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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

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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
Universe
Come
Whole
Feel
Feels
Shut
Way
Basic
Requires
Meditation

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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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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.
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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.
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When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
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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.
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The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
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We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
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Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.
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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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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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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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The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
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Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.
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Everything is perpetually becoming new.
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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
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You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.
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Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.
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Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
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There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
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You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.
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