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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.

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
Fun
Knowing
Suffering
Play
Join
Take
Enlightened
Made
Gods
People
Suffer
Serious

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Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
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When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
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Everything is perpetually becoming new.
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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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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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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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In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.
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If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
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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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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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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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To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.
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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
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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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To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
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One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
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Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
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What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
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