The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
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. In the same way, we do not see that “I” as the knower and controller am the same fellow as “myself” as something to be known and controlled.
Alan Watts • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Not sure i understand
The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity.
Alan Watts • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled
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one is left with a mind of his own: there is just a vast and complex community-mind, endowed, perhaps, with such fantastic powers of control and prediction that it will already know its own future for years and years to come.
Alan Watts • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
It is thus that religions and non-religions—all established in the name of brotherhood and universal love—are invariably divisive and quarrelsome.
Alan Watts • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
But if sex is no longer the big taboo, what is? For there is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skins of an onion. What, then, would be The Book which fathers might slip to their sons and mothers
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in accordance with William Blake’s principle that “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise,”
Alan Watts • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In the meantime, the insurance and investment people have been interesting you in plans for Retirement—that really ultimate goal of being able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all your labors. But when that day comes, your anxieties and exertions will have left you with a weak heart, false teeth, prostate trouble, sexual impotence, fuzzy
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And do not suppose that this understanding will transform you all at once into a model of virtue. I have never yet met a saint or sage who did not have some human frailties. For so long as you manifest yourself in human or animal form, you must eat at the expense of other life and accept the limitations of your particular organism, which fire will
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