Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair. - Alan Watts

There is a very interesting Hindu teacher by the name of Krishnamurti whom many of you may know about. He tells people that all of their religious inquiry, their yoga practices, their reading religious books, and so on, are nothing but the perpetuation of egocentricity on a very refined and highbrow level. Therefore he encourages disciples who studiously avoid reading any kind of philosophical or edifying book. They are reduced to reading mystery stories and they become devoted nondisciples. What a clever bind that is! It is the same as the Zen technique.

But he would do it in the strangest way, by declaring that there was no self to find. Lasting happiness — the underlying quest in almost all of Watts’s copious writing — can only be achieved by giving up the ego-self, which is a pure illusion anyway. The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

What is real, if you have decided to live in the dimension of space and time, is muscle and nerve.