simultaneous sensation of acting freely and being determined is a result of your having made a distinction long ago between yourself and your environment. And then you wonder how the devil to put them together again. Is it you that influences the environment? Or is it the environment that influences you? You have forgotten, you see, that you and the environment are one. And that is a sensation, you see, completely absent from most of us, only regained in moments of deep inspiration. So that, 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. So we might say at a very deep level (deeper than the ego): you are responsible for all that happens. Whereas, at a superficial level of definition of the ego, you are hardly responsible at all. Now, we’ve got these two feelings mixed up. And what we are doing in practice is this: we are confusing the deep feeling of being responsible with the superficial sensation of being an ego.” — Alan Watts
“Decision to do this or that, and the consequent physical actions, happen of themselves like everything else. Free action is certainly not caused by a purely abstract ‘I.’ It emerges from the total intelligence of the organism, in the same way as the growth of the brain and the digestion of food, and it will employ conscious reasoning in situations where reasoning is an appropriate tool. This would perhaps be called biologically or physically ‘determined’ action by those who separate the organism from the rest of the universe, and see it ‘obeying’ or ‘responding’ to ‘drives’ which have first been defined as external to itself. But the individual-and-universe has no external or extraneous determinant. The individual may be seen as constrained by natural processes only when viewed out of context as something in but not of its whole environment.” — Alan Watts
“The point is this: we don’t have a system of nature which is either deterministic or voluntaristic. The relationship of the individual to the environment is not one of the individual as some little thing in the environment, which is moved by the environment and responds to the environment passively. Nor, oppositely, do we have a situation in which the individual is a center of activity that, all of its own, to some extent alters and changes the environment. Both of these opinions are based on lack of awareness or ignorance—ignore-ance—that the behavior of the individual and the behavior of the environment are the same process.” — Alan Watts
“The minute you see what it implies—that there aren’t separate events, there’s one event—then the determinism idea completely vanishes. Because to establish a deterministic point of view you have to have two factors: the one that determines and the one that is determined—the active and the passive. Something that is pushed around by an external force. But now we’re in a position where there isn’t anything to be pushed around.” — Alan Watts
“That’s a difficult thing for many Western people, because it suggests to them a kind of fatalism. It suggests that the individual is nothing more than the puppet of cosmic forces. So, in the same way, when your own inner sense of identity changes from being ‘the separate individual’ to being ‘what the entire cosmos is doing at this place,’ you become not a puppet, but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever.” — Alan Watts
“The way an ecologist describes human behavior is as an action: 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. This is not what you might call a fatalistic or deterministic idea. You see, you might be a fatalist if you think that you are a sort of puppet which life pushes around. You’re separate from life, but life dominates you. That’s fatalism. But in the point of view I’m expressing, the real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real, deep down you is the whole universe, and it’s doing your living organism, and all its behavior. It’s expressing it as a singer sings a song.” — Alan Watts
“When you discover that everything you do is completely determined, then you suddenly have to wake up to the fact that the only real you is whatever it is that’s determining what you do.” — 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 truly consistent fatalist will be forced to the conclusion that he is God and therefore has complete freedom of will.” — 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, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it … 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
“When the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that—in this sense—self is other and here is there.” — Alan Watts
“In the metaphysical sphere the mystic is the one who feels that everything that happens is in some way harmonious, is in some way right, is in some way an integral part of the universe. Now, when we transplant or translate that into the moral sphere, the sphere of human conduct, the equivalent is this: there are no wrong feelings … This is the most releasing thing that anybody can possibly understand: that your inner feeling is never wrong.” — Alan Watts
“The moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, you realize as the first thing how harmonious it all is. Because your organism is a miracle of harmony. All this thing functioning together. Even those corpuscles and creatures that are fighting each other in the blood stream and eating each other up. If they weren’t doing that, you wouldn’t be healthy. So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level. And you begin to realize that, and you begin to be aware, too, that the discords of your life, and the discords of people’s life—which are a fight at one level—at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is, at that level, as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves. The markings in marble. The way a cat moves. And that this world is really okay. Can’t be anything else, because otherwise it couldn’t exist.” — Alan Watts
