I love this book and am grateful for the sense of oneness it has helped me access. When I found some of the core points fading from memory as everything does, I wrote up this summary on my second read. I hope you find it as useful as I do!

Alan Watts - The Book

The ego is an illusion, reinforced by parents & Western society at all levels through a “double bind” that requires us to be impossibly unique & separate, spontaneous and authentic, yet on-demand (e.g. “You must love your parents”):

• Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.” [8]
• “The initial supposition [is] that the individual is the separate ego … Because this supposition is the work of a double-bind[,] any task undertaken on this basis—including religion—will be self-defeating. Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all forms of life, the world would be static, rhythmless, undancing, mummified.” [85]

We are really “IT”, i.e. the no-thing that is everything, the indivisible, the universe:

• “The Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or "pretending" to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT!” [18]
• [On death] “Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus 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.” [158]

This fact is most logically accessible through the recognition that all things are interdependent, impossible to be defined in and of themselves (i.e. Kant’s noumenon, or thing-in-itself). Watts’ most prominent symbol for this is the wave, whose peaks “gowith” their troughs in an entirely inseparable way:

• “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.” [97]
• Quantum Theory supports this (quoting Bohm, Quantum Theory textbook):

“... the world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead, it must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as valid approximations only in the classical [i.e., Newtonian] limit ... Thus, at the quantum level of accuracy, an object does not have any "intrinsic" properties (for instance, wave or particle) belonging to itself alone; instead, it shares all its properties mutually and indivisibly with the systems with which it interacts” [106]

Watts rejects determinism, that the past causes the future, as yet another misinterpretation of the interdependence of everything:

• “ We have to get beyond Newton's vision of the world as a system of billiard balls in which every individual ball is passively knocked about by all the rest! Remember that Aristotle's and Newton's preoccupation with causal determinism was that they were trying to explain how one thing or event was influenced by others, forgetting that the division of the world into separate things and events was a fiction. To say that certain events are causally connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat.” [89]

These facts are admittedly difficult to talk and write about, as our language is incredibly dualistic, but we mustn’t mistake grammatical rules for ultimate reality:

• “Yet it is as true, or false, to say that the brain "feeds itself" through the stomach as that the stomach "evolves" a brain at its upper entrance to get more food. As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot "perform" actions. The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for (or, better, "goeswith") absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action?”
• “The difficulty is not only that language is dualistic, insofar as words are labels for mutually exclusive classes. The problem is that IT is so much more myself than I thought I was, so central and so basic to my existence, that I cannot make it an object. There is no way to stand outside IT, and, in fact, no need to do so. For so long as I am trying to grasp IT, I am implying that IT is not really myself. If it were possible, I am losing the sense of it by attempting to find it. This is why those who really know that they are IT invariably say they do not understand it, for IT understands understanding—not the other way about. One cannot, and need not, go deeper than deep!” [151]

How to respond and act in the world with this knowledge is, in a dualistic sense, difficult and full of contradictions, as our ego-energy constantly re-manifests in competitive one-upmanship:

• “Anyone who brags about knowing this doesn't understand it, for he is only using the theory as a trick to maintain his illusion of separateness, a gimmick in a game of spiritual one-upmanship. Moreover, such bragging is deeply offensive to those who do not understand, and 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.” [131]
• Now you know—even if it takes you some time to do a double-take and get the full impact. It may not be easy to recover from the many generations through which the fathers have knocked down the children, like dominoes, saying "Don't you dare think that thought! You're just a little upstart, just a creature, and you had better learn your place." On the contrary, you're IT. But perhaps the fathers were unwittingly trying to tell the children that IT plays IT cool. You don't come on (that is, on stage) like IT because you really are IT, and the point of the stage is to show on, not to show off. To come on like IT—to play at being God—is to play the Self as a role, which is just what it isn't. When IT plays, it plays at being everything else.” [159]

The best outcome is to continue to play the game while remembering it. This removes any basis for hate, and shatters desire for permanent victory over enemies. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and seize your attention as your vehicle for wonder:

• “If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, "It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what's happening now." How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being” [137]