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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan Watts
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Alan Watts
Age: 58 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 6
Died: 1973
Died: November 16
Anglican Priest
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Dramaturge
Musician
Philosopher
Theologian
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Kent
England
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Mystics
Always
Paradoxes
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More quotes by Alan Watts
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.
Alan Watts
Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
Alan Watts
If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
Alan Watts
Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.
Alan Watts
The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
Alan Watts
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Alan Watts
To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.
Alan Watts
No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.
Alan Watts
Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
Alan Watts
Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Alan Watts
Religion is always falling apart.
Alan Watts
To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
Alan Watts
I owe my solitude to other people.
Alan Watts
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
Alan Watts
But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.
Alan Watts
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
Alan Watts