But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with… - Alan Watts

Instead of thinking that you’re a victim of a mechanical world or an autocratic God, try this on — the life you’re living is what you have put yourself into. Only you won’t admit it because you want to play the game that it has happened to you. But instead of blaming your father for getting horny for your mother, and expecting both of them to take responsibility for your crummy life since they brought you into the world, try considering that you were the shiny gleam in your father’s eye when he approached your mother, and that it was your intention that led you to become deliberately involved in this particular existence. And even if you’ve had a terrible life — rife with syphilis and tuberculosis and the Siberian Itch — it has all, nevertheless, been a game. And isn’t that an optimal hypothesis?

When there is a crack in the Cosmic Egg, Buddha is about to be born.

Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory.