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Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
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
Keep
Possess
Things
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Impermanent
Men
Acceptance
Suffers
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Craving
Causes
Buddha
Forever
Immediate
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Frustration
Desire
Essentially
More quotes by Alan Watts
Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
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Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
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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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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
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LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
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Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
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You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
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The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
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Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.
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If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.
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If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
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The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
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In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
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The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
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It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
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There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
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