For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory, somewhat like the illusory circle of fire made by a whirling torch. … - Alan Watts

You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.

For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation.

Civilized people, whether Western or Eastern,
need to be liberated and dehypnotized from their systems of symbolism and, thereby, become more
intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world. For lack of such awareness our
consciousnesses and consciences have become calloused to the daily atrocities of burning children with
napalm, of saturation bombing of fertile earth with all its plants, wild animals, and insects (not to mention
people), and of manufacturing nuclear and chemical weapons concerning which the real problem is not so
much how to prevent their use as how to get them off the face of the earth.