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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
World
Superimposed
Suspend
Rules
Point
Whole
Things

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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 question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
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If you insist on being determined by the past that's your game, but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.
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Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.
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Everyone is the fabric and structure of existence.
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Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
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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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You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.
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Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
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The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.
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A holy person is someone who is whole who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
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The fools standpoint is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game playing. That's why, when people take their games seriously and take on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles because he knows that it is all a game.
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Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.
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And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
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The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.
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And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
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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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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.
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So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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