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Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.

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
Breath
Breaths
Deep
Alone
Brow
Secret
Brows
Tell
Darkest
Take
Wipe
Deepest

More quotes by Alan Watts

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What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now, and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing... The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep-down you is the whole universe.
Alan Watts
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We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
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Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
Alan Watts
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I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.
Alan Watts
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And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
Alan Watts
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The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.
Alan Watts
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I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.
Alan Watts
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Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
Alan Watts
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We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.
Alan Watts
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What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?
Alan Watts
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The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
Alan Watts
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Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.
Alan Watts
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To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.
Alan Watts