Alan Watts wrote, “The Book. On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” seven years before his death in 1973. Even critics of this book have acknowledge they were never the same after having read it. I am an unabashed fan of it but I struggle with what to say about it. I will end up reading it annually, I assume. One could teach a class on every paragraph here. Social fictions, perceptions, unity, it’s all here. Currently, I place it just behind Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching” in importance. Here is the opening paragraph of the book from the Preface:

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo—our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East…. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.

The rest is, for me, beyond words and thoughts even though it is packed with such things.