Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without … - Alan Watts

Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock.

Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self.

Man is not to be an intellectual porcupine meeting his environment with a surface of spikes. Man meets the world outside with a soft skin, with a delicate eyeball and eardrum, and finds communion with it through a warm, melting, vaguely defined and caressing touch whereby the world is not set at a distance like an enemy to be shot, but embraced to become one flesh, like a beloved wife.

They found security in letting go rather than in holding on and, in so doing, developed an attitude toward life that might be called psychophysical judo. Nearly twenty-five centuries ago, the Chinese sages Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu had called it wu-wei, which is perhaps best translated as “action without forcing.” It is sailing in the stream of the Tao, or course of nature, and navigating the currents of li (organic pattern) — a word that originally signified the natural markings in jade or the grain in wood. As this attitude spread and prevailed in the wake of Vibration Training, people became more and more indulgent about eccentricity in life-style, tolerant of racial and religious differences, and adventurous in exploring unusual ways of loving.