Living in the Moment

by Alan Watts

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

"This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is."

"The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive in each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind wholly open and receptive."

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causitive past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, or will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions, and ideas."

"Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly."