[W]hat is ordinarily felt as the wayward, unpredictable, dangerous, and even hostile world - including one's capricious emotions and inner feelings -… - Alan Watts

Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.

Whatever villainies the British may have committed in India, their Christian consciences balked at the practice of sati, which required a widow to commit suicide at her husband’s funeral. Truly civilized people are — we feel — not faces on the sky but fully enclosed heads containing souls, each one of infinite value in the sight of God.

"May not this, then, be why the figure of the Evil One is simultaneously horrendous and alluring: he represents the extreme of ''self-othering," where, on the human level, man is most ashamed of his own organism, and, on the mythological level, Brahma has lost himself most completely in the maya of separateness.