If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to … - Alan Watts

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If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to have the former without the latter. Indeed, it looks as if the two must in some way alternate, for continuous pleasure is a stimulus that must either pall or be increased. And the increase will either harden the sense buds with its friction, or turn into pain. A consistent diet of rich food either destroys the appetite or makes one sick.

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About Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Alternative Names: Alan Wilson Watts Alan W. Watts
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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 because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.

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Man can never understand his freedom while he regards himself as the mere instrument of fate or while he limits his freedom to whatever he his ego can do to snatch from life the prizes which it desires. To be free man must see himself and life as a whole, not as active power and passive instrument but as two aspects of a single activity.

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