"He sees everybody around him looking dreadfully serious, looking as if they had a problem, looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult. But from his standpoint - the person's who had this experience - he feels that they look funny, that they don't understand that there isn't any problem at all. That he has seen, from where he stands, that the meaning of being alive is just being alive. That is to say, I look at the colour of your hair and the shape of your eyebrow, and I understand that that is the point. That's what we're all here for. And it's so plain, it's so obvious and so simple, and yet here is everybody rushing around in a great panic, as if it were necessary for them to achieve something beyond all that. And the funny thing is that they're not quite sure what it is, but they are devilishly intent upon it; after that 'thing'. And so to the person in that state of consciousness, which I call mystical, that all seems very weird, very absurd. But it's not something that you criticise in an unkindly way. You don't say: 'Those damn fools! Those idiots!' You say: 'It's such a pity that they don't see it.' Because, although they are going around in this wildly ignorant pursuit, one of the funny things about it is that they don't realise that there is a dimension, a sense, in which their pursuit is magnificent." (5:11) ----- "What I think an awakening really involves is a re-examination of our common sense. We've got all sorts of ideas built into us which seem unquestioned, obvious. And our speech reflects them; its commonest phrases: 'Face the facts!' As if they were outside you. As if life were something they simply encountered as a foreigner. 'Face the facts!' Our common sense has been rigged, you see? So that we feel strangers and aliens in this world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because this is what we are used to. That's the only reason."... "As you question these basic assumptions that underlie our culture you find you get a new kind of common sense. It becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe." (The nature of consciousness 2)

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