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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
Life
Instead
Feeling
Sense
Feelings
Certain
Something

More quotes by Alan Watts

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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.
Alan Watts
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Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.
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The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
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For we have never actually understood the revolutionary sense beneath them – the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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Lack of love for the vegetative, subtle, cthonic, pagan, and sexy aspect of the world means death.
Alan Watts
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Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
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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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The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies.
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
Alan Watts
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In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Vishnu Lila, the play of Vishnu. Lila means dance or play. Also in Hindu philosophy, they call the world illusion and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, to play.
Alan Watts
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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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A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool.
Alan Watts
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In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain it only indicates.
Alan Watts
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These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.
Alan Watts
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Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
Alan Watts
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
Alan Watts
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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.
Alan Watts
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
Alan Watts
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The menu is not the meal.
Alan Watts