Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Watts

Watts is doing two things at once: reassuring the skeptical reader that the mystics aren’t “making no sense,” and warning them that sense-making is the wrong yardstick. By foregrounding paradox, he frames mystic writing as a deliberate technique rather than a lapse into fog. Paradox isn’t an accident in Zen; it’s the instrument.

The line works because it quietly flips the usual hierarchy between reason and experience. “If you study” sounds like an invitation into the library, but the payoff is an anti-library lesson: the closer you read, the more the text refuses to settle into tidy propositions. That refusal is the point. Zen koans, for example, weaponize contradiction to short-circuit the mind’s compulsive habit of turning life into labels and arguments. Watts is signaling that the mystic is not primarily transmitting information; they’re trying to provoke a shift in consciousness, a felt reorientation that can’t be captured cleanly in declarative sentences.

The subtext is a defense of mysticism against modern Western literalism. Mid-20th-century audiences, trained to treat language as a transparent delivery system for facts, often dismissed spiritual writings as either nonsense or superstition. Watts, a philosopher and popularizer steeped in both Anglican and Buddhist worlds, translates Zen into terms a rationalist might tolerate: paradox as method, not mistake. He’s also slyly setting expectations: if you demand linear clarity, you’ll miss the transmission. The “paradox” is a door; the reader’s discomfort is the handle.