/similar_quotes/283

Showing 3 similar quotes for quote #283 from This Is It by Alan Watts

Publisher: Vintage (1973)

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence...but man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

If Christ is really God's search for man, God, to have effectively 'come down to Earth,' must be discoverable here in this very place and moment. But the emulation of the 'Jesus of history' obscures the truth. It concerns itself so much with what happened two thousand years ago that it misses the point, confusing the pointing finger with the truth. 'Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.' The disciples sought him at the tomb; we seek him in the tradition of the Church or the record of the Bible - or in the future, which is merely the past projected ahead. They are all tombs, and 'he is not here.

Going by a system is often, though not necessarily, an elaborate and subtle ego-trip in which people inflate their egos by trying to destroy them, stressing the superhuman difficulty of the task. It can so easily be mere postponement of realization to the tomorrow which never comes, with the mock humility of, 'I'm not ready yet. I don't deserve it. Perhaps, if I work as hard as the great sages of old, I can get it in twenty years or in my next incarnation.' But what if this is just self-punishment and spiritual masochism - lying as it were, on a bed of nails to assure oneself of 'authentic' existence? Mortification of the ego is an attempt to get rid of what doesn't exist, or - which comes to the same thing - of the feeling that it exists...My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which all these systems strive is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now or never.