Key learning points from the book
By Alan Watts
My conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real ‘me’ than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems to be so fleeting and intangible but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions about what I will be in the future. So it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.
By ALAN WATTS
Spiritual shouldn’t be separated from material nor the wonderful from the ordinary. We need, above all, to disentangle ourselves from the habit of speech and thought which set this two apart making it impossible for us to see that THIS – the immediate, everyday and present experience – is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
by Alan Watts
We have been brought up in a religious tradition, that to a great extent has taught us to mistrust the nature around us and to mistrust our own selves as well. But the irony here is that if u cannot trust your own basic nature, then how can you trust your own mistrusting ? Isnt your mistrusting a part of your nature ? How do u know that your mistrusting is not wrong as well ? If you do not trust your own nature, you become as tangled up as anyone can be.
Confucius was the first to say that he would rather trust human passions and instincts than trust human ideas about what is right, for like the Taoists he realized that we have to allow all living things to look after themselves.