salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. - Alan Watts

"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences."

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.

To begin with, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not
of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is
notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of
interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a
dancing presentóthe unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future
but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much
the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement
with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as
overlook them.