Home > Work > Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
1 " God is the most obvious thing in the world. He is absolutely self-evident - the simplest, clearest and closest reality of life and consciousness. We are only unaware of him because we are too complicated, for our vision is darkened by the complexity of pride. We seek him beyond the horizon with our noses lifted high in the air, and fail to see that he lies at our very feet. We flatter ourselves in premeditating the long, long journey we are going to take in order to find him, the giddy heights of spiritual progress we are going to scale, and all the time are unaware of the truth that "God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves." We are like birds flying in quest of the air, or men with lighted candles searching through the darkness for fire. "
― Alan W. Watts , Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
2 " because even then I was ill at ease with the commitment to spiritual imperialism which most Christians feel to be the sine qua non of being Christian, as if one could not be a true Christian without being a militant missionary. "
3 " What interests him, for instance, about the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ is whether and how it happened. These two questions are, however, much less important than why it happened, than the discovery of what it means. For "
4 " A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or a mindless fundamentalism. "
