Out of Mind spring in-numerable things, conditioned by discrimination (i.e., classification) and habit-energy; these things people accept as an exter… - Alan Watts

For when you have really heard the sound of rain you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way — as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what. I have tried for years, as a philosopher, but in words it comes out all wrong: in black and white with no color.

Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.

Who wants to serve in a police vice squad, spending hours peeking into men’s johns to detect acts of homosexuality? Who wants a job as a debt-collection agent, spending his whole day being nasty to people? What sort of person voluntarily serves as a prison guard or hangman? Also, alas, one might ask what kind of individual would want to spend millions of dollars to become president of the United States, never away from the telephone, guarded around the clock by agents of the Secret Service, reading tomes of amazingly uninteresting documents, and being accompanied day and night by a warrant officer carrying a black bag containing the mechanisms to set off the atomic bomb? We believe that all such occupations, dreary or dangerous as they may be, are exercises of high responsibility and even of glory, despite the maxim that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” But what is their actual end and purpose? Towards what is Progress? In fact, what on Earth are we doing? No one has even the ghost of a notion, save perhaps a few simple-minded people who live to smell flowers, to listen to the sea, to watch trees in the wind, to climb mountains, to eat pâté de veau en croûte, to drink the Malvasia wine from Ruby Hill, and to cuddle up with a lovely woman — and such pursuits are not really expensive, as compared with the trillions spent on the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.