“If you want a new world, accept the world as it currently is. Until you find acceptance, nothing new can become. All you perpetuate when you resist the now, is the past. Because now, is nothing more than the past in manifested form. By resisting the now, you hold the past as your object of attention. And when you hold the past as your object of attention, the past is all that can come.”

Source: All the King's Men (1946)

On deep meditation and enlightenment that transcends temporal experiences and most notions of selfhoody
Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)
Context: [Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now — and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there.... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility.

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 61

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

Source: Healing the Wounds of the Past

Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. 359

Speech at the UN World Peace Day (21 September 2006) New York, Speech in UN Webcast (00:16:35) http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/specialevents/se050921.rm