I've recently started reading “The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” by Alan Watts. The book “delves into the cause and cure of the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, which 'confronts' a universe of physical objects that are alien and stupid” (excerpt from book cover). It's part of my expanding my mind to other life thoughts process.
So far — and I'm only eleven pages in — I'm enjoying it. Especially with quotes like these.
“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.”
In speaking about the book that he would give his children, Watts explains that the book itself would be “slippery” as it would “slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling.” He then explains that it would be a “temporary medicine, not a diet” and his children would “read it and be done with it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to go back to it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.” WHAM!
And all this in the first 11 pages 🙂