and religion now seem to me to be meaningless, without even attaining the charm of deliberate nonsense; and this is even, and perhaps especially, tru… - Alan Watts

Thus if man is to realize again his fundamental unity and harmony with life he must proceed by the roundabout way of trying to get that which he already has until he convinces himself of his own folly. For it is only by trying to accept life as a whole that we can make ourselves aware that there was never any real need to try, and that spirituality is in fact a matter of “becoming what we are.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

"One of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages — losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many manuscripts mysteriously entitled "Book of Hours", since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their title-pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons — ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only assume that these books were some ancient device for marking the passage of time and they associated themselves in my mind with sundials in old country yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head."