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Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand 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
Doe
Fist
Lap
Fists
Stand
Hand
Open
Hands

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What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.
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I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, You shall be my disciple.I looked at him and said, Who was Buddha's teacher? He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
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To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.
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Thought is a means of concealing Truth.
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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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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We see what we believe rather than what we see.
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Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.
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More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
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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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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.
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If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
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Religion is always falling apart.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
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It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt
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For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
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