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You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

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
Figure
Figures
Especially
Universe
School
Using

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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
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We see what we believe rather than what we see.
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That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
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Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
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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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Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
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The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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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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Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
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The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
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Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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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.
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