The Book of the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

In this book, well-known British philosopher, writer, and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience, Alan Watts, describes a worldview based on a blend of Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science. He claims that the universe is a single organism playing hide-and-seek with itself (lila), hiding from itself (maya), becoming all living and non-living beings in the universe—entities that forget who they truly are. And the ultimate goal is to understand what we really are: the “hiding One.” In this view of existence, Watts argues that our understanding of ourselves as an “ego in a bag of skin” is a myth; the entities we call separate things are inseparable parts of the whole.