They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.

Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.