The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

But I define myself in terms of you; I know myself only in terms of what is "other," no matter whether I see the "other" as below me or above me in any ladder of values.

the more resolutely you plumb the question "Who or what am I?"—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else.

Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing.

the ego may reassert itself with the insidious "I-can't-help-myself" play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim.

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.