the price you pay

  

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I heard a man say a poem once, he said, 

‘All that lives is holy.’

—John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath

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A cat, when it walks—did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake? Did you ever see a badly formed cloud?

Were the stars ever mis-arranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never.

And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we’re worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence.

We lost this thing that the cats and the flowers have, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation and so on, and then we worry.

This is the price you pay for knowing that you know.
For being able to think about thinking, being able to feel about feeling. And so you’re in this funny position.


—Alan Watts
The Nature of Consciousness

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"To every Form of being is assigned,"
Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage,
"An 'active' Principle:--howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.

This is the freedom of the universe;
Unfolded still the more, more visible,
The more we know; and yet is reverenced least,
And least respected in the human Mind,
Its most apparent home."


—William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850
The Excursion, Book 9, excerpt

 

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