Nonduality.com: List of Teachers
https://www.nonduality.com/gurus.htm
A Short List of Books for the Up and Coming
Some Written Works That May Help Get the Young up to Speed
The Prince by Machiavelli
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Candide by Voltaire
Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Dune by Frank Herbert
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
King Rat by James Clavell
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Demian by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life by Gail Sheehy
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A Short List of Books for the Up and Coming
Some Written Works That May Help Get the Young up to Speed
http://thestillnessbeforetime.com/ashortlistofbooksfortheupandcoming.pdf
© Michael J. Holshouser 2019
World Rights Reserved
Wikipedia: Alan Watts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts
The Library of Consciousness: Alan Watts
https://www.organism.earth/library/author/alan-watts
BrainyQuote: Alan Watts Quotes
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/alan-watts-quotes
Google Search: Alan Watts Videos
https://www.google.com/search?q=alan+watts+videos&oq=Alan+Watts+Videos&aqs=edge.0.0i512l2j0i22i30l6j69i64.633j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone. The moment is the 'door of heaven,' the 'straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life,' because there is no room in it for the separate 'I' ... Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between 'I' and 'now' has vanished -- when there is just this 'now' and nothing else.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
No work or 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.
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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.
Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Saints need sinners.
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
I owe my solitude to other people.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.