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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
Experience
Scholasticism
Together
Empiricism
World
Linear

More quotes by Alan Watts

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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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How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?
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The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
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For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.
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Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
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At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a problem of it.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
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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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What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
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Faith...is letting go and trusting oneself to the unknown.
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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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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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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.
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Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done it's just doing it.
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How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?
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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.
Alan Watts
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... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).
Alan Watts
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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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