Alan Watts

It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves

But in practice we are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words.

Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death.

The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, enabling us to do nothing but pursue the future faster and faster.

Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one’s goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.

But this doesn’t help, either, for as soon as I try to understand what is meant by my everyday mind, and then try to latch on to it, I am just sucking another finger. But why does this difficulty arise?

And sure enough, I find time and time again that I made no mistake about its direction—but for all this I simply cannot see what it’s pointing at.

but hardly together. The first revolution was

Shinran did not remain in the Pure Land school to which Honen belonged; he founded his own school to preserve the purity of a faith which he felt that ordinary Jodo priests did not fully understand.