To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself. - Alan Watts

In the light of these principles, how does the mind absorb suffering? It discovers that resistance and escape — the “I” process — is a false move. The pain is inescapable, and resistance as a defense only makes it worse; the whole system is jarred by the shock. Seeing the impossibility of this course, it must act according to its nature — remain stable and absorb.

It is convention alone which persuades me that I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time.

But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run.