Originally Posted by
Aylen
"Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the “saved” from the “damned,” the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. . . . All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty."
~Alan Watts
"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes
round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it
begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the
world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the
watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night,
waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't
have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to
know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or
white unless side-by-side with black.
"In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when
it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it
would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it;
now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes
back again after it disappears. 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..
"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing
outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over
this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of
hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people
in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the
stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of
which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams,
for when he wakes up they will disappear."
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--Alan Watts (1966) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Pantheon Books.