The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Allan Watts is a radical piece about the unrecognised but mighty taboo?our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that 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?in particular, the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man?s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.