Alan Watts Quotes About Ego

Quotes about: Ego

• Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be

  Alan Watts

  Letting Go, Ego, Purpose

• Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

  Alan Watts

  Reality, Play, Ideas

  Alan Watts (1999). “Buddhism the Religion of No-Religion”, p.29, Tuttle Publishing

• The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

  Alan Watts

  Independent, Knowing, Ego

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.10, Souvenir Press

• The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

  Alan Watts

  Focus, Ego, Attention

  Alan Watts (2017). “Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek”, p.21, Sounds True

• The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

  Alan Watts

  Ego, Ego Trip

  "Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969".

• The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Ego, Mind

• One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.

  Alan Watts

  Men, Ego, Mind

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.66, New World Library

• I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

  Alan Watts

  Ego, Skins, Bags

• The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

  Alan Watts

  People, Effort, Ego

• The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

  Alan Watts

  Rejection, Ego, Identity

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

• To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

  Alan Watts

  Ego, Life Is, Inches

  "Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety".

• Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Games, Perfection

• But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.

  Alan Watts

  Letting Go, Effort, Ego

  Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

• The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

  Alan Watts

  Ego, Tests, Hallucinations

  Alan Watts (2001). “Eastern Wisdom”, Mjf Books

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