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Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Alan Watts

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Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
Author
Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
Videographer
Writer
Kent
England
Spirituality
Humor
Spiritual
Peeling
Spirit
Peel
Doe
Confuse
Soul
Relaxation
Thinking
Potatoes
Godly

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When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.
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However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.
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Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
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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!
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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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.
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Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
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Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
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Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
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You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
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Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
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The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
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You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
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