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The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

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
Ego
Separate
Tests
Stand
Hallucination
Hallucinations
Biological

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
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To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.
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That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
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Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
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Religion is always falling apart.
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If you belong to an in-group of good, or saved, or elite people, you can only know that you’re in because someone else is out. You cannot live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks, so you ought to be grateful to the outside for having the privilege of being on the inside.
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All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
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The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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We usually don't look. We overlook.
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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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You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.
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The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
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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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Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.
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When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.
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People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
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For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
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