The Book

The Book: on the taboo against knowing who you are, or The Book: that is changing my life a little right now. I don't usually like books about philosophy, because how can you express something so close to your center self? But in between the words there is something falling, and when he forgets to be a philosopher it approaches poetry. Alan Watts doesn't actually say the important things, but he also doesn't try to. He indicates.
I welcome any comments or thoughts on the passages I found most interesting.
quotes!:
"Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?"

"... as my sensation of "I-ness," of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the "central" Self-the IT- appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms-- always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born."

"In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant."

"... [those] who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because after all, in them the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game--the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster."

"It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry."