Quote

The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

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
Cutting
Illuminate
Fire
Knife
Knowledge
Knives
Doesn
Burn
Light
Endless
Mind
Object
Always
Mystery
Never
Objects
Godhead

More quotes by Alan Watts

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Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.
Alan Watts
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Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.
Alan Watts
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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The source of all light is in the eye.
Alan Watts
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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
Alan Watts
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And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan Watts
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But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.
Alan Watts
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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
Alan Watts
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
Alan Watts
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Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.
Alan Watts
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Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
Alan Watts
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We have a strange anxiety in us that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
Alan Watts
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You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.
Alan Watts
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Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.
Alan Watts
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
Alan Watts
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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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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
Alan Watts
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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan Watts
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The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.
Alan Watts