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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
Open
Hands
Doe
Fist
Lap
Fists
Stand
Hand

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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.
Alan Watts
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The Highest to which people can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it there is the limit.
Alan Watts
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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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Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain which scans the environment for any trouble making changes. If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
Alan Watts
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Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.
Alan Watts
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
Alan Watts
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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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Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
Alan Watts
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We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
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But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
Alan Watts
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Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
Alan Watts
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Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Alan Watts
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Everything is perpetually becoming new.
Alan Watts
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You can't have something without nothing.
Alan Watts
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We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.
Alan Watts
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Faith is, above all, openness an act of trust in the unknown.
Alan Watts
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Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.
Alan Watts
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You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!
Alan Watts