The Book

The Book (on the taboo against knowing who you are)

By Alan Watts
The Alan Watts Archive

Just what should a young man or woman know inorder to be “in the know”? Is there, in other words,some inside information, some special taboo, some reallowdown on life and existence that most parents andteachers either don’t know or won’t tell?

In Japan it was once customary to give youngpeople about to be married a “pillow book.” This wasa small volume of wood-block prints, often colored,showing all the details of sexual intercourse. It wasn’tjust that, as the Chinese say, “one picture is worthten thousand words.” It was also that it spared parentsthe embarrassment of explaining these intimate mattersface-to-face. But today in the West you can getsuch information at any newsstand Sex is no longer aserious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more aboutit than adults.
But if sex is no longer the big taboo, what is? Forthere is always something taboo, something repressedunadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the cornerof one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettlingTaboos lie within taboos, like the skins of an onion.What, then, would be The Book which fathers mightslip to their sons and mothers to their daughterswithout ever admitting it openly?
In some circles there is a strong taboo on religion,even in circles where people go to church or read theBible. Here, religion is one’s own private business. Itis bad form or uncool to talk or argue about it, andvery bad indeed to make a big show of piety. Yetwhen you get in on the inside of almost any standard-brand religion, you wonder what on earth the hushwas about. Surely The Book I have in mind wouldn’tbe the Bible, “the Good Book”–that fascinatinganthology of ancient wisdom, history, and fable whichhas for so long been treated as a Sacred Cow that itmight well be locked up for a century or two 80 thatmen could hear it again with clean ears. There areindeed secrets in the Bible, and some very subversiveones, but they are all so muffled up in complications,in archaic symbols and ways of thinking, that Christianity has become incredibly difficult to explain to amodern person. That is, unless you are content towater it down to being good and trying to imitateJesus, but no one ever explains just how to do that.To do it you must have a particular power from Godknown as “grace,” but all that we really know aboutgrace is that some get it and some don’t.
The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish,Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are–as now practiced–like exhausted mines: very hard todig. With some exceptions not too easily found, theirideas about man and the world, their imagery, theirrites, and their notions of the good life don’t seem to fitin with the universe as we now know it, or with ahuman world that is changing so rapidly that much ofwhat one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.
The Book I’m thinking about would not be religious in the usual sense, but it would have to discussmany things with which religions have been concerned–the universe and man’s place in it, the mysterious center of experience which we call “I myself,”the problems of life and love, pain and death, and thewhole question of whether existence has meaning inany sense of the word. For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: livingorganisms, including people, are merely tubes whichput things in at one end and let them out at the other,which both keeps them doing it and in the long runwears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubesfind ways of making new tubes, which also put thingsin at one end and let them out at the other. At theinput end they even develop ganglia of nerves calledbrains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easilyscrounge around for things to swallow As and whenthey get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making allsorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the inputhole, and gathering together in groups to fight withother groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do thisin a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rulenot to eat tubes of your own form, but in generalthere is serious competition as to who is going to bethe top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile,and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins tobe more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have thisfeeling that the usual, the way things normally are, isodd–uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at agorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but itis quite another and much higher thing to be amazedat a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do existand look as if they don’t. This feeling of universaloddity includes a basic and intense wondering aboutthe sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, thiscolossal and apparently unnecessary multitude ofgalaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberlessways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of thesnow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?
Ludwig Wittgenstein and other modern “logical”philosophers have tried to suppress this question bysaying that it has no meaning and ought not to beasked. Most philosophical problems are to be solvedby getting rid of them, by coming to the point whereyou see that such questions as “Why this universe?”are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words inthat the question sounds sensible but is actually asmeaningless as asking “Where is this universe?” whenthe only things that are anywhere must be somewhereinside the universe. The task of philosophy is to curepeople of such nonsense, Wittgenstein, as we shall see,had a point there. Nevertheless wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and thearts, are among the most important things which seemto distinguish men from other animals and intelligentand sensitive people from morons.
Is there, then, some kind of a lowdown on this astounding scheme of things, something that neverreally gets out through the usual channels for theAnswer–the historic religions and philosophies?There is. It has been said again and again, but in sucha fashion that we, today, in this particular civilizationdo not hear it. We do not realize that it is utterly subversive, not so much in the political and moral sense,as in that it turns our ordinary view of things, ourcommon sense, inside out and upside down. It may ofcourse have political and moral consequences, but asyet we have no clear idea of what they may be.Hitherto this inner revolution of the mind has beenconfined to rather isolated individuals; it has never,to my knowledge, been widely characteristic of communities or societies. It has often been thought toodangerous for that. Hence the taboo.
But the world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of adangerous cure–like the Pasteur serum for rabies. Itis not that we may simply blow up the planet withnuclear bombs, strangle ourselves with overpopulation,destroy our natural resources through poor conservation, or ruin the soil and its products with improperlyunderstood chemicals and pesticides. Beyond all theseis the possibility that civilization may be a huge technological success, but through methods that mostpeople will find baffling, frightening, and disorienting–because, for one reason alone, the methods will keepchanging. It may be like playing a game in which therules are constantly changed without ever being madeclear–a game from which one cannot withdraw without suicide, and in which one can never return to anolder form of the game.
But the problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanityhas evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical powerwithout any comparable growth in moral integrity, or,as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way inwhich we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings,our sensation of being alive, of individual existenceand identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from afalse and distorted sensation of our own existence asliving organisms- Most of us have the sensation that “Imyself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body–a center which “confronts an “external” world of peopleand things, making contact through the senses with auniverse both alien and strange. Everyday figures ofspeech reflectt this illusion. “I came into this world.””You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”
This feeling of being lonely and very temporaryvisitors in the universe is in flat contradiction toeverything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” thisworld; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As theocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, aunique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely,if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even thosewho know it to be true in theory do not sense or feelit, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated”egos” inside bags of skin.
The first result of this illusion is that our attitude tothe world “outside” us is largely hostile. We are forever “conquering” nature, space, mountains, deserts,bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperatewith them in a harmonious order. In America the greatsymbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and therocket–the instrument that batters the hills into flattracts for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the greatphallic projectile that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, wehave fine architects who know how to fit houses intohills without ruining the landscape, and astronomerswho know that the earth is already way out in space,and that our first need for exploring other worlds issensitive electronic instruments which, like our eyes,will bring the most distant objects into our ownbrains.)1 The hostile attitude of conquering natureignores the basic interdependence of all things andevents–that the world beyond the skin is actually anextension of our own bodies–and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge andupon which our whole life depends.
The second result of feeling that we are separateminds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe is thatwe have no common sense, no way of making sense ofthe world upon which we are agreed in common. It’sjust my opinion against yours, and therefore the mostaggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflictingopinions united by force of propaganda is the worstpossible source of control for a powerful technology.
It might seem, then, that our need is for somegenius to invent a new religion, a philosophy of lifeand a view of the world, that is plausible and generally acceptable for the late twentieth century, andthrough which every individual can feel that theworld as a whole and his own life in particular havemeaning. This, as history has shown repeatedly, is notenough. Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. Theyare a form of one-upmanship because they dependupon separating the “saved” from the “damned,” thetrue believers from the heretics, the in-group from theout-group. Even religious liberals play the game of”we-re-more-tolerant-than-you.” Furthermore. as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religionsharden into institutions that must command loyalty,be defended and kept “pure,–and-because all beliefis fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt anduncertainty-religions must make converts. The morepeople who agree with us, the less nagging insecurityabout our position. In the end one is committed tobeing a Christian or a Buddhist come what may inthe form of new knowledge. New and indigestibleideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition.however inconsistent with its original doctrines, sothat the believer can still take his stand and assert, “Iam first and foremost a follower of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever.” Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; itis positive unfaith because it closes the mind to anynew vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness–an act of trust in the unknown.
An ardent Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convinceme that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallibletextbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied thatno considerate God would destroy the human mindby making it so rigid and unadaptable as to dependupon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For theuse of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyondthemselves to a world of life and experience that is notmere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real,consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolizescriptures is like eating paper currency
Therefore The Book that I would like to slip to mychildren would itself be slippery. It would slip theminto a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary medicine.not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual pointof reference. They would read it and be done with it,for if it were well and clearly written they would nothave to go back to it again and again for hiddenmeanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.
We do not need a new religion or a new bible. Weneed a new experience–a new feeling of what it is tobe “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secretand profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role thatwe are playing, or have been conned into playing–with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotizedperson is basically willing to be hypnotized The moststrongly enforced of all known taboos is the tabooagainst knowing who or what you really are behindthe mask of your apparently separate, independent,and isolated ego. I am not thinking of Freud’s barbarous Id or Unconscious as the actual reality behindthe facade of personality. Freud, as we shall see, wasunder the influence of a nineteenth-century fashioncalled “reductionism,” a curios need to put downhuman culture and intelligence by calling it a flukyby-product of blind and irrational forces. Theyworked very hard, then, to prove that grapes can growon thornbushes.
