The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

I think I got more from The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and from some modern similar books, Waking Up by Sam Harris, and The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. This is a good companion book though and it goes in its own very unique direction. Plus I always give bonus points for brevity.

We are isolated beings, unconnected to the rest of the universe. This led to our view of the outside world with hostility and fueled our misuse of technology and violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world. This belief is mistaken. We are attached to everything in this world. At the beginning of the book, Alan Watts discusses the concept of cultural taboos, such as making direct eye contact with another person or performing an act that is against one's religion, which leads him to make the following statement: "The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing yourself or what you are behind the mask of your separate, independent, and isolated ego." The concept of "I" is powerful and commonplace in most societies on Earth, and it is so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought and our laws and social institutions. Alan Watts argues against personal selfhood in favor of a universal notion of identity that includes the rest of reality and the components we would commonly judge as ourselves. One of the other things I found interesting was Alan Watt's definition of "attention" as "narrowed perception" because when we attend to one thing, we ignore everything else. In his own words: "Conscious attention is at the same time ignorance even though it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice."