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The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

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
Rules
Point
Whole
Things
World
Superimposed
Suspend

More quotes by Alan Watts

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But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
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And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
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Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.
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Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
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Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
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Where does my fist go when I open up my hand? Where does my lap go when I stand up?
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The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.
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Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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Different Chinese philosophers, writing probably in 5-4 centuries B.C., presented some major ideas and a way of life that are nowadays known under the name of Taoism, the way of correspondence between man and the tendency or the course of natural world.
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.
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Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
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