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed andoverlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one canhardly find the words for it. The Germans call it aHintergendanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in theback of our minds which we cannot easily admit, evento ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely andisolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speechand thought, to our laws and social institutions, thatwe cannot experience selfhood except as somethingsuperficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to bea brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons oftime–a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where thewave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, andmulticolored drops that gleam for a moment only tovanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself doesnot reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge ofenergy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclearfields in my body. At this level of existence “I” amimmeasurably old; my forms are infinite and theircomings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrationsof a single and eternal flow of energy.
The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyeswere trying to look at themselves directly, or as if onewere trying to describe the color of a mirror in termsof colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or”ground” of our existence and our awareness cannotbe understood in terms of things that are known. Weare forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth–that is, through special metaphors, analogies. andimages which say what it is like as distinct from whatit is. At one extreme of its meaning, “myth” is fable,falsehood, or superstition. But at another, “myth” isa useful and fruitful image by which we make sense oflife in somewhat the same way that we can explainelectrical forces by comparing them with the behaviorof water or air. Yet “myth,” in this second sense, is notto be taken literally, just as electricity is not to beconfused with air or water. Thus in using myth onemust take care not to confuse image with fact, whichwould be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.
Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answerwhen children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds:”Where did the world come from?” “Why did Godmake the world?” “Where was I before I was born?””Where do people go when they die?” Again andagain I have found that they seem to be satisfied witha simple and very ancient story, which goes somethinglike this:
“There was never a time when the world began,because it goes round and round like a circle, andthere is no place on a circle where it begins. Look atmy watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and sothe world repeats itself again and again. But just asthe hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve anddown to six, so, too, there is day and night, wakingand sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter.You can’t have any one of these without the other,because you wouldn’t be able to know what black isunless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or whiteunless side-by-side with black.
“In the same way, there are times when the world is,and times when it isn’t, for if the world went on andon without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you seeit; now you don’t. So because it doesn’t get tired ofitself, it always comes back again after it disappears.It’s like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out,and if you try to hold it in all the time you feelterrible. It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it’s always fun to find new ways of hiding, andto seek for someone who doesn’t always hide in thesame place.
“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but becausethere is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty bypretending that he is not himself. This is his way ofhiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and Iand all the people in the world, all the animals, allthe plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this wayhe has strange and wonderful adventures, some ofwhich are terrible and frightening. But these are justlike bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.
“Now when God plays hide and pretends that he isyou and I, he does it so well that it takes him a longtime to remember where and how he hid himself. Butthat’s the whole fun of it–just what he wanted to do.He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for thatwould spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult foryou and me to find out that we are God in disguise,pretending not to be himself. But when the game hasgone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stoppretending, and remember that we are all one singleSelf–the God who is all that there is and who livesfor ever and ever.
“Of course, you must remember that God isn’tshaped like a person. People have skins and there isalways something outside our skins. If there weren’t.we wouldn’t know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin andno shape because there isn’t any outside to him.[With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate thiswith a Mobius strip–a ring of paper tape twistedonce in such a way that it has only one side and oneedge.] The inside and the outside of God are thesame. And though I have been talking about God as’he’ and not ‘she,’ God isn’t a man or a woman. Ididn’t say ‘it’ because we usually say ‘it’ for things thataren’t alive.
“God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see Godfor the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’tsee your own eyes, and you certainly can’t bite yourown teeth or look inside your head. Your self is thatcleverly hidden because it is God hiding.
“You may ask why God sometimes hides in the formof horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffergreat disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’treally doing this to anyone but himself. Remember,too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there haveto be bad people as well as good people, for the thrillof the tale is to find out how the good people will getthe better of the bad. It’s the same as when we playcards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle themall into a mess, which is like the bad things in theworld, but the point of the game is to put the messinto good order, and the one who does it best is thewinner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and playagain, and so it goes with the world.”
This story, obviously mythical in form, is not givenas a scientific description of the way things are. Basedon the analogies of games and the drama, and usingthat much worn-out word “God” for the Player, thestory claims only to be like the way things are. I use itjust as astronomers use the image of inflating a blackballoon with white spots on it for the galaxies, toexplain the expanding universe. But to most children,and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating. By contrast, so many othermythical explanations of the world are crude, tortuous, and unintelligible. But many people think thatbelieving in the unintelligible propositions and symbols of their religions is the test of true faith. “I believe,” said Tertullian of Christianity, “because it isabsurd.”
People who think for themselves do not accept ideason this kind of authority. They don’t feel commandedto believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abrahamfelt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. AsT. George Harris put it:

