Just as true humour is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself. - Alan Watts

Work is something serious. It’s what you do for a purpose, because you believe that you have to go on living. You have to work to survive, because you think you have to survive. But you don’t have to. And this whole thing doesn’t have to go on, which is why it does. I know that seems paradoxical, but think about it — life is full of examples of this. If I try to impress someone, I usually don’t. If you try too hard with anything, you usually make a mess of it.

They found security in letting go rather than in holding on and, in so doing, developed an attitude toward life that might be called psychophysical judo. Nearly twenty-five centuries ago, the Chinese sages Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu had called it wu-wei, which is perhaps best translated as “action without forcing.” It is sailing in the stream of the Tao, or course of nature, and navigating the currents of li (organic pattern) — a word that originally signified the natural markings in jade or the grain in wood. As this attitude spread and prevailed in the wake of Vibration Training, people became more and more indulgent about eccentricity in life-style, tolerant of racial and religious differences, and adventurous in exploring unusual ways of loving.

Already man uses innumerable gadgets to displace the work done by bodily organs in the animals, and it would surely be in line with this tendency to externalize the reasoning functions of the brain — and thus hand over the government of life to electromagnetic monsters. In other words, the interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism. If we are to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.