To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead. - Alan Watts

"The frightened or lonely person begins at once to think, "I'm afraid," or, "I'm lonely." This is, of course, an attempt to avoid the experience. We don't want to be aware of this present. But as we cannot get out of the present, our only escape is into memories. Here we feel on safe ground, for the past is the fixed and the known — but also, of course, the dead."

Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.

[T]he wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief. This experience is psychological or spiritual, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.