Alan Watts

“Religious ideas are like words—of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word ‘water’ is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called ‘God.’

“In certain natures, the conflict between social convention and repressed spontaneity is so violent that it manifests itself in crime, insanity, and neurosis, which are the prices we pay for the otherwise undoubted benefits of order.

“The division of life into the higher and lower categories of spirit and nature usually goes hand in hand with a symbolism in which spirit is male and nature female. The resemblance was perhaps suggested by the rains falling from heaven to fertilize the earth, the planting of seed in the ground, the ripening of the fruit by the warmth of the sun. To a considerable extent ancient man reasoned in terms of such correspondences, and made sense of his world by seeing analogies between one natural process and another, analogies which were understood to be actual relationships.

“Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called ‘birth’, and will continue long after the event called ‘death’. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

“A separate self is merely conventional reality, in the same sense as lines of latitude and longitude and the measurements of the clock; which is why one of the means of maya, illusion, is measurement. Things are measurements; they are units of thought, like inches are measurements. There are no things in physical nature. How many things is a thing? However many you want. A “thing” is a “think”, a unit of thought; it is as much reality as you can catch hold of in one idea.

“Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called ‘birth’, and will continue long after the event called ‘death’. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.