Thank goodness this happened before I read this, or else I, being conscious of its development, would not have been able to let go and let it.
"...our quest for permanence is pure futility...happiness only exists in relation to misery...the perceptive man does not try to separate them...he learns to abandon all desire for any happiness separate from misery, or pleasure apart from pain...
All political propaganda, all advertising, and most of what we call education is based on the assumption that "there is a Way," and that its only a matter of "know-how." (If some of the details haven't quite been worked out yet, just give the scientists a few more months and they'll have it.)
...All striving and grasping is so much smoke in the clutch of a dissolving hand. We are all lost -- kicked off into a void the moment we were born -- and the only way is to fall into oblivion...
...Just watching. Not trying to get anything. Not expecting anything. Not hoping. Not seeking. Not trying to relax. Just watching, without purpose...
'A watched pot never boils.' We are all familiar with the many involuntary acts of the human body which never happen so long as we are trying to make them happen, so long as we are anxious about them -- going to sleep, remembering a name, or, under certain circumstances, sexual excitation. Well, there is something like this which happens upon the sole condition that we are not trying to make it happen, that we have realized clearly that we cannot make it happen. In Zen, it is called satori, sudden awakening."
Alan Watts, "Become What You Are"
All political propaganda, all advertising, and most of what we call education is based on the assumption that "there is a Way," and that its only a matter of "know-how." (If some of the details haven't quite been worked out yet, just give the scientists a few more months and they'll have it.)
...All striving and grasping is so much smoke in the clutch of a dissolving hand. We are all lost -- kicked off into a void the moment we were born -- and the only way is to fall into oblivion...
...Just watching. Not trying to get anything. Not expecting anything. Not hoping. Not seeking. Not trying to relax. Just watching, without purpose...
'A watched pot never boils.' We are all familiar with the many involuntary acts of the human body which never happen so long as we are trying to make them happen, so long as we are anxious about them -- going to sleep, remembering a name, or, under certain circumstances, sexual excitation. Well, there is something like this which happens upon the sole condition that we are not trying to make it happen, that we have realized clearly that we cannot make it happen. In Zen, it is called satori, sudden awakening."
Alan Watts, "Become What You Are"
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