"As the fish doesn't know water, people..." - Quote by Alan Watts
As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
More by Alan Watts
“Do you see yourself as a victim of the world, or do you see yourself as the world?”
“When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.”
“And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.”
More on Awareness
“When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you were waking up from a dream, the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity. No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is.”
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep.”
“Life is now in session. Are you present?”
More on Consciousness
“To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.”
“We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.”
“A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can't tell the dancer from the dance. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body.”