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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.

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
Watch
Interfering
Effort
Disappearance
Without
Interfere
Trying
Thinker
Mind
Precisely
Ego
Separate
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Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
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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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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.
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And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
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Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.
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If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.
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We usually don't look. We overlook.
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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.
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By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.
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Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.
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When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
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What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present
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Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
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When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, There ought not to be winter. That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.
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Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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