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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
Independently
Altogether
External
Pretend
Exists
Trying
World

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The mind's the standard of the man.
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The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.
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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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The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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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 trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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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.
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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.
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We see what we believe rather than what we see.
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We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.
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Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.
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