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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

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
External
Pretend
Exists
Trying
World
Independently
Altogether

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
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... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.
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The sound of the rain needs no translation.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
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We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
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Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
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People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'
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Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.
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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
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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.
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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.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain it only indicates.
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To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.
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And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
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