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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
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
Considered
Poverty
Freedom
Much
Really
Voluntary
Simplicity
More quotes by Alan Watts
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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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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Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
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But we must not suffer over the suffering.
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If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.
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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
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I knew of a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidity, the instability of the physical world impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor.
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
Alan Watts
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
Alan Watts
Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
Alan Watts
Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
Alan Watts
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
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If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.
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Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
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Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
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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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To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
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Chaos is always losing, but never defeated
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
Alan Watts
