There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point… - Alan Watts

Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.

Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics, have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.) The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.

the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional — the environment grows the organism, and the organism creates the environment. The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires an environment containing a sun in order to exist. It’s all one process. It isn’t that organisms came into this world by accident or chance — this world is the sort of environment that grows organisms. And it has been that way from the beginning. From the very first moment of the big bang — if that’s the way the whole thing started — organisms like you and me were involved.