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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

Alan Watts

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
ALAN WATTS

Nature System Trust Yourself
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
ALAN WATTS

Future Inspirational Night Present Significance
If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
ALAN WATTS

Belief Cling Faith God Let Go
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
ALAN WATTS

Deep Fun God Man Serious Suffering
I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
ALAN WATTS

Ego Finding Sensation Skin
The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
ALAN WATTS

Constant Construction Ego Empty Expectation Future Memories Past Reality Regret
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
ALAN WATTS

Aline Clear Deep Inspirational Mud Patience Process Water
The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
ALAN WATTS

Impossible Love Realize Relationship Self Love Yourself
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated.
ALAN WATTS

Advice Existence Expectation Guidance Influence Light Love Principle Room Rule Truth
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
ALAN WATTS

Attraction Content Inferior Material Package Pleasure Symbol
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
ALAN WATTS

Faith Float Freedom Grab Relaxation Swim Trust Water Yourself
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
ALAN WATTS

Life Live Present
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
ALAN WATTS

Available Description Indeed Language Notice Reality Words
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
ALAN WATTS

Convention Fatal Forget Serious Thinking
The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
ALAN WATTS

Existence Future Illusion Past Present Reality
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
ALAN WATTS

Science System

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

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When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

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Popular Authors

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