This Is Water

The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. (Location 105)

“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. (Location 155)

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. (Location 157)

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. (Location 171)

you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. (Location 298)

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. (Location 304)

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. (Location 311)

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. (Location 313)

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. (Location 317)

And the so-called “real world” will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called “real world” of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. (Location 324)

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. (Location 337)

It is about the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: (Location 360)