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I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

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
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Illusion
Time
Exist
Love
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Life
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Present
Future
Psychedelic
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Realized

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
Alan Watts
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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
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Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.
Alan Watts
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, You shall be my disciple.I looked at him and said, Who was Buddha's teacher? He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
Alan Watts
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We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Alan Watts
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Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.
Alan Watts
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There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.
Alan Watts
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
Alan Watts
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And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
Alan Watts
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We usually don't look. We overlook.
Alan Watts
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Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
Alan Watts
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Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
Alan Watts
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One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Alan Watts
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In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.
Alan Watts
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If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
Alan Watts
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
Alan Watts
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The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
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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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
Alan Watts