“Sometimes, when you change your level of magnification, it’s the other way around—as, for example, when you examine the constitution of human blood, you find an enormous dog-eat-dog warfare going on of cells eating cells, bacilli of various kinds warring on each other and on the component elements of the organism. But what this turmoil and conflict adds up to at a larger level is the ongoing health of the body composed of all these tiny elements. Logically speaking, you see, health, harmonious functioning, is something totally opposed and exclusive of warfare. But the contradiction exists only if you suppose that these two things are on the same level of magnification. War at one level is peace at another. And so, isn’t it possible to approach the problems of freedom and determinism in rather the same way? That what is free at one level, or voluntary, is determined at another, and that the truth of the matter depends upon the level about which we’re speaking?” — 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. As you watch the pattern of the dancing flames they never do anything vulgar. Their artistry is always perfect. Ultimately, it is the same with human beings. We are just as much a part of the natural order as flames in the fire or stars in the sky.” — Alan Watts
“This idea of nature—that which happens of itself so—is a process which is fundamentally not under our control, which is happening all on its own just as our breathing is happening all on its own and just as our heartbeat is happening all on its own. And the fundamental thought of Taoist philosophy is that this self-so process has to be trusted.” — 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
“When your heart beats, you don’t plan it, it happens of itself. When you breathe, you can pretend that you are breathing, but most the time you’re not thinking about it and your lungs breathe of themselves.” — Alan Watts
“You find you can’t control—not really—your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, all the processes going on inside you and outside you that are happening; there’s nothing you can do about it. So then, what follows? Well, there’s only one thing that follows: you watch what’s going on. You see, feel this whole thing happening, and then suddenly you find—to your amazement—that you can perfectly well get up, walk over to the table, pick up a glass of milk and drink it. There’s nothing standing in your way for doing that. You can still act, you can still move, you can still go on in a rational way, but you’ve suddenly discovered that you’re not what you thought you were. You’re not this ego pushing and shoving things inside a bag of skin. You feel yourself, now, in a new way, as the whole world—which includes your body, everything that you experience—is going along.” — Alan Watts
“The so-called ‘Outside World’ and the so-called ‘Inside World’ come together. They are a happening. Your thoughts are a happening just like the sounds going on outside, and everything is simply a happening and all you’re doing is watching it.” — Alan Watts
“My self contains all these factors that, we could say, the body is doing: the circulation of the blood, the breathing, the electrical activity of the nerves—all this is me, but I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know how it came together, I don’t know how it’s constructed. And yet I do all that, if it is true, also, to say ‘I breathe. I walk. I think. I am conscious.’ I don’t know how I manage to be, but I do it in the same way as I grow my hair. So I must, therefore, locate the center of me—my I-ing—at a deeper level than my ego, which is my image or idea of myself. But how deep do we go? We can say the body is the I, but the body comes out of the rest of the universe, comes out of all its energy. So it’s the universe that’s I-ing. The universe I-s in the same way that a tree apples or that a star shines. And the center of the apple-ing is the tree, the center of the shining is the star, and so the basic center—or Self—of the I-ing—which is called in this case Alan Watts, which is only a name for this particular physical organism; flowering from, shining out of this particular environment—makes the center of all this I-ing the eternal universe … This particular organism is an I-ing being done by the whole universe.” — 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 can look at the process from two points of view. You can look at it from the point of view of ‘It’s all happening to me,’ or you can look at it from the point of view ‘I’m doing it.’ These are just two poles of two ways of looking at the same thing.” — Alan Watts
“What you do is what happens to you. And what happens to you is what you do. Because you can’t tell what you mean by ‘doing’ unless something happens to you to contrast it with and vice versa.” — 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. So that you have a little game in which you play that what happens to you, that you’re not responsible for. That’s not you, see? You’re only responsible for this side of it. And then you can compete with the other side … Everyone’s in his true place. Everybody, in other words—put it in what language you will—is a manifestation of the divine, playing this game, that game, the other game. And your not knowing it (if you don’t know it) is part of the game. Makes it all the more fun.” — Alan Watts
“When you make a decision it happens … ‘of itself,’ ‘naturally,’ ‘spontaneously.'” — Alan Watts
“We don’t really even know how we manage to be conscious, how we actually think, and how we actually make decisions. We do these things, indeed, but the processes of the order of the physical body which underlie them are completely mysterious to us.” — Alan Watts
“When you describe human behavior … or anything you want to describe, you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately, you must also describe the behavior of its environment … Your behavior is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you … You are something that the whole world is doing.” — Alan Watts
“The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and exactly the same way the whole universe is doing each one of us.” — 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
“You do it, and it does you. But that’s a clumsy way of talking about it: it’s all one process, a unified process.” — Alan Watts
“Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment.” — Alan Watts
“You are your thoughts and your feelings, and they’re running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go. You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Still growing your hair. Still seeing and hearing. Are you doing that? I mean, is breathing something that you do? Do you see? I mean, do you organize the operations of your eyes and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It’s a happening. It happens. So you can feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening, your thinking is happening, your feeling is happening, your hearing, your seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The sun is happening shining. There it is, all this happening. And may I introduce you: this is yourself. This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that’s the way you function. You function by happening—that is to say: by spontaneous occurrence.” — Alan Watts
“When we come down to it: you think you decide things, but you don’t know how you do it. How do you open and close your hand? You can decide, ‘I will now open my hand’ and do it, but you don’t know how it’s done. And yet, in a sense, you do know how it’s done, because I say, ‘I know how to open my hand.’ But you don’t know in words. You can’t explain it. Still less can you explain how you see, still less can you explain how you are conscious. How are you an ego? Well, you don’t know. Because the springs of being conscious, of being an ego, are outside the surveillance of consciousness. They are somehow underneath. And that lets the cat out of the bag at once, because you see that what is ‘I’ is something very, very much deeper than the superficial consciousness. And what you call ‘I’ in the sense of the voluntary willing center, ego, has very little to do with it. You are just a watchman on top of the mast, or a radar on a ship that is scanning the environment by conscious attention, looking out for trouble or looking for food. The real you is much too complicated to think about.” — Alan Watts
“I feel no longer any boundary between what I do and what happens to me. I feel that everything that’s going on is my doing, just as my breathing is. Is your breathing voluntary or involuntary? Do you do it or does it happen to you? See, you can feel it both ways. But you feel everything like breathing. And it isn’t as if you had become a puppet. There is no longer any separate ‘you.’ There is just this great happening going on. And if you have the name in your background you will say, ‘This happening is God,’ or the will of God, or the doing of God. Or, if you don’t have that word in your background, you will say with the Chinese, ‘It is the flowing of the Tao.’ Or if you’re a Hindu, you will say, ‘It is the māyā of Brahman.'” — Alan Watts
Voluntary & Involuntary
“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
“In the world, everything is happening all together everywhere at once, and meanwhile we, with our myopic little minds, are working it out step by step … Here’s the problem: because of our myopia, because of the way we’ve restricted consciousness to focus upon just that certain little area of experience that we call voluntary action, that’s ‘us’ and everything else happens to us.” — Alan Watts
“Think. Behind what you call ‘voluntary’, you decide: ‘Having reviewed the evidence, I’ve decided it would be best to buy this brand of detergent’. Made a decision. How did you make a decision? ‘Well, I reviewed the evidence, added up the price, and I came to the…’ Yeah, I know all that, but how did you work the machinery—the computer in your head? You know, you pushed all these buttons, but what’s underneath the buttons? ‘Well, I don’t know, I never looked’. So, that involuntary growth called the brain underlies your voluntary decision. 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.” — Alan Watts
“The sense of subjective isolation is also based on a failure to see the relativity of voluntary and involuntary events. This relativity is easily felt by watching one’s breath, for by a slight change of viewpoint it is as easy to feel that ‘I breathe’ as that ‘It breathes me.’ We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide—an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. We are free to decide because decision ‘happens.’ We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it. In fact, it is neither voluntary nor involuntary. To ‘get the feel’ of this relativity is to find another extraordinary transformation of our experience as a whole, which may be described in either of two ways. I feel that I am deciding everything that happens, or, I feel that everything, including my decisions, is just happening spontaneously. For a decision—the freest of my actions—just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.” — Alan Watts
“Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world? You can define yourself, you see—if you identify you with what you call the voluntary system of the nerves, and say, ‘Only that’s me’—and that’s really a rather limited amount of my total performance; what I do voluntarily—then you’ve defined yourself as the victim in the game. And so you are able to feel that life was a trap. Something else—whether it was God, or whether it was fate, or whether it was ‘the big mechanism,’ ‘the system’—imposed this on you. And you can say, ‘Poor little me.’ But you can equally well, and with just as much justification, define yourself not only as what you do voluntarily, but also what you do involuntarily; that’s you, too. Do you beat your heart, or don’t you? Or does it just happen to you? And if you define yourself as the works, then nobody’s imposing on you. You’re not a victim. You’re doing it. Of course, you can’t explain how you do it in words, because words are too clumsy and it’d take too long to say. You’d get bored with it. But actually, 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
