PRIVACY?!
WIP. Work in progress
"The book" van Alan Watts is eigenlijk de "Handleiding voor de Mens" die ik ooit schreef, maar dan een stuk volwassener en wat niveautjes hoger en verder :-). Het bevat informatie over de belangrijkste vragen die we maar al te makkelijk overslaan of (willen?) vergeten. Wie ben ik? Wat en waarom dit leven?
Een boek voor elk kind (hoe oud je ook mag zijn), met daar in een aantal volwassen waarheden, die je perspectief op alles behoorlijk kan beinvloeden.
You saw, but did not really look.Alan Watts
Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail.Alan Watts
(police) "Where are you going?" Aimless strolling is suspicious and irrational. You are probably a vagrant or burglar.Alan Watts
Thus bamboozled, the individual – instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world – is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Becaus he is now so largely defined as a seperate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present – that is, of really living. For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.Alan Watts
The illusion that organisms move entirely on their own is immensely persuasive until we settle down, as scientists do, to describe their behavior carefully.Alan Watts
But, as Douglas E. Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell-invested skeleton.Alan Watts
But when you know for sure that your seperate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life.Alan Watts
For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your own side.Alan Watts
Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.Alan Watts
To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason the universe, the all, seems to defy definition.Alan Watts
All things are known by their differences from and likenesses to each other.Alan Watts
I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of "prickles" and the partisans of "goo". The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. The prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress the underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air drill.Alan Watts
If, on the other hand, self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are the poles of a single process, THAT is my true existence. As the Upanishads say, "That is the Self. That is the real. That art thou!"Alan Watts
Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols.Alan Watts
Novels, magazines, television, and populair cartoons therefore portray "Dad" as an incompetent clown. And the image has some truth in it because Dad has fallen for the hoax that work is simply something you do to make money, and with money you can get anything you want.Alan Watts
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