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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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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
Forever
Fear
Might
Cancel
Pair
Pairs
Opposites
Anxiety

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You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.
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A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
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When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
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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.
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...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.
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Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
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But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.
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Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
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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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No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
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As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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You can't have something without nothing.
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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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