"This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without b… - Alan Watts

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Civilization, comprising all the achievements of art and science, technology and industry, is the result of man’s invention and manipulation of symbols — of words, letters, numbers, formulas and concepts, and of such social institutions as universally accepted clocks and rulers, scales and timetables, schedules and laws. By these means, we measure, predict, and control the behavior of the human and natural worlds — and with such startling apparent success that the trick goes to our heads. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.

[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but a consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.

[H]uman experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.