Alan Watts - World as Play

....the alleged you, which is different from your thoughts and feelings, is a hallucination. There is a stream of thought and feeling going on, just like there is a stream of water going by, and that’s you. It’s an organized stream just in the same way that when you see a whirlpool in a river, it’s organized, it’s recognizable, it has a shape. And it has an enduring shape, even though it is a constant flow. Or take a better illustration still: a flame on a candle. It is a stream of gas. And no particle of this gas stays in the flame for but a split second. But the flame keeps apparently there and is recognizable. I can say one, two, three flames. This one, that one, the other one. And that’s like us.

But that stream which we are—thought, feeling what we call the body, everything like that—but the body is one of the most intangible things there is. You seem to be able to grab hold of it, but it is nothing more than a vibrating pattern of energy. And on it flows. So when you understand that, you can see a little bit more why Hindus speak of the body as māyā, as illusion, because one of the things they mean by illusion is transitoriness as distinct from permanence. That is to say, everything in this world is disintegrating. In fact, if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be there. Disintegration is life. And it’s as important to see that as it is to see that there is no time, and that black and white go together. - Alan Watts

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/world-as-play

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