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Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

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
Stay
People
Grow
Trust
External
Grows
Pretending
Lives
Guidance
Need
Passionate
Many
Judgment
Needs
Authority

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I owe my solitude to other people.
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If we live, we live if we die, we die if we suffer, we suffer if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
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Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
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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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Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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The mind's the standard of the man.
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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
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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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In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
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We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
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I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.
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Society is our extended mind and body.
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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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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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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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