Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself.… - Alan Watts

Thus a Buddhist text says, “If the accumulation of false imaginations is cleared away, Enlightenment will appear. But the strange thing is that when people gain Enlightenment they realize that without false imaginations there could be no Enlightenment.

This is the whole meaning of polarity, of life implying death, of subject implying object, of man implying world, and Yes implying No. [...] Just as liberation involves the recognition of oneself in what is most other, it involves the recognition of life in death - and this is why so many rites of initiation take the neophyte through a symbolic death. He accepts the certainty of death so completely that, in effect, he is dead already - and thus beyond anxiety.

Chao-Chou asked, “What is the Tao?” The master [Nan-ch’üan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.” “How can one return into accord with it?” “By intending to accord you immediately deviate.” “But without intention, how can one know the Tao?” “The Tao,” said the master, “belongs neither to knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”2 [56b]