“The problem is this: we identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. We have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary, and we feel in control of those. And then over against that, there is all those things that are involuntary. But the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary. Because, for example, when you move your hand, you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask yourself: how do you decide? When you decide to open your hand, do you first decide to decide? You don’t, do you? You just decide. And how do you do that? And if you don’t know how you do it, is it voluntary or involuntary? Let’s consider breathing. You can feel that you breathe deliberately; you can control your breath. But when you don’t think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary or involuntary? And so we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self: that much of my activity which I feel I do. And that, then, doesn’t include breathing most of the time, it doesn’t include the heartbeats, it doesn’t include the activity of the glands, it doesn’t include digestion, it doesn’t include how you shape your bones, circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now, if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find that your body knows that you are one with the universe. In other words, that the so-called ‘involuntary’ circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out that it’s you who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that’s going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean, your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos—and it’s all you. Only: you’re playing the game that you’re only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there are—in physical reality—no such things as separate events.” — Alan Watts
“You have the feeling of yourself. But the feeling of self depends on there being at the same time a contrast: the feeling of other. This self has a certain sensation of being in control of life to some extent through voluntary action. The will seems to have a certain freedom. And yet, on the other hand, there are limits to that. And it seems in the end life sweeps us away, and we are overwhelmed by the involuntary. And yet, the voluntary keeps popping up. New voluntaries come into the world with every baby. So, you couldn’t have the experience you call being a voluntarily acting self without the contrast of the involuntary happening. Now, do you want to be without the involuntary happening? You want to get rid of that? Alright. If you get rid of it, you won’t have the experience of the voluntary self. Or would you like to turn it the other way around? Would you like to have the experience of no voluntary self, and on the other hand everything just happened? Well, then you say, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that.’ Because then I would feel at first that I was floating. See? That I had no further responsibilities. That I was just walking on air. And we do get that feeling sometimes. If you take the ideas of determinism and fatalism to their final conclusion, you do have that sense of freedom from all responsibility; freedom from worry and care. And you float along for a while, but it wears off. You don’t somehow seem to be able to follow out that philosophy consistently, especially if you have children. And somehow a society begins to push on you to be responsible, as it pushes on children to be responsible. And so this nagging duality keeps coming back: that I cannot realize the nicely responsible condition of involuntary behavior unless I have the contrast of the possibility of the voluntary and vice versa. And what does that mean? Obviously it means that these two aspects, or sides, of our experience—which we can call the voluntary and the involuntary, the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the self and the other—although appearing to be two, are indeed one. Because you can’t have one without the other. And when that state of affairs arises, you know at once that there’s a conspiracy: that two things which look as different as different can be are, for that very reason, the same. Now, you can detect—even under those actions of yours which you call the voluntary—the voluntary movement of the muscles or of the mind—that there are processes which are not voluntary. You do not will your blood to circulate. You do not control by intention the synapses in your nervous system. And yet, you would be incapable of any voluntary action unless those involuntary processes were going on. So you see these two things go together.” — Alan Watts
Victim/Puppet or Everything?
“When you wake up, you see, and discover that all this ‘to do’ wasn’t you—what you thought was you—but was the entire works, which we can just call ‘it.’ That you’re ‘it,’ and that ‘it’ is it, and everything is ‘it,’ and ‘it’ does all things that are done—then that is a great surprise.” — Alan Watts
“A person who is under illusion, māyā, thinks of himself basically as a victim—someone caught in a trap, somebody subject to fate, the will of God, or whatever you want to call it—who got involved in life passively. That’s why I use the word ‘victim.’ And he has, therefore, the sensation of his consciousness as being a kind of passive, but nevertheless very delicate and tender, receptor or percipient of everything that goes on. So that life in general occurs to you, it happens to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And you say, ‘Well, it’s awful! I can’t get myself out of this trap.'” — Alan Watts
“The Hindu thinks in a different way. He feels that the creator, or the actor, is the author of both the good and the evil. For the reasons that I explained it to you, you have to have the evil for there to be a story. And in any case, it isn’t as if the creator had made evil and made someone else its victim. It isn’t like saying, ‘God creates the evil as well as the good, and poor little us are his puppets, and he inflicts evil upon us.’ The Hindu says, ‘Nobody experiences pain except the godhead. You are not some separate little puppet which is being kicked around by omnipotence. You are omnipotence in disguise.’ And so there is no victim of this; no helpless, defenseless, poor little thing. Even the baby with syphilis is the dreaming godhead.” — Alan Watts
“What you do is also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its behavior as much as its behavior is your behavior. It’s mutual. We could say it is transactional. You are not a puppet which your environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet which you push around. They go together. They act together.” — Alan Watts
