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“I read of the following incident in a textbook on abnormal psychology. The doctors in a mental institution were thinking of releasing a certain schizophrenic patient. They decided to give him a lie-detector test. One of the questions they asked him was, ‘Are you Napoleon?’ He replied, ‘No.’ The machine showed he was lying.”
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“An experiment was conducted with a chimpanzee in a room in which a banana was suspended by a string from the center of the ceiling, so that banana was too high to reach. The room was empty except for the chimp, the experimenter, the banana and string, and several wooden boxes of various sizes. The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether the chimp was clever enough to make a scaffolding of the boxes, climb up, and reach the banana.
What really happened was this. The experimenter stood in the corner of the room to watch the proceedings. The chimp came over to the corner and anxiously tugged the experimenter by the sleeve indicating that he wanted him to move. Slowly the experimenter followed the chimp. When they came to about the center of the room, the chimp suddenly jumped on his shoulders and got the banana.”
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“I didn’t feel that I was reading something strange or exotic, but that I was reading the very thoughts I’ve had all my life, only expressed far better than I’ve ever been able to express them.”
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“A precise statement, though it often has its place, has only one meaning, whereas a vague statement may contain a multitude of interesting and fruitful meanings.”
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“It’s hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.” [Alan Watts]
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“There may be entities which are so sensitive that the very act of naming them throws them out of existence.”
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“The Taoist isn’t like the western agnostic who grants that either God exists or He doesn’t, but doesn’t know which. The question simply doesn’t occur to him ― the Tao is above existence and nonexistence.”
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“If you really want to find out the meaning of a word like ‘Tao’, you can’t expect any shortcut like a definition to tell you. To understand its true meaning, you must sample hundreds and thousands of cases in which the term is actually used. After you’ve done this, you might try your hand at being clever and framing one single definition to cover this whole multitude of cases. But even if you succeed, how utterly empty your definition will be to those who haven’t had your concrete experiences of actually living through this philosophy.”
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