The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. - Alan Watts

Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery — in
morals, in art or in spirituality — the more you see that you are playing a
rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of
any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with
someone else's depth or failure.

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior — that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward.