Naomi

“Our society at large has lost its ability to distinguish between opinion and fact, and between a threat and an opinion. This is due to the fact that many people are focused on making their opinions into facts—which causes them to react irrationally when others express different opinions, which they perceive as a threat to their personal reality.”
― Zita Steele, Guide to Free Thinking: Stories & Life Lessons

“Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
― Terence McKenna

“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety