You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says 'Boo' and then laughs at itself for jumping.
Alan WattsBreathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world โ a place where they are one.
Alan WattsSo the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Alan WattsInability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spiritโ-to the โconquestโ of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.
Alan Watts