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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
Thinking
Potatoes
Godly
Spirituality
Humor
Spiritual
Peeling
Spirit
Peel
Doe
Confuse
Soul
Relaxation

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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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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.
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
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Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
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Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
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Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?
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Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
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The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
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The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
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We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
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