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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
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
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Writer
Kent
England
Achieve
Panic
Alive
Plain
Everybody
Simplicity
Simple
Obvious
Around
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Overachieving
Great
Necessary
Obviousness
Something
Meaning
Plainness
Life
Beyond
Rushes
More quotes by Alan Watts
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, I am all this! There is simply all this.
Alan Watts
To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Alan Watts
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
Alan Watts
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
Alan Watts
Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
Alan Watts
Duality is always secretly unity.
Alan Watts
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.
Alan Watts
You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
Alan Watts
What would you do if money was no object?
Alan Watts
The sound of the rain needs no translation.
Alan Watts
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
Alan Watts
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan Watts
Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.
Alan Watts
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
Alan Watts
Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
Alan Watts