The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss aboveyou always punished any error, conditioned men to feel achain of harsh authority reaching all the way “up there.”We don’t feel this bond in today’s egalitarian freedom. Wedon’t even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathersin the human family. So the average unconscious no longerlearns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above.

But, he continues–

Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement inthis life, without a God to damn or save it. Until manfigures out the trap and hunts . . . “the Ultimate Groundof Being,” he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty,finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this lifehas no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not reallya person but a victim of self-extinction.” 2

“The Ultimate Ground of Being” is Paul Tillich’sdecontaminated term for God” and would also dofor “the Self of the world” as I put it in my story forchildren. But the secret which my story slips over tothe child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you.Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground isassuming, or “pretending” to be, but that inmost Selfwhich escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos you reIT!
Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity,the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalo-mania–an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.For though we cultivate the ego with one hand, weknock it down with the other. From generation togeneration we kick the stuffing out of our children toteach them to “know their place” and to behave,think, and feel with proper modesty as befits one littleego among many. As my mother used to say, “You’renot the only pebble on the beach.” Anyone in hisright mind who believes that he is God should becrucified or burned at the stake, though now we takethe more charitable view that no one in his rightmind could believe such nonsense. Only a poor idiotcould conceive himself as the omnipotent ruler of theworld, and expect everyone else to fall down and worship.
But this is because we think of God as the King ofthe Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personallyand consciously controls every detail of his cosmos–and that is not the kind of God in my story. In fact, itisn’t my story at all, for any student of the history ofreligions will know that it comes from ancient India,and is the mythical way of explaining the Vedantaphilosophy. Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems,most of which go back to at least 800 B.C. SophisticatedHindus do not think of God as a special and separatesuperperson who rules the world from above, like amonarch. Their God is ”underneath” rather than”above” everything, and he (or it) plays the worldfrom inside. One might say that if religion is theopium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope.What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God indisguise without seeing at the same time that this istrue of everyone and everything else. In the Vedantaphilosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem tobe other things than God, but only because he isdreaming them up and making them his disguises toplay hide-and-seek with himself. The universe ofseemingly separate things is therefore real only for awhile, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as theSelf hides and seeks itself.
But Vedanta is much more than the idea or thebelief that this is so. It is centrally and above all theexperience, the immediate knowledge of its being so,and for this reason such a complete subversion of ourordinary way of seeing things. It turns the world inside out and outside in. Likewise, a saying attributedto Jesus runs:

