If man is to rediscover his own image in the macroscopic and microscopic worlds which science reveals, this will be the “own image” in which God is said to have created him.
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
Nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything—including “my” thoughts and actions—were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that “I make them”; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.
One’s life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
The organism of man does not confront the world but is in the world.
Science and psychotherapy have also done much already to liberate us from the prison of isolation from nature in which we were supposed to renounce Eros, despise the physical organism, and rest all our hopes in a supernatural world […]. This liberation is, in other words, a very partial affair even for the small minority which has fully understood and accepted it. It leaves us still as strangers in the cosmos—without the judgment of God but without his love, without the terrors of Hell but without the hope of Heaven, without many of the physical agonies of pre-scientific times but without the sense that human life has any meaning.
One of the blessings of easy communication between the great cultures of the world is that partisanship in religion and philosophy is ceasing to be intellectually respectable. Pure religions are as rare as pure cultures, and it is mentally crippling to suppose that there must be a number of fixed bodies of doctrine among which one must choose, where choice means accepting the system entirely or not at all.
Those who rove freely through the various traditions, accepting what they can use and rejecting what they cannot, are condemned as undisciplined syncretists. But the use of one’s reason is not a lack of discipline, not is there any important religion which is not itself a syncretism, a "growing up together" of ideas and practices of diverse origin.
The therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from from hating this conditioning—hatred being a form of bondage to its object.
The part and the whole, the individual and the cosmos, are what they are only in relation to one another.
To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the victim of other people’s anxiety requires considerable tact.
But what our social institutions repress is not just the sexual love, the mutuality, of man and woman, but also the still deeper love of organism and environment, of Yes and No, and of all those so-called opposites represented by the Taoist symbol of the yin-yang, the black and white fishes in eternal intercourse. It is hardly stretching a metaphor to use the word “love” for intimate relationships beyond those between human organisms.
In place of the inarticulate cohesion of mere stuff we find the articulate cohesion of inseparably interconnected patterns. The effect of this upon the study of human behavior is that it becomes impossible to separate psychological patterns from patterns that are sociological, biological, or ecological.
Liberation is not the release of the soul from the body; it is recovery from the tactical split between the soul and the body.
The point is not that one stops choosing, but that one chooses in the knowledge that there is really no choice.
It is simply that in a universe of relativity, all choosing, all taking of sides, is playful. But this is not that one feels no urgency. To know the relativity of light and darkness is not to be able to gaze unblinkingly into the sun; to know the relativity of up and down is not to be able to fall upward. To feel urgency without compulsion is the seemingly paradoxical way of describing what it is like for a feeling to arise spontaneously without its happening to a feeler.
The world of knowledge may, like Earth, be round-so that immersion in material particulars may quite unexpectedly lead back to the universal and the transcendent.
Awareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present.
This competitive “rat race” need not be taken seriously, or rather, if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless nervous breakdowns are to become as common as colds.
Social institutions are simply rules of communication which have no more universal validity than, say, the rules of a particular grammar.