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The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (ju) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves.

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
Power
Disbelief
Problem
Controlling
Way
Overcome
Turning
Love
Gentle
Overcoming
Skid
Winning
Cooperating
Nature
Ingrained

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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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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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Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done it's just doing it.
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We do not come into this world we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
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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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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives. As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves. The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot
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The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.
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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
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I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
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A scholar tries to learn something everyday a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
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Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.
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Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
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It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
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The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
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Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
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In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
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The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
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