The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Alan Watts sets out to answer the question a child asks and an adult stops asking: who, exactly, are you? His argument is that the Western sense of the self as a separate ego, walled off from and at odds with everything around it, is a hoax we are all quietly in on, and that the alternative is not a belief to adopt but something to notice. Drawing mainly on Vedanta, with Zen, Hinduism and Taoism alongside it, he wrote the book as the one he would want to hand to his own children when they were old enough to read it.