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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.

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
Whirlpools
Body
Flowing
Thing
Like
Flame
Flames
Event
Fixed
Events
Whirlpool
Living

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Courage is the goal of cowards.
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Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
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We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
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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.
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We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
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There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to get culture or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.
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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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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
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The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
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You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.
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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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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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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
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The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
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The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
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You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
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