The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated… - Alan Watts

The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes.

Conscious attention is not really the effective controlling force in your life, it’s merely the lookout. It's merely an information source which warns the organism as a whole of unusual features of the environment. […] It is the trouble-shooter - and if you identify yourself with your trouble-shooter, well then, you become one-sided and you become a perpetually anxious person.

there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other.

You do not want to be God to the annihilation of your own individuality, for then there would be no “you” to enjoy being God.