If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea. - Alan Watts

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.

When someone is in some kind of social or psychological difficulty, and someone has been irresponsible in some way, we wonder what caused the problem: “Why are they like that?” And instead of attributing the problem to the person, our psychologists tend to refer it back to other things and other people: It was because of their environment, or because of family conditioning, or because of their father and mother. But there is no end to that, because you can take the blame straight back to Adam and Eve! And responsibility is evaded, because it was limited in the first place.

Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines,