Quote

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

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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
Fear
Ghost
Comes
Surprise
Death
Forgotten
Transience
Take
Afraid
Hitherto
Never
Dies
Dissolution
Point
Ghosts
Pain
Pains
Born
Unbelievable

More quotes by Alan Watts

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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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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.
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...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.
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When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
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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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What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?
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What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.
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To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
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The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
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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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It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about I.
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It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
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To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.
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You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
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But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
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Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
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Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be
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We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
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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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Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.
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