But God is always found where He is least expected, and no one would have thought of looking for Him in the cowshed of a country inn. - Alan Watts

We say in popular speech that we come into this world, but we do nothing of the kind. We come out of it. In the same way as the fruit comes out of the tree, the egg from the chicken, and the baby from the womb, we are symptomatic of the universe. Just as in the retina there are myriads of little nerve endings, we are the nerve endings of the universe.

the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.

Look, if you play life on the supposition that you’re a helpless little puppet or that life is a frightful, serious risk, it will be an invariable drag. There’s no point in going on living unless you make the assumption that the situation of life is optimal, that — really and truly — we’re all in a state of total bliss and delight, but we’re all pretending otherwise, just for kicks. You play “non bliss” in order to really experience “bliss.” And you can really go as far out into the non bliss game as you want, because when you wake up from the game, it’ll be great. You can’t know black unless you know white, and you can’t know white without knowing black. This is simply fundamental.