[A]wareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present[.] - Alan Watts

The paradox about waking up — I mean the ordinary kind of waking up that occurred to you and me this morning — is that you can’t make it happen, yet it’s inevitable. The same holds true spiritually. You can’t wish, pray, beg, force, or meditate yourself awake.

Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead. But this is the secret of Goethe’s Stirb und werde, “Die and come to life.” For the job of compassion in a sick society only the dead need apply.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.