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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?

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
Alive
Unless
Dead

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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
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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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Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.
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Running away from fear is fear fighting pain is pain trying to be brave is being scared
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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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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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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Black implies white self implies other
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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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We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness.
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If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
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Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.
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We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
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The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the 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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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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The destination of life is this eternal moment.
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