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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

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
Something
Life
Instead
Feeling
Sense
Feelings
Certain

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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
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When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
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Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
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I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, You shall be my disciple.I looked at him and said, Who was Buddha's teacher? He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
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If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
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What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are coins for real thing
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Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
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...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
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The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.
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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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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
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The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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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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