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The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

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
Universe
Underlying
Culture
Myths
Sense
Identical
Feel
Aliens
Feels
Myth
Parts
Taught
Common
Confronting

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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Society is our extended mind and body.
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It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway.
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The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
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The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
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The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
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If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
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Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.
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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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The mind's the standard of the man.
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If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.
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I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.
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Black implies white self implies other
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By going out of your mind, you come to your senses
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The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.
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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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