"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.

The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual oneupmanship, and Guru competitions.

This recognition of the two-sidedness of the One is what makes the difference between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of a religion, and the latter is always guarded and is always
mystical or ''closed'' [...] because of the danger that the opposites will be confused if their unity is made explicit. It is thus that mysticism is never quite orthodox, never wholly respectable.

"As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is
something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and
basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a
Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds
which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as
a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and
commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and
thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience
selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I
seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a
rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of
biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual,
sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to
vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even
absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the
whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear
fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old;
my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the
pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy."