The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment… - Alan Watts

the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional — the environment grows the organism, and the organism creates the environment. The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires an environment containing a sun in order to exist. It’s all one process. It isn’t that organisms came into this world by accident or chance — this world is the sort of environment that grows organisms. And it has been that way from the beginning. From the very first moment of the big bang — if that’s the way the whole thing started — organisms like you and me were involved.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life; he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, a mere pedant absorbed in the dry bones of something which the life has long deserted. A symphony is not explained by a mathematical analysis of its notes; the mystery of a woman’s beauty is not revealed by a postmortem dissection; and no one ever understood the wonder of a bird on the wing by stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. To understand these things, you must live and move with them as they are alive. The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao. “What is the Tao?” A Zen master answers, “Usual life is the very Tao.” “How does one bring oneself into accord with it?” “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it.” For to imagine that there is a “you” separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap.