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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
Pleasure
Packaged
Inspirational
Inferior
Inferiors
Pleasures
Symbols
Content
Material
Materials
Attractively

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The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
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Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
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It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about I.
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Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol.
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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
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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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To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason, the universe, the all, seems to defy definition....Just as no one in his senses would look for the morning news in a dictionary, no one should use speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought.
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The difference between a baby and adult is that a baby believes in everything while the adult doubts everything. Babies also only tell the truth until they learn what a lie is.
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
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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.
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The Greek word for sinning means to ‘miss the point’ The point is eternal life which is here and now.
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In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.
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Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
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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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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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