Alan Watts

Was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

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Alan Watts

Was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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.
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.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
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.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Wikipedia

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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.
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.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
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.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.