Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind th… - Alan Watts

A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence.

On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.

The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international
peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and
assistance to the starving of the earth — urgent as they are — will destroy
rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we
have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not
enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they
will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and
similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by
those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love.
No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart,
just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no
capacity for living now.

[T]he anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up.