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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

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
Belief
Faith
Cannot
Likewise
Clinging
Cling
Letting
Since

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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.
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
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What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?
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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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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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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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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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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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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.
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The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
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What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
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The mind's the standard of the man.
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.
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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
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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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A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.
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Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
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