To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, “To travel well is better than to arrive. - Alan Watts

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.

To travel well is better than to arrive.

In this respect, the Chinese written language has a slight advantage over our own, and is perhaps symptomatic of a different way of thinking. It is still linear, still a series of abstractions taken in one at a time. But its written signs are a little closer to life than spelled words because they are essentially pictures, and, as a Chinese proverb puts it, “One showing is worth a hundred sayings.” Compare, for example, the ease of showing someone how to tie a complex knot with the difficulty of telling him how to do it in words alone.

In sum, then, I have tried to show that reincarnation has very strong theoretical probability, without resorting to the paranormal evidence and even without being able to explain the transmission of memories. I have carefully avoided bringing in the moral and retributive arguments, since they have little force, and I do not find a person’s fortunes or misfortunes explained by a former life. I find the explanation postponed, as in all attempts to explain the present by the past. But it is basically an intellectual block to find it incredible that you have more than one life. It is just as incredible that we have this one. It is still more incredible to suppose that what has happened once cannot happen again.

This is why G. I. Gurdjieff, that marvelous rascal-sage, wrote in his All and Everything: The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.