What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phen… - Alan Watts

To some degree, all civilized people are out of touch with reality because we fail to distinguish between the way things are and the way they are described. For politicians this dichotomy has reached extreme proportions, but it affects everyone. We confuse money, which is an abstraction, with real wealth; we confuse the idea of who we are with the actual experience of our organic existence.

"All perfect accomplishment in art or life is accompanied by the curious sensation that it is happening of itself - that it is not forced, studied, or contrived. Thos is not to say that everything which is felt to happen of itself is a perfect accomplishment; the marvel of human spontaneity is that it has developed the means of self-discipline - which becomes repressive only when it is felt that the controlling agent is separate from the action. But the sensation that the action is happening of itself, neither from an agent nor to a witness, is the authentic sensation of life as pure process, in which there is neither mover nor moved. Process without source or destination, verb without subject or object - this is not deprivation, a the word "without" suggests, but the "musical" sensation of arriving at every moment in which the melody and rhythm unfold."

But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.