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Quote by Alan W. Watts

“This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. [...] [T]he root of this frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only for the brain. The "primary consciousness," the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more that what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., "everyone will die") that the future assumes a high degree of reality - so high that the present loses its value.”

Quote by Alan W. Watts

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The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

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Alan W. Watts

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“Zen would say that in adopting, too completely, the scientific view of reality we have closed the door on a more holistic view of life and are limiting ourselves to a rather mundane view of something altogether extraordinary. Zen maintains that our dualistic view of life means that whatever we perceive goes through our mental filtering systems before being cognitively understood. We use mental boxes for all aspects of our daily lives so we can make sense of our world and interact with oth- ers. With the development of language, though, this cognitive grasp of reality means that everything we perceive is subject to these men- tal processes, and so from early childhood we lose the ability to directly perceive the world. This is the point where dualism starts.”

“Het losstaan van één specifieke traditie beaam ik als legitiem, maar het losstaan van traditie als zodanig beschouw ik als slechts één zijde van een munt, en als niet geheel terecht. Enerzijds is uitsluitend *nu* van belang, en daarin valt traditie inderdaad weg, maar anderzijds is het van belang ook te blijven erkennen wat precies de bronnen zijn geweest voor het inzicht dat 'louter nu van belang is'. Dat zijn toch de teksten uit de verschillende oosterse non-dualistische tradities, de teksten die juist omdat ze het tijdloze benadrukken, nu nog volkomen tijdloos en fris zijn gebleven. Ik zie het als wezenlijk dat ook de westerse leraar deze oosterse tradities onder de aandacht blijft brengen - althans de tijdloze kern ervan, datgene wat na onderzoek overblijft als waardevol, en wat om die reden het verdient om zo helder en verstaanbaar mogelijk in westerse taal vertaald en doorgegeven te worden.”

“If Zen master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.”