“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.”

A myth can only “work” when it is thought to be truth,

the community is its own moralist. It elects and pays judges, policemen, and preachers, as if to say, “When I am difficult, please kick me.

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,

These myths

when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere.

sorry-go-round.

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.

It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.