Buddhism the Religion of No-Religion (Alan Watts Love Of Wisdom)

Yet common to all sensation is this basic sense. If you explored your sensations and began reducing them to the basic sense, you would be on your way to reality, to that which underlies everything, the ground of being, the basic energy. To the extent that you realize this basic energy and know that you are identical with it, you transcend, overcome

Sunya does not mean that the world itself and the energy of the world are nothing, however. It means that no concept of the world is valid. No ideas or beliefs or doctrines or systems or theories can contain the universe.

The point is that Buddhism is not a teaching. Its essence consists in a certain kind of experience, a transformation of consciousness, which is called awakening or enlightenment, that involves our seeing through or transcending the hoax of being a separate ego.

To feel oneself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, locked up inside a bag of skin, is in the view of the East a hallucination. You are not a stranger on the earth who has come into this world as the result of a fluke of nature, or as a spirit from somewhere outside natur

A person who has good mental discipline can be perfectly happy wandering around in the rain. You do not need a fire if you have good mind control. But if you have ordinary, bad mind control, when it is cold you start shivering because you are putting up a resistance to the cold; you are fighting it. But don’t fight it, relax to the cold, as a matte

This is the secret of the Middle Way: you cannot be saved alone because you are not alone. You are not an isolated point on a circle. You are not one extreme point on a spectrum, separate from any of the other points. You are the whole cosmos.

You are only really there when you let go of everything and do not depend on any fixed idea or belief for your sanity or happiness.

Buddhism is not interested in concepts, it is interested in direct experience only.

Yesterday does not exist. Tomorrow never comes. There is only today.

Therefore the Buddha devised the doctrine that is called the Middle Way, that is neither ascetic nor hedonistic.