Quote

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

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
System
Nature
Cannot
Without
Paralyzed
Whole
Mistrust
Even
Underlying
Trust
Simply

More quotes by Alan Watts

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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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We usually don't look. We overlook.
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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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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Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
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Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
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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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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
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In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
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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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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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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
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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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When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
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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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Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
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The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
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