Alan Watts
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: Vintage (1973)

To become the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. For it implies that experience is not something in which one is trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one must fight. The conventional duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity: the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a single event which happens, not to me or from me, but of itself. The experiencer and the experience become a single, ever-changing, self-forming process, complete and fulfilled at every moment of its unfolding, and of infinite complexity and subtlety. It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling arabesque of smoke patterens in the air, or of ink dropped in water, or of a dancing snake which seems to move from every part of its body at once. This is to say that all our actions and experiences arise mutually from the organism and from the environment at the same time.