"But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us."
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Alan Watts quotes (page 19 of 25)
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"If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself."
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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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"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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"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."
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"As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything."
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"To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play."
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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."
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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."
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"The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise."
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"For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me."
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"To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen."
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"We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible."
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"We usually don't look. We overlook."
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"When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point."
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"You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping."
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"You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are."
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"Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once."
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"But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent."
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"Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything."
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