The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between “I” and my ex… - Alan Watts

The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.

Man can never understand his freedom while he regards himself as the mere instrument of fate or while he limits his freedom to whatever he his ego can do to snatch from life the prizes which it desires. To be free man must see himself and life as a whole, not as active power and passive instrument but as two aspects of a single activity.

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it.

Instead of thinking that you’re a victim of a mechanical world or an autocratic God, try this on — the life you’re living is what you have put yourself into. Only you won’t admit it because you want to play the game that it has happened to you. But instead of blaming your father for getting horny for your mother, and expecting both of them to take responsibility for your crummy life since they brought you into the world, try considering that you were the shiny gleam in your father’s eye when he approached your mother, and that it was your intention that led you to become deliberately involved in this particular existence. And even if you’ve had a terrible life — rife with syphilis and tuberculosis and the Siberian Itch — it has all, nevertheless, been a game. And isn’t that an optimal hypothesis?