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Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.

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
Behavior
Concerned
Belief
Way
Religions
World
Transformation
Doctrine
Aware
Western

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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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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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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
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Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.
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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
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Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
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When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
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Cows scream louder than carrots.
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I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
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However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
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Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
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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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