...“We have to ask ourselves, quite fundamentally, whats all the trouble? In other words, what is your state of mind when you contemplate the possibility of everything becoming nothing? Alright, so the universe is a transitory system, like bubbles, like smoke, like foam on the water, so what? And so how easy, just go along with it, dissolve. So whats the problem? Why don't we want to give up? What do we think were going to get by holding on and by resisting the dissolution.

What I'm interested in for you to feel, is what do your really feel like inside at the prospect of everything becoming nothing, of this whole thing being a bubble that dissolves. You see about death, the reality of approaching death, people are apt to feel chilly, cold, lonely, scared because its unknown, that the most frightening thing about death is that there might be something beyond it. There are all sorts of things that scare you, but beyond every monster is death. Dissolution is the end of it all.

The act of government and religion is to fill that void beyond death with threats of a rather unspecified nature, so that we can rule people by saying 'if you don't do exactly what I say I'll kill you'. And so long as we can be scared of that, and so long as we can be made to think of death as a bad thing we can be ruled. And that is why no government likes mystics. Because if we define the mystic as the person who is no longer scared of death, because the mystic in the simplest possible language is the person that understands you have to have nothing to have something. So you can't fundamentally scare the mystic with death, because, see, what end can it all come too? Whats all the trouble about? The most it can come to is nothing." ~Alan Watts...