The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality.
ALAN WATTSHuman desire tends to be insatiable.
More Alan Watts Quotes
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People can’t be talked out of illusions.
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Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.
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One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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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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I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.
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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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The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
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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’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
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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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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
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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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I owe my solitude to other people.
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The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.
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When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of, Nothing is left but to love.
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Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
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A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
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Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.
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The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.
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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.
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Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
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If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
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The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.
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Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
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No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
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Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
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