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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
World
Independently
Altogether
External
Pretend
Exists
Trying

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Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.
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It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
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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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Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
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A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
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The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.
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Someone once described “Christian Secularism” as the assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity ward and the crematorium, and that it is within that span that Christian concern must be exercised because that is all there is.
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
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The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
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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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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
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If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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Everything is perpetually becoming new.
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