Just So Quotes

“When the leaves start to come back on the trees in the spring, you could look at them as new leaves. Last year's leaves fell off the tree in the autumn, and now a new generation of leaves has risen to take their place. But if you look at it from another point of view, you'd just say that the tree is leafing again-- leafing is just something that the tree does from time to time. It's only because we're so fascinated with the individual details of people that we think that there are generations upon generations of different humans on the planet, but a being from Mars observing the continual process of our birth and death might just as easily think that it's the same thing happening to our planet repeatedly-- humans keep on coming, but it's actually the same ones who keep coming back. In the same way, every year's leaves are the same old leaves coming back. They die, they're reabsorbed, and they keep coming back on the tree.

Everything does this. Everything keeps doing it again, but there are spaces in between, coming and going, and when we just look at those spaces, we don't see anything, so we think that the wave is finished-- it's done. And we think that when we die, our life is finished, and that's too bad. But what we really are is the energy field itself, and that energy field keeps doing us. It keeps peopling.”
― Alan Watts