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

More quotes by Alan Watts

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What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
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Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.
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The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.
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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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We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
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Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.
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We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
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I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.
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Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
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If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.
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Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
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Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
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Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.
Alan Watts
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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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Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
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A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
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You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe...
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