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That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality.
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
Viable
Recognizes
Society
Strong
More quotes by Alan Watts
Increasingly, we're developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
Alan Watts
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.
Alan Watts
The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.
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...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
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There is an ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It is the darkness from which the light shines. When you recognize the integrity of the universe and that death is as certain as birth, then you can relax and accept that this is the way it is. There is nothing else to do.
Alan Watts
Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
Alan Watts
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan Watts
Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.
Alan Watts
Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Alan Watts
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
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Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.
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Faith is, above all, openness an act of trust in the unknown.
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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.
Alan Watts
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
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Alan Watts
Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Alan Watts
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.
Alan Watts
To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.
Alan Watts
Your soul isn't in your body your body is in your soul!
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Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.
Alan Watts