It is quite another thing to see that you are your “fate,” and that there is no one either to master it or to be mastered, to rule or to surrender. - Alan Watts

There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.

Everything is the Tao' - an integrated, harmonious, and universal process from which it is absolutely impossible to deviate. This sensation is marvelous, to put it mildly, though there is no logical reason why it should be so, unless it is just through release from the chronic feeling of having to 'face' reality. For here one does not face life anymore; one simply is it.

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance — that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see — unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.