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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

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
Spurn
Convention
Deceived
Conventions
Inspiring
Free

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To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
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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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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.
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The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
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You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.
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You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
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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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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
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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.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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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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Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
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There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
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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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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
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What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.
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