There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken d… - Alan Watts

There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down — traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.

All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd - uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing [...] species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?

Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness — from which men shrink.

The full splendour of sexual experience does not reveal itself without a new mode of attention to the world in general.