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It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

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
Consider
Question
Desire
Important

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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
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I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
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Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
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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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We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self.
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
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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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Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.
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If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.
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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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If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
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A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.
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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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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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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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