Quotes Alan Watts - page 4
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Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
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No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.
The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
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.
What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.
The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.
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.
The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the I out of the experience...
Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realisation that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate I or mind can be found .... [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.
It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable-it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical" reasons of economics, politics, and technology.. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation.
It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.
It's time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are.
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.
Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen.
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To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
