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Religion and Philosophy

Perhaps the most famous of all of Alan Watts’s works, The Book delves into the cause and cure of the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, which "eon-fronts” a universe of physi-cal objects that are alien and stupid. According to Dr. Watts, this illusion underlies the misuse of technology for a violent and hostile subjugation of man’s natural environ-ment, leading to its even-tual destruction.

To find the urgently needed answer to this problem of personal iden-tity, the author modern-izes and restates the ancient Hindu philosophy of Vedanta and brings out the fuli force of its startling and psycholog-ically subversive way of realizing that the self is in fact the root and ground of the universe.

With his customary lucid-ity and wit, Alan Watts presents this “lowdown” on the naturę of the self in the form of The Book—a manuał of initiation into the central mystery of ezistence which any father might slip to his son, or mother to her daughter, upon the threshold of adult life.

ISBN 0*679-72300-5

u.s. $10.95

Cun. $10.95

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