When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above
as the below . . .
then shall you enter [the Kingdom] . . . .
I am the Light that is above
them all, I am the All,
the All came forth from Me and the All
attained to Me. Cleave [a piece of] wood, I
am there; lift up the stone and you will
find Me there. 3

Today the Vedanta discipline comes down to usafter centuries of involvement with all the forms, attitudes, and symbols of Hindu culture in its floweringand slow demise over nearly 2,800 years, sorelywounded by Islamic fanaticism and corrupted by British puritanism. As often set forth, Vedanta rings nobell in the West, and attracts mostly the fastidiouslyspiritual and diaphanous kind of people for whomincarnation in a physical body is just too disgusting tobe borne.4 But it is possible to state its essentials ina present day idiom, and when this is done withoutexotic trappings, Sanskrit terminology, and excessivepostures of spirituality, the message is not only clearto people with no special interest in “Oriental religions”; it is also the very jolt that we need to kickourselves out of our isolated sensation of self.
But this must not be confused with our usual ideasof the practice of “unselfishness,” which is the effort toidentify with others and their needs while still underthe strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such “unselfishness” is apt to be a highlyrefined egotism, comparable to the in-group whichplays the game of “we’re-more-tolerant-than-you.”The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did noturge people to ape the saints without sharing theirreal motivations or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.
For this reason The Book I would pass to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds andoughts. Genuine love comes from knowledge, not froma sense of duty or guilt. How would you like to be aninvalid mother with a daughter who can’t marry because she feels she ought to look after you, and therefore hates you? My wish would be to tell, not howthings ought to be, but how they are, and how andwhy we ignore them as they are. You cannot teachan ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egoshave the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed.The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experimentand experience, the illusion of oneself as a separateego. The consequences may not be behavior along thelines of conventional morality. It may well be as thesquares said of Jesus, “Look at him! A glutton and adrinker, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners.”
Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of theego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than,or superior to, others for having done so. In everydirection there is just the one Self playing its myriadgames of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than theeggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could besaid that a bird is one egg’s way of becoming othereggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self. Thereis a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laidthe egg from which the world was hatched. Thus Iam not even saying that you ought to break out ofyour shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, theSelf) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible thatthe play of the Self will be to remain unawakened inmost of its human disguises, and so bring the drama oflife on earth to its close in a vast explosion. AnotherHindu myth says that as time goes on, life in theworld gets worse and worse, until at last the destructive aspect of the Self, the god Shiva, dances a terribledance which consumes everything in fire. There follow, says the myth, 4,320,000 years of total peace during which the Self is just itself and does not play hide.And then the game begins again, starting off as a universe of perfect splendor which begins to deteriorateonly after 1,728,000 years, and every round of thegame is so designed that the forces of darkness presentthemselves for only one third of the time, enjoying atthe end a brief but quite illusory triumph.Today we calculate the life of this planet alone inmuch vaster periods, but of all ancient civilizationsthe Hindus had the most imaginative vision of cosmictime. Yet remember, this story of the cycles of theworld s appearance and disappearance is myth, notscience, parable rather than prophecy. It is a way ofillustrating the idea that the universe is like the gameof hide-and-seek.
If, then, I am not saying that you ought to awakenfrom the ego-illusion and help save the world fromdisaster, why The Book? Why not sit back and letthings take their course? Simply that it is part of”things taking their course” that I write. As a humanbeing it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds areeagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and someroses. I realize, too, that the less I preach, the morelikely I am to be heard.

(1) “I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will comeout of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon . . . Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is nowwell supported.” Fred Hoyle, Galaxies, Nuclei, And Quasars.Harper & Row, New York, 1965.

(2) A discussion of the views of theologian Paul Tillich in “TheBattle of the Bible,” Look, Vol. XIX, No. 15. July 27, 1965,P. 19.

(3) A. Guillaumont and others (trs.), The Gospel According toThomas. Harper & Row, New York, 1959. pp. 17-18, 43. A recently discovered Coptic manuscript, possibly translated from aGreek version as old as A.D. 140. The “I” and the “Me” are obvious references to the disguised Self.

(4) I said “mostly” because I am aware of some very special exceptions both here and in India.