This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo — our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the pre… - Alan Watts

When you dig sound you realize that the flow or vibration of sound is a way in which you experience basic existence, being here. You can learn everything from sound, because it is not a constant. It comes and goes. It is on and off. You only hear it because it is vibrating. The lesson is that life is on and off, black and white, life and death, inside and outside, knowing and not knowing: they’re all vibrations. It’s easy to explain that in words, but to feel and understand it in your bones you have to learn how to listen to a sound. It was to teach that skill that this system of chanting sounds was invented.

Wouldn't it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the cat's head the cause of the tail? Lifting the neck of a bottle implies lifting the bottom as well, for the "two parts" come up at the same time. If I pick up an accordion by one end, the other will follow a little later, but the principle is the same. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, “To travel well is better than to arrive.