Lets say we take us the basic supposition which is the thing one experiences in waking That this now moment, in which i’m talking, and your listening, is eternity. that although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary and that we may not feel very well, and that we are vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to changed. this is it. so you don’t need to do anything at all but the difficulty about explaining this is that you mustn’t try to do nothing as that is doing something. and how to explain that, as their is nothing to explain. it is the way it is now. and if you understand that it will automatically wake you up. 

thats why zen teachers use shock treatment, sometimes they hit people or shout at them or create a sudden surprise because it is that jolt that suddenly brings you here. see there is no road to here cause your already there. so if you ask me how are you going to get here, your like some american tourist in england asking how to get to alleabadna, a little village, the little yolkle from the village scratched his head and said, sir i do know where it is but if i were you i wouldn’t start from here. 

so you see, when you ask how do I attain the knowledge of god, how do I find nirvana and liberation, all i can say is that is the wrong question. why do you want to attain it? why do you want to attain it? because the very fact of why you want to attain it is the only reason you have not attained it. you already have it. but of course it is up to you and your privilege to pretend that you don’t. thats your game, thats your life game, thats why you still pretend you have an ego. and when you want to wake up you will. just like that. if your not awake its because you dont want too, your still playing the hide part. your still as you will the self pretending its not the self. thats what you want too do. so you see in that way you are already there. 

when you understand this a funny thing happens, and some people misinterpret it. you will discover as this happens that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behaviour disappears. you’ll realise that, what you describe as things under your own will, feel exactly the same as things going on outside you. you watch other people moving and you know your doing that… just like your breathing or circulating your blood. if you don’t understand whats going on your liable to go crazy at this point and to feel you are god in the Jehovah sense. to say that you actually have power over some people so that you can alter what they are doing and that you are omnipotent in a very crude literal bible sense. a lot of people feel that and go crazy, you have to put them away, they feel people should kneel down and worship them like jesus. thats only they got their wires crossed. the experience happened to them and they dont know how to deal with it. so be careful with that. 

jung calls it inflation, people who get the holy man syndrome, that i finally discover that i am the lord and am above good and evil and start giving myself airs and graces but the point is everybody else is too. if you discovered that your that you must realise also that everybody else is. well for example, lets see how in other ways you might realise this. 
most people think that when they open their eyes and look around that what they are seeing is outside, it seems doesn’t it that you are behind your eyes and that behind the eyes there is a blank you cannot see it all, you turn around and you see something in front of you. but behind the eyes there seems to be something that has no color, it isn’t dark, it isn’t light, its there from a tactile standpoint, you can feel it with your fingers although you dont get inside it. but what is that behind your eyes? well actually, when you look out there and your looking around thats how it looks like inside your head. the color of this room is back here inside your nervous system where the optical nerves are in the back of the head. it is in there what you are experiencing. it is a neurological experience. now if that hits you and you feel sensuously that that so then you might feel that the external world is all inside my skull. but you have to correct that with the fact that your skull is also in the external world. so you suddenly begin to feel well, what kind of situation is this? its inside me and im inside it and its inside me and i’m inside it, but thats the way it is. this is what you can call transaction instead of interaction between the individual and the world. just like for example, in buying an selling. there cannot be an act of buying unless there is also a simultaneous act of selling. and vice versa. so the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional. the environment creates the organism creates the environment. the organism turns the sun into light but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. the fact is this is simply one process. and it isn’t that organisms by chance came into this world, it is in fact that this world is the type of place that creates organisms. the organisms might have, in time, came out or into the scene later then the creation of the scene but from the moment it went bang from the beginning, if thats the way it started, organisms like us, us sitting here, were involved in it. 

-Alan Watts.