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The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

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
Self
Begins
Really
Exist
Good
Therefore
Never
Goal
Disillusion
Life
Idea
Morrow
Comes
Gratification
Ideas
Goals
Without
Pursuit

More quotes by Alan Watts

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Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain it only indicates.
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Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.
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Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.
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The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
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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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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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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.
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The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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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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Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
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I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.
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Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
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And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
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