sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions. - Alan Watts

Harry Emerson Fosdick could write a book called On Being a Real Person, which translated literally is, “How to be a genuine fake,” because in the old sense, the person is the role, the part played by the actor. But if you forget that you are the actor, and think you are the person, you have been taken in by your own role. You are “en-rolled,” or bewitched, spellbound, enchanted.

We have arbitrarily agreed to define the sun by the limit of its visible fire.

This book, however, is in the spirit of the Chinese sage Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness — from which men shrink. Here, then, my aim is to show — backwards-fashion — that those essential realities of religion and metaphysic are vindicated in doing without them, and manifested in being destroyed.