Quote

This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

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
Emotion
Blocked
Feeling
Detached
Water
Birds
Means
Flying
Feelings
Reflection
Without
Experiences
Mean
Pass
Reflections
Like
Bird
Sticky

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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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We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
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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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One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
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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.
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The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
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You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
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Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
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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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When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, I am all this! There is simply all this.
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