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Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.

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
Whole
Something
Life
Enters
Department
Religion

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...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
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I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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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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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
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...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
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This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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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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The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
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The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
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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.
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You can't make love without art.
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By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.
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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.
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Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
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