"Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see..." - Quote by Alan Watts
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
More by Alan Watts
“No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.”
“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.”
“The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.”
More on Self Consciousness
“Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.”
“People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.”
“The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous.”
More on Suffering
“Pain makes hens and poets cackle.”
“They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.”
“Extreme torture is mute, and so we sat silent, petrified, like columns of marble buried under the sand of an earthquake. Neither wished to listen to the other because our heart-threads had become weak and even breathing would have broken them.”