Rachel Graham's Key Ideas from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts

By accepting our condition—craving for categorization—we can begin to monitor how we create these imitation realities and modify our conscious experience to embrace our relationship with the universe.

Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized.

The most powerful taboo in society is the one against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.”

The universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game… there is never anything to be gained —through the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Everything is a big wiggle. They wiggle so much and in so many different ways that one can really make out where one wiggle begins and another ends whether it be in space or time.

No matter how much we divide, count, sort, or classify the wiggle into particular things, this is nothing more than a method for thinking about the world; Nothing Is Actually Ever Divided.

Just as nothing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. The total interrelationship between all things.

The more things changes, the more they are the same. Change is in some ways an illusion, for we are always at a point of uncertainty where any future can occur.

America’s reputation for materialism is unfounded. Pleasures are not material but symbols for pleasure—attractively packaged, but inferior in content.

The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.

To define is to limit. The words we use in language are limits to the magnificence that is our presymbolic. The boundaries we set on the boundless make it impossible to properly define things like the universe.

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. Attention is a narrowed perception. Like a scanning mechanism, it is a flashlight in the darkroom that narrows our perception. While a narrowed perception is great for being sharp, it can only focus on one area at a time.

Life is a system of geological and biological cooperation. But man continues to separate himself, as though he is the only subject among a world of objects—such dualist thinking is a neurosis.

Two Factors are ignored:

• Not realizing that so-called opposites are poles of the same thing. Things like light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space cannot be without one another.
• We are absorbed in conscious attention, convinced that this narrowed perception is the only real way of seeing the world.

The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is — rather literally — to be spellbound.

Memories overtime convinces you that ‘I’ is real—they are actually one of the key parts of the ego-sensation. It gives an impression of a self, the executive, as something that remains constant as life changes—as if our conscious selves were a static mirror reflecting a fixed perception