Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair… - Alan Watts

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.

Life & love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith - in life, in other people, and in oneself - is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on Zen may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that Zen can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason.

There is more in this beauty than the succession of melodious images, and the theme of dissolution does not simply borrow its splendor from the things dissolved. The truth is rather that the images, though beautiful in themselves, come to life in the act of vanishing.

This, then, is the paradox that the greater our ethical idealism, the darker is the shadow that we cast, and that ethical monotheism became, in attitude if not in theory, the world's most startling dualism.