We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright… - Alan Watts

Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but the positive substance which we call wonderful.

[W]e have never [...] permitted ourselves to be everything that we are, to see that fundamentally all the gains and losses, rights and wrongs of our lives are as natural and 'perfect' as the peaks and valleys of a mountain range.

"If, on the other hand, you are aware of fear, you realize that, because this feeling is now yourself, escape is impossible. You see that calling it "fear" tells you little or nothing about it, for the comparison and the naming is based, not on past experience, but on memory. You have then no choice but to be aware of it with your whole being as an entirely new experience. Indeed, every experience is in this sense new, and at every moment of our lives we are in the midst of the new and the unknown. At this point you receive the experience without resisting it or naming it, and the whole sense of conflict between "I" and the present reality vanishes."

Man makes God in his own image, and as he comes to a clearer and more intelligible view of his own image - changing it in the process - he comes to a more intelligible view of God.