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The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

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
Feel
Ego
Feels
Tells
Always
Ought
Moralist
Like
Effort
Egos
People
Stills
Futile
Still
Unselfish
Persons
Invariably
Person
Efforts

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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
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Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
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Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.
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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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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.
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The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.
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We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
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Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
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Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
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Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
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Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
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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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We see what we believe rather than what we see.
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