.......................................Alan Watts:
. . . only doubtful truth needs defense.
. . . to know truth one must first get rid of knowledge . . .
Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry.
Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees—unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp . . .
For it is the essence of scientific honest that you do not pretend to know what you do not know, and of the essence of scientific method that you do not employ hypotheses which cannot be tested.
At once new myths come into being—political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them—for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.
Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one's own. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it.
To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.
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