Quote

The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.

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
Simply
Confused
Wrong
Patterns
Fit
Upon
Inspiring
Hierarchical
Sense
Failure
Fits
Something
Level
Pattern
Events
Belongs
Levels
Event

More quotes by Alan Watts

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For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done it's just doing it.
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
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The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.
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To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
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To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
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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.
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
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Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
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One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
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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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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.
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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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When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
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