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Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.

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
Openness
Faith
Unknown
Mind
Suicide
World
Commitment
Intellectual
Positive
Trust
Irrevocable
Vision
Closes

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.
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The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
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The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
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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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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
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...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
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What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
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And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
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The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.
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We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time
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All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
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Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
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