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Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

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
Start
Measuring
Experiencing
Productivity
Degree
Presence
Degrees
Days
Stop

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Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
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The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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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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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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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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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
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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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The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
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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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...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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