The highest good is like water, for the good of water is that it nourishes everything without striving. It occupies the place which all men think bad… - Alan Watts
" "The highest good is like water, for the good of water is that it nourishes everything without striving. It occupies the place which all men think bad [i.e., the lowest level].17 [102d] It is thus that Tao in the world is like a river going down the valley to the ocean.18 [102e] The most gentle thing in the world overrides the most hard.19 [102g] How do coves and oceans become kings of a hundred rivers? Because they are good at keeping low — That is how they are kings of the hundred rivers.20 [102f] Nothing in the world is weaker than water, But it has no better in overcoming the hard.21 [101a]
About Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.
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Additional quotes by Alan Watts
This wave phenomenon is happening on ever so many scales — the fast wave of light, the slower waves of sound — and there are all sorts of other wave processes, such as the beat of the heart; the rhythm of breath, waking, sleeping; the movement of human life from birth to maturity to death. And the slower the wave goes, the more difficult it is to see that the crest and trough are inseparable, and this is how we become persuaded in the game of hide-and-seek. So we see the trough go down, down, down and think it keeps going forever — that it will never rise back up again into a crest. We forget that trough implies crest, and crest implies trough. There is no such thing as pure sound — sound is sound/silence. Light is light/darkness. Light is pulsation — between every light pulse there is the dark pulse.
[L]ife and death are in conflict only in the mind which creates a war between them out of its own desires and fears. In fact life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes.
This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking — in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. These have had an effect on our perceptions which seems to be strictly hypnotic. It is largely by talking that a hypnotist produces illusions and strange behavioral changes in his subjects — talking coupled with relaxed fixation of the subject’s conscious attention. The stage magician, too, performs most of his illusions by patter and misdirection of attention. Hypnotic illusions can be vividly sensuous and real to the subject, even after he has come out of the so-called “hypnotic trance.” It is, then, as if the human race had hypnotized or talked itself into the hoax of egocentricity. There is no one to blame but ourselves.