Alan Watts Quotes - Page 15

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• We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

  Alan Watts

  Science, Tolerance, Religion

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• What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Views, Vegetables

  Alan Watts (1977). “The essence of Alan Watts”, Celestial Arts Publishing Company

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• More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Mean, Thinking

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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• Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

  Alan Watts

  Opposites, Anxiety, Forever

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• Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhism, Hands, Knives

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.29, New World Library

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• ...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

  Alan Watts

  Problem, Chopping, Horns

  Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

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• What would you do if money was no object?

  Alan Watts

  Objects, Ifs

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• The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

  Alan Watts

  Self, Ideas, Goal

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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• Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

  Alan Watts

  Unity, Hallucinations, Serious

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.112, New World Library

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• Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

  Alan Watts

  Inspirational, Pleasure, Materials

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.59, Souvenir Press

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• If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world - -especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, War, Heart

  "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts, (p. 98), 1966.

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• But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.

  Alan Watts

  Skills, Perception, Taoism

  Alan Watts (1970). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”

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• We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

  Alan Watts

  People, Giving, Sun

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.85, Vintage

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• To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

  Alan Watts

  Wise, Technology, Men

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• The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

  Alan Watts

  Style, Church, Different

  "The Essence of Alan Watts".

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• So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

  Alan Watts

  Able, Bodhisattva, Preaching

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• Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain
  which scans the environment for any trouble making changes.
  If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.

  Alan Watts

  Anxiety, Brain, Attention

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Believe, Trying, Peculiar

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• The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

  Alan Watts

  People, Effort, Ego

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• If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.

  Alan Watts

  Friendship, Spring, Men

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Cutting, Years, Bangs

  "The Nature of Consciousness". Book by Alan Watts, 1960.

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• But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

  Alan Watts

  Trying, World

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• The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.

  Alan Watts

  Giving, Community, Trying

  "Psychotherapy, East and West" by Alan Watts, (p. 7), 1961.

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• People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'

  Alan Watts

  Talking, People, Wonder

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• When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Death, Summer

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