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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.

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
Taken
Thus
Nursery
Society
Laws
Convert
Freedom
Protect
Policemen
Become
Personal
Hired
Made
Risk
Libertarianism
Liberty
Industrial
Land
Libertarian
Plethora
Law
Safety
Busybodies

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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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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
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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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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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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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Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
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So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.
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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
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People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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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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To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
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When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
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