At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences.

However, when you say to yourself, “I must go on living,” you put yourself in a double bind because you submit to a process which is essentially spontaneous and then insist it must happen.

We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.

Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake – not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment.

As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity – in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.

What we know by memory, we know only at secondhand.

There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down – traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.

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.

However, until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand eternal life, that is to say, eternal now.

To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only “give,” but also stability or “weight.