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Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

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
Beyond
Reality
Negative
Positive

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What would you do if money was no object?
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The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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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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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
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Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
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We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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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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Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
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The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
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Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
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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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Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
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