The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence. - Alan Watts

The self pretends that things are getting serious, just like a great actor on the stage. Even though the audience knows that what they see on stage is only a play, the actor’s skill takes them in — they weep and laugh and sit on the edge of their seats with anticipation. They’re utterly involved in what they really know is just a play. So that’s what’s going on here. Brahman is a tremendous actor with absolutely superb technique, so much so that Brahman takes itself in and feels that the play is real. We are all the Brahman acting out our own parts and playing the human game so beautifully that Brahman is enchanted, and this is what enchantment means — under the influence of a chant, hypnotized, spellbound, fascinated. And that fascination is maya.

[T]he problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

[A]wareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present[.]