I owe my solitude to other people. - Alan Watts

Taoism, on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

I know, then, that after I die other bodies, other eyeings, will be born. But this is really the same thing as saying that after I die I will again awake as a baby — any baby, but only one — just as I did before but without remembering the previous trip. For anyone who argues that after death there will be nothingness forever is really saying that when he dies the universe will cease to be. But we know that it goes on after people die, and that because it does the eyeing it is really more my self than this particular body.

The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, begins: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.” This is, in effect, the same statement that opens St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things were made by him (the Word), and without him was not anything made that was made.” By thoughts, or mental words, we distinguish or “make” things. Without thoughts, there are no “things”; there is just undefined reality.