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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Alan Watts

This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
ALAN WATTS

Complete Life Play Realize Secret Work
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
ALAN WATTS

Abyss Chase Death Depend Expectation Future Happiness Ourselves
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

Attempt Avoid Control Deep Exercise Power
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
ALAN WATTS

Aline Clear Deep Inspirational Mud Patience Process Water
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
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
ALAN WATTS

Duty God Infinite Religious
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
ALAN WATTS

Deal Freedom Guilt Perfection Worry
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
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
ALAN WATTS

Bite Inspirational Teeth Try Yourself
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
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
ALAN WATTS

Ocean Physical Universe Wave
Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.
ALAN WATTS

Change Deceive Thinking
Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
ALAN WATTS

Act Faith One Liner Trust Unknown
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision.
ALAN WATTS

Action Decision Feeling Follow Happen Voluntary
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN WATTS

Music Play Violin
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
ALAN WATTS

Conscious Glory Listen Magnificant Perceive Universe Witness

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

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