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Alan Watts Quotes
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The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves.
Alan Watts
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This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
Alan Watts
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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
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, I am listening to this music, you are not listening.
Alan Watts
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The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
Alan Watts
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What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance.
Alan Watts
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In this light it will be clear that consciousness is no mere phosphorescent scum upon the foundations of fire and rock — a late addition to a world which is essentially unfeeling and mineral. Consciousness is rather the unfolding, the "evolution," of what has always been hidden in the heart of the primordial universe of stars.
Alan Watts
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
Alan Watts
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The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.
Alan Watts
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If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or nonhuman, we must first come to terms with the minority wand the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the 'external' world - especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside.
Alan Watts
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Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.
Alan Watts
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If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.
Alan Watts
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We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
Alan Watts
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Mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
Alan Watts
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Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
Alan Watts
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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
Alan Watts
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Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.
Alan Watts
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The natural world seems a marvel of complexity, requiring a vastly intricate intelligence to create and govern it, just because we have represented it to ourselves in the clumsy "notation" of thought.
Alan Watts
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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
Alan Watts
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These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.
Alan Watts
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To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
Alan Watts
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We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you are looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts.
Alan Watts
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To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one's own eternity — it's the same thing!
Alan Watts
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The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.
Alan Watts
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Preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
Alan Watts
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Alan Watts
Born:
January 6, 1915
Died:
November 16, 1973
(aged 58)
Bio:
Alan Wilson Watts was a British-born American philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.
Known for:
The Book (1966)
The Way of Zen (1957)
The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
Become what you are
Tao: The Watercourse Way
Most used words:
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