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 retir… - Alan Watts

For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

Conscious attention is not really the effective controlling force in your life, it’s merely the lookout. It's merely an information source which warns the organism as a whole of unusual features of the environment. […] It is the trouble-shooter - and if you identify yourself with your trouble-shooter, well then, you become one-sided and you become a perpetually anxious person.

we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view. Whitehead’s criticism of traditional education is applicable to our whole way of living: We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine.… In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.1

In attachment there is pain, and in pain deliverance, so that at this point attachment itself offers no obstacle, and the liberated one is at last free to love with all his might and to suffer with all his heart. This is not because he has learned the trick of splitting himself into higher and lower selves so that he can watch himself with inward indifference, but rather because he has found the meeting-point of the limit of wisdom and the limit of foolishness. The Bodhisattva is the fool who has become wise by persisting in his folly.