The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

By: Alan Watts

You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego.

—Alan Watts

The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity.

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms.