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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.

Alan Watts
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The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
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Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
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How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
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So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
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We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
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Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
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Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
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No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
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So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
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But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
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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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If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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Faith is a state of openness or trust.
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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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Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
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But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
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But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
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The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
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I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
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You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
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The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
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Saints need sinners.
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But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
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I owe my solitude to other people.
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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
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The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
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So then, 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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What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
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