Quote

The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.

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
Easily
Wholeness
Function
Sensation
Standing
Functions
Second
Freely
State
Sensations
Art
Club
States
Ego
Without
Clubs

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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
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The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
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Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?
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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
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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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In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
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Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
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To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
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The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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You know that if you get in the water and have nothing to hold on to, but try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
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No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
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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
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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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How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?
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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.
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Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
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Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
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