The book on the taboo against knowing who you are

I believe it's called no death, no fear, uh, by that knit Yon.

And I just probably screwed up every part of his name as well as the book.

Uh, but it was, it's that similar sentiment that once you can get over death, you can get over fear and you can really do anything from there.

Um, what were like, you're into the self-development stuff like I am.

As far as a book, I highly recommend, maybe this is a little too esoteric, but have you ever heard of Alan Watts?

Yeah.

So he wrote a book called The Book on the taboo of...

I don't know the subtitle.

And then we move on in life and we ended up with the internet.

which opened up even more information than search engines, which gave us access to that information, right? So now we don't have to go to the library and spend time reading books upon books upon books to find out information.

We go to Google or Bing or whatever search engine we use and have the information at our fingertips.

Or poor librarians and poor libraries were suffering and what happened to all those researchers out there and so forth.

And the sense that there is a knee at the center of it is one of those lies.

Alan Watts, in 1996, wrote this book that I love called The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

And the taboo in this title is precisely this.

He says, the thing we believe in the skin-encapsulated ego, this is the sense that you are a separate center of awareness and will, writing inside a body looking out in a world that's not you and he says that it's a hallucination it's an illusion and a very specific illusion it's an error about boundaries you have this idea that you are a separate thing kind of hanging out in the world detached from it in a way You have this sense that you came into this world.

You, me, animals, plants, even rocks, are all a single being wearing different masks.

It sounds like something you'd hear from your stoned friend at 2am, but after reading his entire book, I realized that in a world where individualism is tearing us apart, this might be the most important idea of our generation.

That you are God, pretending to be human.

Now, you have a name, and with that name, a unique identity that is recognizable to the people that you know.

That is what a person is.

Or should I say how Western culture has generally conceived of a person for the last few centuries? But what if our understanding of what we are is actually a long-running illusion? What if the notion of an isolated individual is about as real as Neverland in Peter Pan's stories? And that by pointing that out, we are committing one of society's last great taboos.

This part of Alan Watts' thesis in his book, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, writing in the 1960s amid a cultural revolution, Watts was challenging the Western notion of the sovereign individual.

To this day, our society is built around this notion that we are independent and capable of flourishing by our own individual efforts.