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But the fantasy of what I would have liked to learn as a child may be revealing, since I feel unequipped by education for problems that lie outside the cloistered, literary domain in which I am competent and at home. Looking back, then, I would have arranged for myself to be taught survival techniques for both natural and urban wildernesses. I would want to have been instructed in self-hypnosis, in aikido (the esoteric and purely self-defensive style of judo), in elementary medicine, in sexual hygiene, in vegetable gardening, in astronomy, navigation, and sailing; in cookery and clothesmaking, in metalwork and carpentry, in drawing and painting, in printing and typography, in botany and biology, in optics and acoustics, in semantics and psychology, in mysticism and yoga, in electronics and mathematical fantasy, in drama and dancing, in singing and in playing an instrument by ear; in wandering, in advanced daydreaming, in prestidigitation, in techniques of escape from bondage, in disguise, in conversation with birds and beasts, in ventriloquism, in French and German conversation, in planetary history, in morphology, and in classical Chinese.

— In my own way by Alan Watts

I was thus moving from the ideal of Christian love to that of Buddhist wisdom, from agape to bodhi. I didn’t like Christian love as I saw it exemplified in the lives of those who preached it. They were always going to war with other people to save them. They believed that suffering was “good for you” and considered flogging their children an act of mercy. Formerly, they had even burned heretics at the stake in a desperate attempt to save them from their own fantasies of everlasting damnation. Indeed, there were people around me, such as Aunts Gertrude and Ethel, who really lived Christian love; but they never preached it. Trying, then, to put myself back into an adolescent’s point of view, it seemed to me that those who preached it didn’t have it. They were solemn bombasts who, as might have been expected, ended up with the atomic bomb. “O how great a thing it is when the Lord putteth into the hands of the righteous invincible might.”

— In my own way by Alan Watts

In debates about consciousness, one of the most frequently asked questions goes something like this: “What is it about consciousness that helps us survive? Why couldn’t we have had all this cognitive apparatus but simply been machines that don’t feel anything or have any experience?” As I hear it, this question is basically asking, “Why did consciousness get added on to brains that reached a certain level of complexity? Why was consciousness thrown into the bargain as a kind of bonus? What extra evolutionary good does the possession of consciousness contribute, if any?”

To ask this question is to make the tacit assumption that there could be brains of any desired level of complexity that are not conscious. It is to buy into the distinction between Machines Q and Z sitting side by side on the old oaken table in Room 641, carrying out identical operations but one of them doing so with feeling and the other doing so without feeling. It assumes that consciousness is some kind of orderable “extra feature” that some models, even the fanciest ones, might or might not have, much as a fancy car can be ordered with or without a DVD player or a power moonroof.

— I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Now it is the papal infallibility and orthodox dogma of the present scientific establishment that plants are mechanisms without intelligence, and that they have neither feeling nor capacity for purposeful action. A little child hasn’t been told this, and therefore knows better. I knew that plants, moths, birds, and rabbits were people—as is exemplified in such tales as The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, and innumerable folk tales from all cultures. Anthropologists and historians of religion dismiss this as animism, the most primitive, superstitious, and depraved of all those systems and beliefs which, in the course of historical progress, eventually blossom into Christianity or dialectical materialism. It is thus that our entire civilization has no respect for plants or for animals other than pets—the flattering dog, the wily cat, the obedient horse, and the mimicking parrot. It is high time to go back, or on, to animism and to cultivate good manners toward all sentient beings, including vegetables, and even lakes and mountains.

— In my own way by Alan Watts

From all this I learned a love of moths, but I no longer catch, kill, and set them in cabinet drawers under glass. I have found that by talking gently to moths, even calling “Here kitty-kitty-kitty!” I can get them to alight on my hand, where I can inspect them alive and at leisure. I have even persuaded a huge Polyphemus to stay on my head for half an hour. By this means, if you are inclined to the scientific study of moths or butterflies, you can simply photograph them in color instead of killing them—and the sport of making friends with them is far more challenging than going out on the hunt. This applies equally to birds, deer, fish, and bears.

— In my own way by Alan Watts

‘There seems to be a root problem about the very nature of being,’ she went on. ‘Our being is an emanation of a continuous flux. It is anicca. But Heraclitus knew that too.’

‘Yes,’ Wizard Prang went on, ‘but not Empedocles. Zeno actually took the flux apart, so that even Aristotle could not put it back together again. He gave up on the problem, instead of inventing the differential calculus on the spot. Two thousand years wasted. So in the West, being has ended up as an essentially static entity. In the hands of a Jung it attains to flexibility, because he understood so much of the Vedanta, but mere flexibility isn’t enough. Yes, the problem is radical, all right.’

— The Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer

16 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, so that it may become gnats throughout the whole land of Egypt.’ ”

17 And they did so; Aaron stretched out his hand with his staff and struck the dust of the earth, and gnats came on humans and animals alike; all the dust of the earth turned into gnats throughout the whole land of Egypt.

18 The magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, but they could not. There were gnats on both humans and animals.

19 And the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God!” But Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said.

— New Revised Standard Version Updated Bible by National Council of Churches