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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.

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
Improve
Listen
Wrong
Culture
Music
Meditating
Nothing
Meditate
Mind
Deaf
Way
Concerts

More quotes by Alan Watts

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To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.
Alan Watts
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And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
Alan Watts
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
Alan Watts
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Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
Alan Watts
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The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
Alan Watts
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Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
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Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
Alan Watts
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
Alan Watts
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No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
Alan Watts
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Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
Alan Watts
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The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.
Alan Watts
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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
Alan Watts
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To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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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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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
Alan Watts