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Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

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
Sense
Island
Persons
Islands
Person
Dramatic
Lonely
Illusion
Based
Normal
Imagery
Consciousness
Theological

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And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.
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Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.
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The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.
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Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to get culture or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.
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Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
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What is the next step, the practical application? —I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give.
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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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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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Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
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The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
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We see what we believe rather than what we see.
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You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
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Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
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The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.
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The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
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