Writing in the Cosmic Slipstream

Dear Living Dark reader,

Alan Watts ends the first chapter of his classic The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are—which is about seeing through the illusion of being an isolated ego that’s separate from the universe—by beautifully addressing what some might see as a contradiction in his act of writing such a book at all.

On the one hand, he says, the book contains “no sermons, no shoulds and oughts.” This is because

on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of ...