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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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
Concerned
Way
Good
Advantageous
Discovering
Liberation
More quotes by Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
Alan Watts
Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
Alan Watts
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
Alan Watts
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
Alan Watts
Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
Alan Watts
The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game.
Alan Watts
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
Alan Watts
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
Alan Watts
Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
Alan Watts
The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.
Alan Watts
A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
Alan Watts
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
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
Alan Watts
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
Alan Watts
Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
Alan Watts
