By Alan Watts, 1951 First read: January 2024 ** Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward - whether it be a “good time” tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave.  -- The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for reality.  There is another way of life that requires neither myth nor despair. (spoiler alert: this way of life is “living in the present moment”) - Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. - Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. 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. If then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite our best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end. The discontent of our souls would appear to be the sign and seal of their divinity. --- The human body lives because it is a complex of motions, of circulation, respiration and digestion. To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist, you kill yourself.  We shall then have a war between consciousness and nature, between permanence and the fact of flux. This war is futile and frustrating - a vicious circle - (...). For when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake.  Ideas and words are more or less fixed, whereas real things change. -- To define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say “This is I”. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth and will continue long after the event called death. We are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words. And the more we try to live there the more isolated and alone we feel. To separate “this person” from the rest of the universe is to make a conventional separation. To want “this person” to be eternal is to want the words to be the reality, and to insist that a convention endure for ever and ever. **