Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Watts

Myth, for Alan Watts, isn’t a childish lie we eventually outgrow; it’s the mind’s user interface. Calling myth an “image” is doing quiet but heavy work here. Images aren’t arguments. They’re compressions: a way to hold complexity in a shape you can carry. Watts is signaling that our deepest frameworks - God, Nature, Progress, the Self, even “common sense” - operate less like proofs and more like pictures we inhabit.

The intent is corrective and slightly mischievous. Mid-century Western culture treated myth as the opposite of knowledge: science had facts; religion had stories. Watts flips that hierarchy without rejecting science. He’s pointing at a more uncomfortable truth: we never encounter “the world” raw. We encounter interpretations, and the interpretations arrive dressed as images - narratives, metaphors, symbols - that feel obvious precisely because they’re shared.

Subtext: if myth is how we “try to make sense,” then sense-making is provisional, creative, and psychologically necessary. Myth isn’t merely content; it’s a mode of perception. That dovetails with Watts’ larger project of translating Zen and Vedanta for postwar audiences anxious about materialism, status competition, and the alienation of seeing oneself as a lone ego trapped in a dead, mechanical universe. The quote nudges you to notice the myth you’re already living inside: the story of a separate self managing an external world.

It works because it sidesteps culture-war binaries (reason vs. superstition) and lands on a sharper premise: humans don’t just discover meaning; we manufacture it in images, then forget we made them.