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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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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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Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
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And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
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The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine that lives for a thousand years.
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The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
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Duality is always secretly unity.
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Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
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What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
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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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Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
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To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
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You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
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This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain it only indicates.
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