The Art of Contemplation by Alan Watts (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of The Art of Contemplation by Alan Watts which is a short book written in his own handwriting:

The Art of Contemplation book by Alan Watts

🔒 Premium members have access to the companion post: Alan Watts Synthesis: How to Answer the Ultimate Question of “Who am I?”

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

Contemplation
Polar Vision
Center-Surround
Ego
Tao

**Individual & Interdependence: The Art of Contemplation by Alan Watts (Book Summary)**

Contemplation

“Contemplation as a particular ‘exercise’, done in a formal way, is simply the ritual enjoyment of that basic awareness of what is happening now which goes on always from moment-to-moment.”

“If you have understood all this, you are simply aware of what is happening now, and we might call this state meditation or, better, contemplation. But it is not that you are something which is just watching what happens. ‘What happens’ is just using your organism to watch itself. It is the universe centering as a particular being.”
“If this becomes clear, the effort to transform one’s own mind should collapse, and along with it the whole illusion that one is a separate center of consciousness to which experience happens and for which these happenings are problematic. This collapse would then become the state of contemplation, the realization that all is One.”
“The good of contemplation is contemplation—not some future result that is may bring … Contemplation ceases as soon as there is any seeking for results.”
“In contemplation, this view is as real and self-evident as breathing, and enables the problems of mundane life to be seen in their true perspective.”
“In contemplation, man discovers himself as inseparable from the cosmos as a whole in both its positive and negative aspects, its appearances and disappearances.”

Polar Vision

“To understand the reciprocity or mutual interdependence of polar opposites—being and nothing, center and surround, self and other, doing and happening—might be called polar vision.”

“The whole system is symbiotic in principle, for no individual can appear, for however short a time, except in mutual interdependence with the whole.”
“The individual is something which the whole is doing, and the whole is something which the individual is doing simultaneously. This relationship is not ordinarily felt or recognized in human consciousness, fascinated as it is by the apparent independence of the individual from the whole.”
“Not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of life, and not to see the unity of being and non-being is the fear of death.”
“Emptiness is the essential prerequisite for every form of being.”
“It is not simply that we are subordinate parts of the system, but that the entire system is ourself in its full and only true sense … All the wonders of nature are no other than oneself.”
“It is really incorrect to think of nature as controlled, self-controlled, or uncontrolled, for the idea of control always involves a duality in which one element commands and the other obeys, or refuses to obey. The pattern or order of nature depends on no such division, since cause and effect, action and reaction, are simply two aspects or poles of a single process, or two ways of looking at it. No cause is separate from its effect … Nothing is really explained by its cause or motivation, for we find only causes behind causes until we can pursue them no longer.”
“Free action is certainly not caused by a purely abstract ‘I’. It emerges from the total intelligence of the organism … 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.”

Center-Surround

“The individual is an aperture through which the whole energy of the universe is aware of itself, a vortex of vibrations in which it realizes itself as man or beast, flower or star—not alone, but as central to all that surrounds it. These centers are not, as may seem, apart from their surroundings, but stand in mutual relationship to them … It is thus that each center anywhere implies all other centers elsewhere.”

“The individual is not, therefore, only a center. He is the entire surround centered at this time or this place.”
“One cannot experience doing except in relation to happening, or self (center) except in relation to other (surround). Thus nothing other than oneself is quite other, for between self and other, doing and happening, there is, again, the same kind of unity which exists between magnetic poles, or between the crest and the trough of a wave.”
“We confuse what we actually are, as center-and-surround or organism-and-environment, with an idea, concept, or image of ourselves from which the interdependence of self and other is absent. This image we call the ‘I’, the ego, the person, or the subject (as distinct from the object). We consider it as the doer of our deeds, the thinker of our thoughts, and the feeler of our feelings.”

Ego

“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.”
“The fiction of the isolated ego or person as the real individual has been implanted to stimulate the feeling of creatureliness and the fear of God.”
“In such an emergency it is necessary to take the risks of exposing the illusion of the person and all its works, and to allow what has been esoteric to become generally known.”
“Egoless people have very strong characters.”

Tao

“This unobstructed flow is the Tao, the way or course of nature, and is also what is meant by the state of non-attachment—a spontaneous unforced and unblocked flowing of life.”

“The Tao flows without obstruction whether we know it or not, for the not knowing is no more than a variant pattern of the flow.”
Zen verse: “If you understand, things are just as they are; If you do not understand, things are just as they are.”
“A time when the objective seems clearly unattainable is a time ripe for the unmasking of that ego—itself the persona-mask which conceals the splendors of our Original Face.”
“When there is a crack in the Cosmic Egg, Buddha is about to be born.”

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