”So what I think we could aim for in the way of human
civilization and culture would be a system in which we
are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and
unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do
not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union.
In other words, look at the number of people we know who are
terrified of silence, and who have to have something going all
the time, some noise streaming into their ears.

They’re doing that because of their intense sense of loneliness.
And so when they feel silent, they feel lonely and they want to
escape from it. Or people who just want to get together. As we
say, they want to escape from themselves. More people spend more
time running away from themselves. Isn’t that wretched? What a definition.

What an experience of self if it’s something you’ve always got to
be running away from and forgetting. Say you read a mystery story.
Why? So you forget yourself. You join a religion. Why? To forget
yourself. You get absorbed in a political movement. Why? To forget
yourself. Well it must be a pretty miserable kind of self if you have
to forget it like that. Now for a person who doesn’t have an isolated
sense of self, he has no need to run away from it, because he knows.”
Alan Watts