The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

by Alan W. Watts

living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes,

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world “outside” us is largely hostile. We are forever “conquering” nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order.

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events—that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies—and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness—an act of trust in the unknown.

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever.

children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds:

“unselfishness” is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of “we’re-more-tolerant-than-you.”

The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivations, or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.

The Book I would pass to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds and oughts. Genuine love comes from knowledge, ...

The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego.

There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg from which the world was hatched.

Another Hindu myth says that as time goes on, life in the world gets worse and worse, until at last the destructive aspect of the Self, the god Shiva, dances a terrible dance which consumes everything in fire.

But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events.

it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects.

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “I” and all other “things” now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them—to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it.

if the game of order-versus-chance is to continue as a game, order must not win.

the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.

We might “conquer” nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and “outside” nature are all of a piece.

If, then, there is this basic unity between self and other, individual and universe, how have our minds become so narrow that we don’t know it?

The cat has already been let out of the bag. The inside information is that yourself as “just little me” who “came into this world” and lives temporarily in a bag of skin is a hoax and a fake. The fact is that because no one thing or feature of this universe is separable from the whole, the only real You, or Self, is the whole. The rest of this book will attempt to make this so clear that you will not only understand the words but feel the fact.

There was a young man who said, “Though It seems that I know that I know, What I would like to see Is the ‘I’ that knows ‘me’ When I know that I know that I know.”

If there is any biological foundation for the hoax it lies only in the brain’s capacity for narrowed, attentive consciousness hand-in-hand with its power of recognition—of knowing about knowing and thinking about thinking with the use of images and languages.

the real wiggly world slips like water through our imaginary nets.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect.

We have quite forgotten that both “matter” and “meter” are alike derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, “to measure,” and that the “material” world means no more than the world as measured or measurable—by

We are loath to believe that cruelty, pain, and malice come directly from the Root and Ground of Being, and hope fervently that God at least is the perfection of all that we can imagine as wisdom and justice.

The image of God as a personal Being, somehow “outside” or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence,

To many people it was therefore an immense relief when Western thinkers began to question this image

Society is our extended mind and body.