The Book - On the taboo against knowing who you are

is a great book by Alan Watts. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages.

Attention is narrowed perception.

We need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed.

The human individual is not built as a car is built.

Differentiation is not separation.

To say that certain events are causally connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat.

In the Nootka language a church is "housing religiously," a shop is "housing tradingly," and a home is "housing homely."

It is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects.

We have scrubbed the earth clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms.

No work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

The goal of action is always contemplation - knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming.

Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what the represent.