Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to h… - Alan Watts

The next aspect of the mystical feeling is even more difficult to assimilate into our ordinary practical intelligence. It is the overwhelming sense that everything that happens — everything that I or anybody else has ever done — is part of a harmonious design and that there is no error at all.

Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock.

[T]he function of the brain is to serve the present and the real, not to send man chasing wildly after the phantom of the future.