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" "So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the
beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing,
then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only
beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your
bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the
shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the
waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic
Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being
the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a
continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any
line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can
in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements
of nature.
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it. In other words, if we can really understand what we are looking for — that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it — we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can’t do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable.
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The point is not that one stops choosing, but that one chooses in the knowledge that there is really no choice. [...]
It is simply that in a universe of relativity, all choosing, all taking of sides, is playful. But this is not that one feels no urgency. To know the relativity of light and darkness is not to be able to gaze unblinkingly into the sun; to know the relativity of up and down is not to be able to fall upward. To feel urgency without compulsion is the seemingly paradoxical way of describing what it is like for a feeling to arise spontaneously without its happening to a feeler.