Tao of Philosophy

On the other hand, such major Oriental philosophies as the Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism arise in cultures far less concerned with controlling the world, and in which the whole notion of the dominance of the universe by man (the conscious ego) seems palpably absurd. For all these philosophies it is a first principle that the seeming separateness of the ego from the world, so that it could be its own controller, is an illusion. Individual consciousness did not contrive itself and, not being sui generis (un-born, anutpanna), can never be the directive source of life.

Thus, for Oriental philosophy, knowledge is not control. It is rather the “sensation”—the vivid realization—that “I” am not this individualized consciousness alone, but the matrix from which it arises. This knowledge consists, not in a verbal proposition, but in a psychological change, similar to that which occurs in the cure of a psychosis. One in whom this change has come to pass does not attempt to control the world, or himself, by the efforts of his own will. He learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.

Lovely trees are turned into information about nothing, and we do not replace them properly

Now that resonance is an extremely primitive form of consciousness.

a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole.

absurd to say that we came into this world. We did not: we came out of it!

sensation we are brought up with of being an island of consciousness locked up in a bag of skin.

words of the poet A.E. Housman, perceive “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.”