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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

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
Material
Materials
Attractively
Pleasure
Packaged
Inspirational
Inferior
Inferiors
Pleasures
Symbols
Content

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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
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No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.
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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.
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What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
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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 ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
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Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.
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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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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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If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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Society is our extended mind and body.
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
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