Quote

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

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
Especially
Details
Constants
Consciousness
Basic
Ignores
Space
Changing
Varying
Water
Thus
Exceptional
Doesn
Aware
Backgrounds
Everything
Constant
Fish
People
Awareness
Fishes
Concerned
Ignorant

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The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
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Truly great companies are built on ideals, not just deals.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.
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If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
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Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.
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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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A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
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I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.
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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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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
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You can't get wet from the word 'water.'
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.
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So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'
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You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
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