Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together. - Alan Watts

Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a state of considerable confusion. Not only are there serious difficulties of communication between the intellectual and the general public, but the course of our thinking and of our very history has seriously undermined the common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions and institutions.

We depend on each other. If you lean two sticks against each other, and they stand up because they support each other, and you take one stick away, and the other falls down, you clearly see how they interdepend. And this is exactly our situation. We and our environment and all of us together are interdependent systems.

I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the “backwards law.” When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it — which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.