Alan Watts Quotes - Page 7

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• In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

  Alan Watts

  Simplicity, Poverty

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.84, New World Library

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• You can't live at all unless you can live fully now.

  Alan Watts

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• Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

  Alan Watts

  Inspirational, Life, Buddhist

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.27, New World Library

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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.

  Alan Watts

  People, World, Want

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• Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Science, Men

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• But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Faith, Letting Go

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• We usually don't look. We overlook.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Journey, Looks

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• The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

  Alan Watts

  Independent, Knowing, Ego

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.10, Souvenir Press

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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. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.

  Alan Watts

  Communication, Unique, Men

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.7, New World Library

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• No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.

  Alan Watts

  Risk, Superstitions, Currents

  Alan Watts (2017). “Alan Watts - In the Academy: Essays and Lectures”, p.275, SUNY Press

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• This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

  Alan Watts

  Mean, Reflection, Water

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

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• The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Men, Feet

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press

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• You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are.

  Alan Watts

  Mean, Reality, Trying

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• The question "What shall we do about it?" is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.

  Alan Watts

  Light, Hands, Darkness

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

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• Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

  Alan Watts

  Life, Inspiring, Yoga

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

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• When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

  Alan Watts

  Mind, Religion, Looks

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

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• You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Real

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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.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Unique, Past

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

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• Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

  Alan Watts

  Inspiring, Life And Love, Attitude

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.53, Souvenir Press

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• There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

  Alan Watts

  Going Away

  Alan Watts (2003). “Become what You are”, p.11, Shambhala Publications

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• Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.

  Alan Watts

  Our World, Doctrine, Way

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• Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

  Alan Watts

  Jesus, Atheist, Men

  Alan W. Watts (2011). “Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal”, p.147, Vintage

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• When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

  Alan Watts

  Lonely, Feelings, Littles

  Alan Watts (2010). “Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation”, p.90, New World Library

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• It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt

  Alan Watts

  Dance, God, Sports

  Alan Watts (1997). “Zen and the Beat Way”

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• Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Reality, Clouds

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