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If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.

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
Lives
May
Live
Unduly
Absorbed
Altogether
Improving
Forget

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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.
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No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
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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 more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
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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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The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realisation that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realisation that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
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Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
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The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.
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