Alan Watts

It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves

But this doesn’t help, either, for as soon as I try to understand what is meant by my everyday mind, and then try to latch on to it, I am just sucking another finger. But why does this difficulty arise?

And sure enough, I find time and time again that I made no mistake about its direction—but for all this I simply cannot see what it’s pointing at.

but hardly together. The first revolution was

Shinran did not remain in the Pure Land school to which Honen belonged; he founded his own school to preserve the purity of a faith which he felt that ordinary Jodo priests did not fully understand.

Well, I think this is enough medicine for tonight. So let’s put the bottle away, and go out and look at the moon.

It is the irreducible truth in the monkish idea of “holy poverty,” of the way of life to which there are no strings attached, in which—because all is lost—there is nothing to lose, in which there is the exhilaration of a kind of freedom which is poetically likened to the birds and the wind, or to clouds drifting in the boundless sky.

you create the world by the word. You might not be very conscious of doing so, but it’s the way you think that determines your basic reactions to everything you encounter and perceive. As Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

They say that if you really get into what sound is about, you’ll understand the whole mystery of things because the whole mystery of things is essentially vibrating energy — on and off, it’s as simple as that.