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In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

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
Looking
Forget
Upon
World

More quotes by Alan Watts

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What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now, and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing... The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep-down you is the whole universe.
Alan Watts
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There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to get culture or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.
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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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Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
Alan Watts
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I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, You shall be my disciple.I looked at him and said, Who was Buddha's teacher? He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
Alan Watts
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When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
Alan Watts
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Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?
Alan Watts
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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
Alan Watts
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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
Alan Watts
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I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.
Alan Watts
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
Alan Watts
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
Alan Watts
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Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.
Alan Watts
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The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.
Alan Watts
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We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
Alan Watts
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The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
Alan Watts
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If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.
Alan Watts
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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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