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...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

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
Mysticism
Base
Opposition
Letters
Rather
Scholasticism
Experience
Empiricism
Together
World
Linear

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There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.
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And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
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We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.
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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.
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They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.
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It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
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But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
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Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.
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There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.
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The sound of the rain needs no translation.
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And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.
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But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
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Someone once described “Christian Secularism” as the assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity ward and the crematorium, and that it is within that span that Christian concern must be exercised because that is all there is.
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Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.
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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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The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or no fuss.
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In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
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When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
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Many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the Bible, making it an idol.
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