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For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.

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
Religion
Beneath
Idea
Calls
Sense
Revolutionary
Found
Incredible
Truth
Understood
Ideas
Vision
Giving
Belief
Never
Actually

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People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'
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Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
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We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.
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What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
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You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
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If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.
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The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.
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It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
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So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
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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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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
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Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.
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When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
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