The five colours will blind a man’s sight. The five sounds will deaden a mans hearing. The five tastes will spoil a man’s palate. Chasing and hunting… - Alan Watts

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The five colours will blind a man’s sight. The five sounds will deaden a mans hearing. The five tastes will spoil a man’s palate. Chasing and hunting will drive a man wild. Things hard to get will do harm to a man’s conduct. Therefore the sage makes provision for the stomach and not for the eye.

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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

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Alan Wilson Watts Alan W. Watts
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Additional quotes by Alan Watts

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience — a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

The point is not that one stops choosing, but that one chooses in the knowledge that there is really no choice. [...]
It is simply that in a universe of relativity, all choosing, all taking of sides, is playful. But this is not that one feels no urgency. To know the relativity of light and darkness is not to be able to gaze unblinkingly into the sun; to know the relativity of up and down is not to be able to fall upward. To feel urgency without compulsion is the seemingly paradoxical way of describing what it is like for a feeling to arise spontaneously without its happening to a feeler.

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