“To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, the center and soul of our being, which we call ‘I’. For this we think to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this ‘I’ does not exist.”
–Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
“The narration of History thereby becomes yet another occasion for deploying – and thereby reinforcing – the central beliefs and values of the humanistic tradition. That tradition thus provides the ego, or identity-principle, that ‘we’ (the community of humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties. We love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are, while conveniently exorcising the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature. History is, indeed, a ‘fiction’, the corpse over which we warm ourselves.”
–Walter A. Adams, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative
“…enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact…”
–Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces