/similar_quotes/188

Showing 3 similar quotes for quote #188 from This Is It by Alan Watts

The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
114

Through the heroic act of world creation and division of opposites, the ego steps forth from the creative magic circle of the uroboros and finds itself in a state of loneliness and discord.  With the emergence of the fully fledged ego, the paradisal situation is abolished; the infantile condition, in which life was regulated by something ampler and more embracing, is at an end, and with it the natural dependence on that ample embrace.  We may think of this paradisal situation in terms of religion, and say that everything was controlled by God; or we may formulate it ethically, and say that everything was still good and that evil had not yet come into the world.  Other myths dwell on the 'effortlessness' of the Golden Age, when nature was bountiful, and toil, suffering, and pain did not exist; others stress the 'everlastingness,' the deathlessness, of such an existence.


This Is It
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: Vintage (1973)
0

The man of deep spiritual wisdom is irrelevant to this society.  This has not just recently come to be so; it has been so for centuries, because - for centuries - society has consisted precisely of those human beings who are so deluded by the conventions of words and ideas as to believe that there is a real choice between the opposites of life - between pleasure and pain, good and evil, God and Lucifer, spirit and nature.  But what is separable in terms, in words, is not separable in reality, in the solid relationship between the terms.  Whoever sees that there is no ultimate choice between these opposites is irrelevant because he cannot really participate in the politician's and the ad-man's illusion that there can be better and better without worse and worse, and that matter can yield indefinitely to the desires of mind without becoming utterly undesirable.


Meditations
Author: Marcus Aurelius
Publisher: Penguin Great Ideas (2005)
0

Again, it is a sin to pursue pleasure as a good and to avoid pain as an evil. It is bound to result in complaints that Nature is unfair in her rewarding of vice and virtue; since it is the bad who are so often in enjoyment of pleasures and the means to obtain them, while pains and events that occasion pains descend upon the heads of the good. Besides, if a man is afraid of pain, he is afraid of something happening which will be part of the appointed order of things, and this is itself a sin; if he is bent on the pursuit of pleasure, he will not stop at acts of injustice, which again is manifestly sinful. No; when Nature herself makes no distinction - and if she did, she would not have brought pains and pleasures into existence side by side - it behooves those who would follow in her footsteps to be like-minded and exhibit the same indifference. He therefore who does not view with equal unconcern pain or pleasure, death or life, fame or dishonour - all of them employed by Nature without any partiality - clearly commits a sin.