It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd — uncanny and highly improbable. - Alan Watts

There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, “How shall we escape the heat?” — meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, “Go right into the middle of the fire.” “But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?” “No further pain will trouble you!

Certainly the revolutionary thinker must go beyond thought. He knows that almost all his best ideas come to him when thinking has stopped. He may have struggled and struggled to understand a problem in terms of old ways of thinking, only to find it impossible. But when thought stops from exhaustion, the mind is open to see the problem as it is — not as it is verbalized — and at once it is understood.

us. The good of contemplation is contemplation — not some result that it may bring.