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The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.

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
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Psychotherapists
Individual
Convention
Social
Conventions
Helping
Offense
Without
Tries
Giving
Unnecessary
Trying
Alone
World
Community
Psychotherapist

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These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.
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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
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We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.
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There is no coming toward it or going away from it it is, and you are it.
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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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The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
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Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
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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 individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
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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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For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.
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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.
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...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.
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When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
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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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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
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But we must not suffer over the suffering.
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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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Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
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