When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
ALAN WATTSWhat we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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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.
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If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
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We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
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There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.
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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.
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You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
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The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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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.
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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
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Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.
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Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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Belief clings, but faith lets go.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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There is no other reality than present reality.
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People can’t be talked out of illusions.
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The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
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People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
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Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
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The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.
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We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
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Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up, now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
ALAN WATTS