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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
Free
Spurn
Convention
Deceived
Conventions
Inspiring

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Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
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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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...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
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Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
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For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
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Faith is a state of openness or trust.
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...for since there is no real 'way' to sartori, the way you are following makes very little difference.
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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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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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Everything is perpetually becoming new.
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The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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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.
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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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Religion is always falling apart.
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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.
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