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Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.

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
Mind
Number
Think
Silence
Devote
Thinking
Numbers
Extremely
People
Learned
Uncomfortable
Stop
Keeping
Lives
Enormous
Feel
Busy
Feels
Minds

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No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.
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Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
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We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.
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The wake doesn't drive the ship
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If you love a person, you say to that person, Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song.
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
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Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
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We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
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As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
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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.
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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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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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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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The only serious side-effect of # marijuana is that you might get arrested.
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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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