stfu and read, k?

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“For
the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from
the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite
other than himself—and then trying to grasp it.

But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on
the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the
world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the
realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“As far as I can figure, the way that it works is this: everyone has something that happened to them. The thing that we each carry. And you can see it in people, if you look. See it in the way someone walks, in the way someone takes a compliment, sometimes you can just see it in someone’s eyes. In one moment of desperation, of fear, in one quick moment you can see that thing that happened. Everyone has it. The thing that keeps you up at night, or makes you not trust people, or stops love. The thing that hurts. And to stop it, to stop the hurt, you have to turn it into a story. And not just a story you play over and over for yourself, but a story that you tell. A story’s not a story unless you tell it. And once you tell it, it’s not yours anymore. You give it away. And once you give it away, it’s not something that hurts you anymore, it’s something that helps everyone who hears it. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to explain. It’s probably best if we just show you how it works.”
― daniel macivor, How It Works