It is written in the conviction that no theme could be more appropriate in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain. I… - Alan Watts

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

[T]he ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself, since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play - the part of a reliable and predictable centre of action which resists spontaneous change. But in extreme suffering and death this part cannot be played, and as a result they become associated with all the shame and fear with which, as children, we were forced into becoming acceptable egos. Death and agony are therefore dreaded as loss of status, and their struggles are desperate attempts to maintain the assumed patterns of action and feeling.

He learns the art of “letting things happen,” which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.

When someone says, “Time to stop now!” he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner.