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

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This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
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It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
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Religion is always falling apart.
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To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
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Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.
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There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
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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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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
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We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self.
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To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
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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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When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
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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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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
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To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.
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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
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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.
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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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