3 Alan Watts Quotes For Greater Inner Peace

Become present, eliminate mental chatter, and take control of your karma.

Focus On What’s Great About The Present Moment

“But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
― Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

This quote covers a lot in just a couple lines. It refers to the essence of how we manifest things in our life: we project our outer world as a reflection of our inner state. In other words, everything we experience in life is really just an effect of our beliefs, feelings, and behaviors.

If we want our reality to be a certain way — say, filled with love and success — then we have to become a source of those things from within. Telling ourselves 100 reasons everyday why we suck and haven’t gotten enough done is definitely not going to fill our world with love and success. Instead, we can practice gratefulness for what we do love, and seize what small opportunities we already have in front of us.

I want to bring particular attention to the last part of the quote:

“…no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

In the same sense that one cannot guilt oneself into a loving state, one cannot create a beautiful future by terrorizing oneself in the present. Your future self will be good at what you practice today. If you practice self-destructive unending productivity for some fantasy future, you’ll only know how to do self-destructive unending productivity.

The real key is: the present is all you have or ever will have. What can you do to be proud of yourself now? Be kind to your future self with plans and productivity that also serve your present self.

Truth Is Experience, Not Words

“We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the…