Ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels, None other holds you that ye live and die And whir upon the wheel, and hug and kiss its spokes of agony… - Alan Watts

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Ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels, None other holds you that ye live and die And whir upon the wheel, and hug and kiss its spokes of agony, Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness. Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself. Free from clutching at themselves the hands can handle; free from looking after themselves the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.

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About Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Alan Wilson Watts Alan W. Watts

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Shorter versions of this quote

Ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels,
None other holds you that ye live and die
And whir upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness.

Additional quotes by Alan Watts

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior — that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward.

We must repeat: memory, thought, language, and logic are essential to human life. They are one half of sanity. But a person, a society, which is only half sane is insane. To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words — to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam.

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There is simply no problem of life; it is absolutely purposeless play; it doesn't have to continue; there is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, gestures gesturing. If there is any problem at all it is to find out how people come to think there is a problem, whatever made them imagine that life is serious. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, multiplicity are all complications of it. Pain and suffering are very far-out forms of play, and there just isn't anything at all to be afraid of. There isn't any ego. The ego is a kind of flip, knowing that you know — like being afraid of being afraid. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to things, a sort of double take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety.

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