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The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him - his parents, relatives, teachers,… - Alan Watts
" "The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him - his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.
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About Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Alan Wilson Watts
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Alan W. Watts
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Additional quotes by Alan Watts
Protogenesis The Seven Secret
Sayings of God Before athe beginning when God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep, God said bI AM THAT. And it is so. Also, being in eternity which is neither linear nor sequential, where all is nowever, God said, YOU MUST DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE. And it was drawn. But it was no dreary straight line or flat wall, for God then said, HAVE A BALL. And there was a ball, in the image whereof all stars and planets came to be formed. Thereupon God said, THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO EVERYTHING. And there are: the inside and the outside, the dense and the spacious, the right and the wrong, the left and the taken, for, as it is written, cOne shall be taken, and the other left. And God said, IT MUST BE IN TIME. And thereafter it was, is, and will be, for as it is written again, dAs it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, through all ages of ages. Amen. And forthwith God said, SPACE IT OUT. Whereupon it came to pass that, beside this and that and now and then, there is also here and there. And God beheld ehow firm a foundation this was and said unto himself, GET LOST. And there you are.
The rules of communication are not necessarily the rules of the universe, and man is not the role or identity which society thrusts upon him. For when a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.
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