The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The works of Alan Watts (starting with The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are) helped me see outside of Western religions and philosophies. It led me to explore many other perspectives on this amazing planet and its people, and to more completely trusting my intuitions.

'The Book' by Alan Watts

Alan Watts' Wisdom of Insecurity Alan Watts' The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

I recommend reading George Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". This is about comparative mythology, aka comparative story telling. He works out the core elements and common concepts that appear in story telling across cultures and time. It opened my mind to be able to understand all kinds of storys on another level. In school I always hated literature. It was like they tried to make me do something I just didn't understand at all. Literature was just random stories for me and all interpretation and attribution of meaning was fruitless and had I to just guess/fake it. Yea maybe my education was just bad who knows, doesn't matter now. The Hero with a Thousand Faces changed that. Now I was open for all the literature and saw everything in a new light. I could recognize common concepts in stories and human life in general. It also opened my mind for later Alan Watts reads on the interconnected-ness of everything. Someone already recommended "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts, which I can only approve of! I'd also like to add "The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", also by Watts.

Understanding Media - Marshall McLuhan The Book: on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts The Limits to Growth - Donella Meadows Ishmael - Daniel Quinn

Older Stuff: The Bible/Quran, The Republic (Plato), The Social Contract (Rousseau), Tao Te Ching (Laozi), Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson) All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

The Book - Alan Watts http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Taboo-Against-Knowing/dp/0679... (http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Taboo-Against-Knowing/dp/0679723005) I sometimes get stuck in a loop of existential questions, and even though I still do, that book taught me how to deal with them better.