“There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

Lasting happiness—the underlying quest in almost all of Watts’s copious writing—can only be achieved by giving up the ego-self, which is a pure illusion anyway.

dreaming about tomorrow was pure escapism from the pain we fear today.

until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”

Here and now, Watts declared, lies the experience of the universe in its totality. “If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp,

It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise.

Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward—whether