“The self that you think you are doesn’t exist. In other words, the ego has no reality, except in the sense that the equator has reality. It’s a social institution … When we find out that it doesn’t exist, the problem is solved … See, you cannot do anything about it, and you cannot do nothing about it. Because there isn’t any ‘you’ to do it, or not to do it—not in the sense in which we ordinarily think of ‘you,’ of one’s self. That is an abstraction. It cannot do something to transform itself, it cannot do nothing to transform itself. But when that is understood, the problem is solved. Because then, you see, what you find out is that although you, as the ego, do not exist, nevertheless you’re still breathing, still circulating your blood, your hair is still growing, life is still going on, the wind is still blowing. And you find out then that, 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
“You can’t transform yourself, you can’t make yourself sane, you can’t make yourself loving, you can’t make yourself unselfish—and yet it’s absolutely necessary that we be that way. If we are going to hand over the direction of nature to nature, which is what it comes to, it’s absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves, and it can’t be done—not by anything that we call ‘doing’, ‘acting’, ‘willing’, or even just ‘accepting’ things. You can’t do it. Why? Because you don’t really exist as that kind of a separate ego or personality. It’s just an idea based on a phony feeling … You couldn’t realize ‘self’, and ‘control’, and ‘will’ unless there was something other ‘out of control’ and instead of will ‘won’t’. It’s the two together only that produces the sensation that you call ‘having a personal identity.'” — Alan Watts
“How does man follow the will of God if the will of man is perverse? The theologians say you cannot do this without having divine grace, or the power, to follow the will of God. How, then, do you get grace? Why is grace given to some and not to others? If I cannot follow the will of God by my own effort because my will is selfish, how will my will—which is selfish—be transformed into an unselfish will? If I cannot do it because I am already the selfish will, then grace must do it. If grace has not already done it, why not? Because I didn’t accept it? But by definition I had no power to accept it because my will was selfish. Must I then become a Calvinist and say that only those people who are predestined to receive grace will be able to live the good life? Then we come back to the inadmissible position that people who live evil lives and do not get grace—because they are not predestined to it out of the infinite wisdom of the Godhead—then God Himself must be held responsible for their evil deeds. And so that is a nice little tangle.” — Alan Watts
“If you really felt with your whole organism, instead of just with that part of it called conscious attention, you would become aware of this flowing fact. And you would get a very strange feeling which at first might frighten you. It is possible of course to have this feeling. And the feeling is like this: You would not be quite sure how to interpret it. You might feel that you yourself were doing everything else that’s happening. That would be one way of feeling it. The other way of feeling it would be that you are doing nothing at all but that everything else is doing you. And you would feel completely passive like a puppet on the end of strings. Although on the other hand, if you got the feeling that you were doing it all, you would feel like God Almighty. It is very easy for our consciousness to slip into this state of sensation … One has to be very careful about this feeling because it’s enormously easy to misinterpret it—either as being omnipotent, being God in the personal literal sense, or as being helpless and merely driven. Now, what should be understood is that both these ways of feeling are right, only they must both be taken together. To be simultaneously omnipotent and helpless. These are two poles, opposite poles of one and the same state. Because the message that is coming through—and that we find difficulty in understanding because it’s contrary to our common sense, contrary to our whole history and conditioning—is: you as a living organism, and all that is going on in your environment, constitute a single process.” — 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
“You may think, ‘Well, am I just the puppet of a happening? The mere passive witness of something that’s going on completely beyond my control?’ Or, on the other hand, ‘Am I really doing everything that’s going along? Well… if I were, I should be God. And that would be very embarrassing because I would be in charge of everything. That would be a terribly responsible position.’ The truth of the matter—as you will see it—is that both things are true. You can see it that everything is happening to you, and on the other hand, you’re doing everything.” — Alan Watts
“It is not that your own individual organism is the puppet of everything else, responding to it as a billiard ball responds to being hit by a cue. It is not also that you, as an individual, are an independent source of energy which pushes the world around. Both these views are based on a false assumption that the individual organism is really separate from the world; that’s the false assumption.” — 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
“In the giving up of our own will we do not surrender power, we gain power. Because in the giving up of our own will we are, as it were, making ourselves an empty channel through which a greater power than our own can pass through.” — Alan Watts
“The consequence of this is to learn to act and behave in terms of this vision of the world. Not as your acting upon the world, not as it acting upon you, but as the unfoldment of a process which, as you understand it, you become more intelligent and act more intelligently. Intelligence is a function of the degree to which you realize that your behavior is one with the behavior of the rest of the world.” — Alan Watts
“Man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is. Not otherwise.” — 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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